Unknown author · Public domain

Writing in Yiddish under a pen name that means "peace be upon you," Solomon Rabinovich gave the literature of Eastern European Jewish life its most enduring character: Tevye the dairyman, whose stories became the basis for Fiddler on the Roof, the first commercially successful English-language stage production about that world. His prolific body of fiction and drama, written across the late Russian Empire and, after emigration, the United States, is widely credited with elevating Yiddish from a vernacular into a serious literary language.