Mendele Mocher Sforim (Yiddish : מענדעלע מוכר ספֿרים, Hebrew : מנדלי מוכר ספרים, also known as Moykher, Sfarim; lit. "Mendele the book peddler"; January 2, 1836, Kapyl – December 8, 1917 [N.S.], Odessa), born Sholem Yankev Abramovich (Yiddish : שלום יעקבֿ אַבראַמאָװיטש, Russian : Соломон Моисеевич Абрамович, romanized: Solomon Moiseyevich Abramovich) or S. J. Abramowitch, was a Jewish author and one of the founders of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature.
Mendele was born to a poor Lithuanian Jewish family in Kapyl, Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire. His father, Chaim Moyshe Broyde, died shortly after Mendele's bar mitzvah. He studied in yeshiva in Slutsk and Vilna until he was 17; during this time he was a day-boarder under the system of Teg-essen , barely scraping by, and often hungry.
Mendele traveled extensively around Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania at the mercy of an abusive beggar named Avreml Khromoy (Russian for "Avreml the Lame"); Avreml would later become the source for the title character of Fishke der Krumer (Fishke the Lame). In 1854, Mendele settled in Kamianets-Podilskyi, where he got to know writer and poet Avrom Ber Gotlober, who helped him to understand secular culture, philosophy, literature, history, Russian and other languages.
Mendele's first article, "Letter on Education", appeared in 1857, in the first Hebrew newspaper, Hamagid ; his mentor Gotlober submitted Mendele's school paper without Mendele's prior knowledge. In Berdichev, where he lived from 1858 to 1869, he began to publish fiction both in Hebrew and Yiddish. Having offended the local powers with his satire, he left Berdichev to train as a rabbi at the relatively theologically liberal, government-sponsored rabbinical school in Zhitomir, where he lived from 1869 to 1881, and became the head of the traditional school (Talmud Torah) in Odessa in 1881. He lived in Odessa until his death in 1917, except for two years spent in Geneva, where he fled the government-inspired pogroms following the failed revolution of 1905. [1]
Mendele initially wrote in Hebrew, coining many words in that language, but ultimately switched to Yiddish in order to expand his audience. Like Sholem Aleichem, he used a pseudonym because of the perception at the time that as a ghetto vernacular, Yiddish was not suited to serious literary work — an idea he did much to dispel. His writing strongly bore the mark of the Haskalah. He is considered by many to be the "grandfather of Yiddish literature", an epithet first accorded to him by Sholem Aleichem, in the dedication to his novel Stempenyu: A Jewish Novel . [2] Mendele's style in both Hebrew and Yiddish has strongly influenced several generations of later writers.
While the tradition of journalism in Yiddish had a bit more of a history than in Hebrew, Kol Mevasser , which he supported from the outset and where he published his first Yiddish story, Dos kleyne Mentshele, 'The Little Man', in 1863, is generally seen as the first stable and important Yiddish newspaper. [3]
Sol Liptzin writes that in his early Yiddish narratives, Mendele "wanted to be useful to his people rather than gain literary laurels". [4] Two of his early works, the story דאס קליינע מענטשעלע, Dos kleyne mentshele and the unstaged 1869 drama Di Takse (The Tax), condemned the corruption by which religious taxes (in the latter case, specifically the tax on kosher meat) were diverted to benefit community leaders rather than the poor. This satiric tendency continued in Di Klatshe (The Nag, 1873) about a prince, a stand-in for the Jewish people, who is bewitched and becomes a much put-upon beast of burden, but maintains his moral superiority throughout his sufferings (a theme evidently influenced by Apuleius's classical picaresque novel The Golden Ass ).
His later work became more humane and less satiric, starting with פישקע דער קרומער, Fishke der Krumer (written 1868-1888) – which was adapted as a film of the same title in 1939 (known in English as The Light Ahead) – and continuing with the unfinished The Travels of Benjamin III (מסעות בנימין השלישי, Masoes Benyomin Hashlishi, 1878), something of a Jewish Don Quixote . (The title is a reference to the well-known travel book of the Medieval Spanish-Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela.) In 1938, this work was adapted by Hermann Sinsheimer as a play for the Jüdischer Kulturbund in Germany, and performed there shortly after Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), in November of that year.[ citation needed ]
As with Fishke, Mendele worked on and off for decades on his long novel Dos Vinshfingeril (The Wishing Ring, 1865–1889), with at least two versions preceding the final one. It is the story of a maskil — that is, a supporter of the Haskalah, like Mendele himself — who escapes a poor town, survives misery to obtain a secular education much like Mendele's own, but is driven by the pogroms of the 1880s from his dreams of universal brotherhood to one of Jewish nationalism. The first English translation, by Michael Wex (author of Born to Kvetch), was published in 2003.
Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, better known under his pen name Sholem Aleichem, was a Yiddish author and playwright who lived in the Russian Empire and in the United States. The 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof, based on Aleichem's stories about Tevye the Dairyman, was the first commercially successful English-language stage production about Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
Isaac Leib Peretz, also sometimes written Yitskhok Leybush Peretz was a Polish Jewish writer and playwright writing in Yiddish. Payson R. Stevens, Charles M. Levine, and Sol Steinmetz count him with Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholem Aleichem as one of the three great classical Yiddish writers. Sol Liptzin wrote: "Yitzkhok Leibush Peretz was the great awakener of Yiddish-speaking Jewry and Sholom Aleichem its comforter.... Peretz aroused in his readers the will for self-emancipation, the will for resistance against the many humiliations to which they were being subjected."
Avrom Ber Gotlober, also known by the pen names Abag and Mahalalel, was a Russian Maskilic writer, poet, playwright, historian, journalist and educator. His first collection was published in 1835.
Kol Mevasser was a Yiddish-language periodical that appeared from October 11, 1862 into 1872. It is considered by Sol Liptzin and others to be the most important early Yiddish-language periodical.
Yitzkhok Yoel Linetzky was a Yiddish language author and early Zionist. Sol Liptzin characterized him as "a master of the picturesque vitriolic phrase." [Liptzin, 1972, 46]
Israel Isidor Elyashev was a Jewish neurologist and the first Yiddish literary critic. He introduced the world to the works of the great contemporary Yiddish classical writers: Sholem Rabinovich, better known as Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Mocher Sefarim, Isaac Leib Peretz and Nachum Sokolov; along with modern Hebrew writers including Chaim Nachman Bialik, and Sholem Asch, among several others.
Yiddish literature encompasses all those belles-lettres written in Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry which is related to Middle High German. The history of Yiddish, with its roots in central Europe and locus for centuries in Eastern Europe, is evident in its literature.
Jewish literature includes works written by Jews on Jewish themes, literary works written in Jewish languages on various themes, and literary works in any language written by Jewish writers. Ancient Jewish literature includes Biblical literature and rabbinic literature. Medieval Jewish literature includes not only rabbinic literature but also ethical literature, philosophical literature, mystical literature, various other forms of prose including history and fiction, and various forms of poetry of both religious and secular varieties. The production of Jewish literature has flowered with the modern emergence of secular Jewish culture. Modern Jewish literature has included Yiddish literature, Judeo-Tat literature, Ladino literature, Hebrew literature, and Jewish American literature.
Jonathan "Jon" Papernick is a Canadian-born American short story writer, novelist and storyteller.
Aleksander Ossypovich Zederbaum was a Polish-Russian Jewish journalist who wrote primarily in Hebrew. He was founder and editor of Ha-Melitz, and other periodicals published in Yiddish and Russian.
Gershon Shaked (1929–2006) was an Israeli scholar and critic of Hebrew literature.
Oskar Rosenfeld was an Austrian-Jewish writer killed at Auschwitz concentration camp.
Ha-Tsfira was a Hebrew-language newspaper published in Poland in 1862 and 1874–1931.
Israel Aksenfeld was a Yiddish writer. Although he spoke other languages perfectly, he chose to write in Yiddish. Together with Solomon Ettinger, he was one of the first Yiddish-language writers of the 19th century and one of the most significant Yiddish writers to emerge before Mendele Mocher Sforim.
The Travels of Benjamin III is a satirical work from the writer Mendele Mocher Sforim. The work was published first in the year 1878 in Yiddish, and, from then, until today, it has been considered by some to be the greatest satire on exilic Jewish life. The work is modeled after the Miguel de Cervantes novel Don Quixote.
Yakov Lidski was a Warsaw-based Jewish bookseller and publisher, pioneer of Yiddish literature publishing. Founder of “Progress” publishing house, which was the first to publish modern Yiddish literature, and co-founder and owner of the important publishing syndicate “Central.”
Chava Shapiro, known also by the pen name Em Kol Chai, was a Russian Jewish writer, critic, and journalist. A pioneer of Hebrew women's literature and feminist literary criticism, Shapiro was among the most prolific of the diasporic women writers of Hebrew in the early twentieth century.
Jacob Dinezon, also known as Yankev Dinezon, was a Yiddish author and editor from Lithuania. There are various spellings of Dinezon's name in both Yiddish and English transliteration. Early in his career, Yiddish publications spelled his name דינעזאהן (Dinezohn). Later publications removed the ה and spelled his name דינעזאן or דינעזאָן (Dinezon). In English, his name has been spelled Dienesohn, Dinesen, Dineson, Dinezon, Dinesohn, Dineszohn, Dinezohn, Dynesohn, and Dynezon.
The Wise Men of Chelm are dumb Jewish residents of the Polish city of Chełm, a butt of Jewish jokes, similar to the English Wise Men of Gotham, German Schildbürger, Greek residents of Abdera, or Finnish residents of a fictional town of Hymylä. Since at least 14th century Chełm had a considerable population of Jews.
Kasrilevka or Kasrilevke is a fictional shtetl introduced by a Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem. Located "exactly in the middle of that blessed Pale", it is an idealized town of "little Jews", who met their misfortunes with humor and the ultimate belief in justice. It has become an archetype shtetl. Other famous imaginary places of Sholem Aleichem are Yehupetz and Boiberik.
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