Tevye the Dairyman, also translated as Tevye the Milkman is the fictional narrator and protagonist of a series of short stories by Sholem Aleichem, and their various adaptations, the most famous being the 1964 stage musical Fiddler on the Roof and its 1971 film adaptation. Tevye is a pious Jewish dairyman living in the Russian Empire, the patriarch of a family including several troublesome daughters. The village of Boyberik, where the stories are set, is based on the town of Boyarka, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. Boyberik is a suburb of Yehupetz, where most of Tevye's customers live.
Actor John Stefano portraying Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof
Yiddish is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originates from 9th century Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages. Yiddish has traditionally been written using the Hebrew alphabet; however, there are variations, including the standardized YIVO orthography that employs the Latin alphabet.
The opening page of the 1828 Yiddish-written Jewish holiday of Purim play Esther, oder die belohnte Tugend from Fürth (by Nürnberg), Bavaria.
The calligraphic segment in the Worms Machzor. The Yiddish text is in red.
The South-West Yiddish account of the life of Seligmann Brunschwig von Dürmenach describes, among other things, the anti-Semitic events of the revolutionary year 1848. In the collection of the Jewish Museum of Switzerland.
A page from the Shemot Devarim (lit. 'Names of Things'), a Yiddish–Hebrew–Latin–German dictionary and thesaurus, published by Elia Levita in 1542
