Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (Mendele Mokher Sforim)

Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, often called by the name of his most famous fictional persona, Mendele Moykher Sforim (Mendele the Book Peddler), is widely regarded as the founding figure of both modern Hebrew fiction and modern Yiddish fiction. Born in Kapulye in the Russian Empire (today Kapyl, Belarus), he was educated in Lithuanian yeshivas but embraced Jewish Enlightenment as a teenager. Wandering to the empire’s Ukrainian reaches, where he lived in the great old Jewish centers of Kamenets-Podolsk and Berdychiv, in the 1860s, he launched a career as a Hebrew journalist, essayist, scientific popularizer, foundational voice of Hebrew literary criticism, and writer of fiction. In all these veins, and particularly through his increasingly innovative story and novel writing, he critiqued what he saw as East European Jewish traditional society’s willful refusal of modern knowledge, backwardness, superstition, and unwill­ingness to engage realistically with what the new world emerging around it offered (ostensibly). At the same time, he began to experiment writing Yiddish fiction. Though undoubtedly driven in good measure by the practical recognition that only in Yiddish could mod­ernizing ideals reach most Russian Jews, this turn to Yiddish demanded a tremendous ideological and for­mal leap and work of invention. Abramovitsh devised the persona of a religiously rooted but also sharply observant and ironic book peddler, Mendele Moykher Sforim, to whom he attributed his Yiddish works. In the 1870s, Abramovitsh began to abandon his faith in modern education as a panacea while he confronted continued if not increasing social suffering and human intolerance. Thereafter, his fiction in both languages was deepened by serious engagement with the social woes from within and political-cultural hostilities from without that beset Jewish life. In the early 1880s, Abramovitsh moved to Odessa, found economic sta­bility as an educator, and turned his energies to mostly Hebrew-language stories (like “In the Secret Place of Thunder”) that engaged the suddenly darkening po­litical situation of Russian Jewry. Spending the rest of his long life and career in a city that was the epicenter of Jewish Russification and commercial success, but which also emerged as a center of modern Hebrew letters and Jewish nationalism, Abramovitsh systemati­cally reworked his fiction of the 1860s–1870s, and in particular translated or rather transposed his Yid­dish work into Hebrew versions. In seeking a Hebrew substitute for the complex descriptions and tonalities that the vernacular Yiddish allowed, he essentially in­vented a new style in Hebrew prose that mined the lan­guage’s historical layers to produce a wholly new voice of realism, pathos, and satire. In both the Hebrew and Yiddish literary milieus that emerged at the turn of the century, readers hailed the still-living Abramovitsh as a literary patriarch and as the author of a kind of “epic” of traditional East European Jewish life.