Yekhiel Shraibman was born in 1913 to a very poor family in the Bessarabian town of Rashkev. He went to kheyaer and then to a Hebrew teachers’ seminary in Chemowitz where he was arrested for revolutionary activity. Moving to Bucharest he made European Job. Half-tragic, half-comic hero, he is portrayed as the traditional God-fearing Jew struggling to maintain his faith in a new world that threatens the cohesiveness of Jewish life.

Sholem Aleichem is the Jewish humorist, par excellence. His writing has often been characterized as “laughter through tears” and, indeed, behind his humor often lie poverty, sadness, and even tragedy. Critic Dan Miron says, in the Enq/dopaedia Judaka, Vol. 14, p. 1285, “The tragedy is not absent from any of his important works. Everywhere lurks death, madness, a culture on the threshold of disintegration, shattered hopes, ruined dreams. They are however counterposed by a zest for life, an unspoiled freshness, an unceasing ability to renew oneself, recuperate, and regenerate.”