Skip to content

Book Salon
Tevye the Dairyman & Railroad Stories

  • This month we're reading Tevye the Dairyman & Railroad Stories by Sholem Aleichem. Our faculty host is Gabriella Safran.

    Listen to an interview with our Book Salon host.

    "This work displays the comic genius of this classic Yiddish writer. Reading them, we see some of the connections between our own experiences - of parenting, traveling, telling the truth and lying, making the best of our lives - and the very distant world of the Russian Empire in the years before the 1917 revolutions."

    Gabriella Safran, Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies, Professor and Director, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Chair, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages

How to Participate

About this quarter's book selection

This collection of twenty-one stories includes the most beloved character in modern Jewish fiction, Tevye, the compassionate, Bible-quoting milkman. He's been immortalized in Sholem Aleichem's writings, as well as in acclaimed and award-winning theatrical and film adaptations of Fiddler on the Roof.

These railroad stories examine human nature and modernity from the perspective of men and women riding the trains between towns.

The Stanford Book Salon [Seriously Unstuffy]