My Father, Sholom Aleichem by Marie Waife-Goldberg

This memoir of Sholom Aleichem by his youngest daughter is at once the first complete biography of a great writer and a warm and charming evocation of family life in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

Aleichem's ebullient nature and intellectual civility, triumphing over early hardships, over ill health and the anguish of world crisis, pervaded even his will: he asked that the anniversary of his death be celebrated by reading "one of the very merry" of his stories, so that his name might be "recalled with laughter."

Paperback Book 1999