Towards the end of the century, the talent of the great Jewish humorist Shalom Aleichem (S. Rabinovitz)[32] attained its full bloom. He was particularly successful in his masterly delineation of the _Luftmensch_ type of the Pale of Settlement, who is constantly on the hunt for a piece of bread, who clutches at every possible profession and subsists on illusions (his sketches _Menahem Mendel_). Using the popular vernacular with its characteristic idioms and witticisms as his vehicle of expression, Shalom Aleichem draws the pictures of the "Little People" of the Russian ghetto (his series _Kleine Menshelekh_), describes the joys and sorrows of their children (_Maassios far Jüdishe Kinder_, "Stories for Jewish Children"), and puts into the mouth of the unsophisticated philosopher of the ghetto, "Tevye (Tobias) the Dairyman," the soul-stirring epic of the great upheavals in this secluded little world (the series of sketches under the name _Tevye Der Milchiger_). To these big stars on the sky of Jewish _belles lettres_ may be added the host of lesser luminaries who write in the rejuvenated ancient language of the nation or in the vernacular of the masses, the Yiddish. The literary revival manifested itself with particular vigor in the domain of poetry. At the beginning of the nineties, the voice of Judah Leib Gordon, the poet of the "Era of Reforms"[33] was silenced (he died in 1892). The singer of the national sorrow, Simon Frug,[34] who was carried away by the new ideas of Zionism, began to sing his "Zionids" in the Russian language, writing at the same time for the masses sonorous poems in Yiddish, though neither of them reveals the poetic charm of his older national elegies.