Quote by Sholem Aleichem: “Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.”

The same experience of being alive looks completely different depending on your position in the world. Wisdom lets you step back and see life as fluid. Wealth buffers you from its worst. But poverty strips away all distance and leaves you inside a tragedy you did not choose. This is a diagnosis of social inequality in one compressed image.

Sholem Aleichem died in New York in 1916, having emigrated from the Russian Empire after pogroms made life in Eastern Europe untenable. His funeral drew hundreds of thousands of mourners to the streets of New York. The Yiddish-speaking Jewish world of Eastern Europe that he had chronicled was being destroyed by poverty, antisemitism, and war — and would be annihilated entirely within three decades.

Ukrainian-born Yiddish author considered one of the great writers of Jewish literature, often called the Yiddish Mark Twain. His stories about Tevye the Dairyman became the basis for the musical Fiddler on the Roof. He wrote primarily about the shtetl life of Eastern European Jews at the turn of the twentieth century.