Sholem Aleichem's last appearance: Philadelphia, 100 years ago

The headlines were stormy that first week in March 1916. In Europe, thousands were dying as German and French armies battled over Verdun. At home, Philadelphia Mayor Thomas Smith was taking heat over a proposed subway line up Broad Street. Railroad workers were voting to demand an eight-hour day.

Yet, for thousands of the city's recent Jewish immigrants, the most important news that Saturday, March 4, appeared on page 11 of the Evening Ledger, buried near the bottom of the "What's Doing Tonight" column:

"Solomon Rabinowitz, Jewish humorist. Metropolitan Opera House, 8 o'clock."

As the Jewish Sabbath ended, they left their synagogues and sweatshops, old men in beards and side-curls, women in wigs and shawls, younger people dressed as fashionably as working-class immigrants could. From Fourth Street, Lombard Street, Marshall Street, and beyond, they headed to the massive concert hall at Broad and Poplar to hear the man the goyim called the "Jewish Mark Twain," but whom these people knew - intimately - by his Yiddish pen name: Sholem Aleichem.

It was his first Philadelphia appearance since arriving in America in 1914. It was also his last public reading anywhere. Eight weeks later, he was dead.

This year, lovers of Jewish literature are preparing to commemorate Sholem Aleichem's 100th yortsayt (anniversary of his death), a tradition rooted in his own request that his name "be recalled with laughter." Locally, there will be a celebration at Haverford College. Meanwhile, Broadway audiences celebrate him - flocking to the latest revival of Fiddler on the Roof, the musical based on his stories.

Though seldom read and appreciated today, for the millions of Jews who fled the pogroms and poverty of Eastern Europe a century ago, Sholem Aleichem's stories, sketches, and monologues were literary and cultural guideposts. Characters such as Tevye, the milkman who talks back to God, were like family - small-town people struggling with change, distanced from past and future generations, carrying big dreams and opinions about everything.

Indeed, for those who swarmed to the Met that cold night in March, Sholem Aleichem's world was their world, in fact as well as in fiction: While Jews had immigrated to the United States from all over Eastern Europe, the vast majority of those who ended up in Philadelphia came from the same region - today's Ukraine - that had nurtured the young writer who aimed to make their Yiddish into a respectable literary language.

Yet fame didn't equal fortune. Mismanaged and mistreated by publishers, promoters, and impresarios in both Europe and America, Sholem Aleichem was chronically short of cash. Which is why, ill with tuberculosis and diabetes, he had agreed to give a reading in Philadelphia.

The promoters, claiming to represent Philadelphia's entire, 200,000-plus Jewish community, had offered him $250 to read before what they promised would be a small audience. Not until he arrived did Sholem Aleichem learn the actual venue was to be the Met, Philadelphia's largest public hall, with 4,000 seats.

All were filled, for what Philadelphia's Yiddish press had heavily promoted as a gala evening. "The Prince of Jewish Humor! The Man Who Makes an Entire Nation Laugh!" blared the ad in the Yidishe Velt (Jewish World). Seats, at 25 cents to a dollar, were going like matze-vasser - the idiomatic equivalent of "hotcakes."

The next day's papers glossed over the actual reading, noting only that Sholem Aleichem was greeted by "a storm of applause that lasted several minutes."

But two months later, after his funeral procession through New York City had drawn crowds estimated at more than 150,000, and after his last will and testament had been read on the floor of the U.S. Congress and printed in the New York Times, a writer for Philadelphia's Jewish Exponent offered an account of that last appearance:

"His face was pale and wan, and his eyes were watery. . . . It seemed to me as though his frail body was not large enough, not strong enough, to bear that great soul. He complained of feeling ill and that the air on the stage was not healthy for him. . . . His voice was weak and could hardly be heard in the immense auditorium."

It gets worse. After his Philadelphia visit, Sholem Aleichem wrote bitterly that "a gang of bluffers" had swindled him. Taking in $2,200 from ticket sales, they still offered him only $250. When he went to cash the check, he found they had stopped payment.

As his daughter later wrote, the two shady promoters ultimately paid up after being threatened with exposure by some of Sholem Aleichem's local supporters. But for his family, it remained a sad coda - an occasion, like so many of his stories, for laughter through tears.

Bitter memories, however, were the last thing Sholem Aleichem wanted to leave. In his will, he specifically asked his family to mark the anniversary of his death by gathering to read aloud from his stories, especially the "really merry" ones.

And so they have. For decades, the annual Sholem Aleichem family yortsayt has been a New York City tradition, bringing actors, writers, and lovers of Yiddish literature together to celebrate the man who, according to his most recent biographer, Jeremy Dauber, "did nothing less than create modern Jewish literature, modern Jewish humor, a modern Jewish homeland in literature."

Haverford College will host a Sholem Aleichem commemoration at 3 p.m. April 10 in KINSC Sharpless Hall auditorium. Information: 610-896-1199 or www.haverford.edu/ycf.

Andrew Cassel is a former Inquirer writer.