Amazon.com description: Product Description: Sholom Rabinowitz, born in 1859 in Voronko, Russia, would grow up to become Sholom Aleichem, one of the greatest writers in the Yiddish language. Appreciating a good story, he preserved most of the members of his family and the companions of his childhood in his memoirs just as he relied upon them for inspiration in his scores of novels and stories. From the Fair, which Sholom Aleichem began in 1908 and continued writing until the time of his death in 1916 -- the work he considered his greatest achievement -- was to be not only the story of his life but also a cultural and spiritual history of the preceding fifty years. It is an astonishing portrait of a vanished world which bears as well all of the hallmarks of Sholom Aleichem's fiction: these episodes -- written largely for newspaper serialization -- are hilarious and poignant, deceptively innocent and disarmingly frank. Published for the first time in its entirety, this translation of From the Fair takes us from the author's childhood in the Russian Pale of Settlement to his first awkward forays as a young man into the world beyond the shtetl. It provides a generous dose of the witty commentary one expects of Sholom Aleichem, whose appreciation of human folly has so rarely been rivaled. With wit and pathos, he has written of his early education, his first literary efforts, his experiences with the draft, with work, with his family, with love. While it may masquerade as a novel, From the Fair is very much a memoir, and, as such, it assumes a special place among Sholom Aleichem's writings. It offers a unique perspective on the often conflicting forces that joined to turn a mischievous little boy from a poverty-stricken village in Eastern Europe into the celebrated raconteur whose work has charmed and moved readers all over the world.