Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, better known under his
pen name Sholem Aleichem (
Yiddish and ;
Russian and ) ( – May 13, 1916), was a leading
Yiddish author and playwright. The musical
Fiddler on the Roof, based on his stories about
Tevye the Dairyman, was the first commercially successful English-language stage production about Jewish life in
Eastern Europe. (The Hebrew phrase "Shalom [or Sholem according to dialect] Aleichem" literally means "Peace be upon you", and is a greeting in traditional Hebrew and Yiddish, surviving in attenuated form in the modern Hebrew "Shalom" [Peace], the normal greeting in modern Israel).