Tevye the Dairyman

Tevye the Dairyman is a cycle of short stories by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, begun in 1894 and written in Yiddish, centered on Tevye, a pious dairyman living in a village in the Russian Empire modeled on the town of Boyarka, renamed Anatevka in later adaptations. The stories follow Tevye through the marriages, and often the sorrows, of his seven daughters, set against the pressures and displacements faced by Jewish communities in the Russian Empire. The cycle became internationally famous through the 1964 Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof and its 1971 film version, which carried Tevye's world to audiences far beyond its original Yiddish readership.