The prolific Yiddish writer Solomon Simon was born Shlomo Simonovich in a shtetl in what is now Belarus. At 13, he went to his first of several yeshivas in Poland. His studies were interrupted by the threat of the mandatory conscription into the Russian army, which he avoided by fleeing to the United States.

Though he was raised orthodox, his relationship to traditional religion evolved over his life. He raised his three children without a traditional religious education and became a thought leader in the Sholem Aleichem secular Yiddish school system. At the same time, he never abandoned his early goal of synthesizing certain aspects of Judaism with modern life and thought. In an era when other Yiddish children’s writers tended to avoid the subject, his children’s stories depicted traditional religious life in positive ways. Throughout his life he championed the inclusion of traditional religious texts in secular Yiddish education.

Later in life, he came to regret the wholesale rejection of religion of many from his generation of Yiddishists. Observing the outcome of his children’s secular Yiddish education, he shifted his understanding of an American-Yiddish culture and decided that simply studying Jewish history, culture, and the religious texts were a necessary but insufficient foundation for the American-Jewish identity he imagined. He argued for more ritual practice and for a renewal of Halakhah (way of life guided by traditional Jewish laws), in which Judaism would infuse daily life. In the last twenty-five years of his life, he led an adult Talmud and Scripture group, which explored Jewish scholarship and theology.

As part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project, many of his descendants recalled in filmed oral history interviews their zeyde (grandfather).