Dara Horn tells the tale of Sholem Aleichem to the participants in Tikvah’s advanced institute “The Future of the Family.” Brought up in a shtetl—and Horn clarifies just what a shtetl is—Aleichem came by chance into fortune and lost it all. Much of his life was spent moving from place to place to dodge his creditors. Along the way he became the greatest Yiddish writer who ever lived. Among the ironies of his life is that he was so cosmopolitan his children never learned Yiddish

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