Into the New World of Yesterday: Reading with texts by Sholem Aleichem

About the production

Solomon Naumovich Rabbinowicz was born in 1859 in Kyiv and died in 1916 in New York. Under his pen name Sholem Aleichem – which means “peace be with you” – he achieved worldwide fame. Many of his stories of shtetl life are familiar to contemporary audiences from the celebrated musical “Fiddler on the Roof”. The story told here (translated into German for the first time) tells of a new beginning or Aufbruch: on a ship to America in 1914, after the destruction of Galicia in the First World War, a successful author encounters a talkative Jewish refugee traveling third class who tells the story of his life with Yiddish spirit and humour.