Motke the Thief

Yiddish novelist and dramatist Sholem Asch was born in Kutno in Russian-ruled Poland into a Hasidic family. Self-educated in European literature, Asch moved to Warsaw and began to write Hebrew and Yiddish fiction under Y. L. Peretz’s tutelage. In 1904 and 1905, having switched decisively to Yiddish, Asch won approbation for his first novel A shtetl, which moved readers with its deeply romanticized portrait of a small-town life in which Jews and non-Jews, people of all classes, humans and nature are bound together into one harmonious whole. Three years later, already a noted contributor to the still-fledgling Yiddish drama scene, Asch caused a scandal with his provocative drama Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance), which centers on a Jewish brothel owner in Warsaw who strives and fails to maintain the separate worlds of piety and sexual procuring, while a connection is forged between his daughter and one of the brothel’s sex-workers—a connection that famously constituted the first scene of lesbian love in Yiddish letters. Ideologically, Asch combined strong Yiddishist commitments, joining Peretz in championing Yiddish as the primary language of modern Jewish culture, with broad and apolitical support for Jewish national vitality, including the developing Yishuv (Jewish settlement) in Palestine. Leading a peripatetic life that brought him from the Russian Empire to the United States to the new Polish state and back to the United States, Asch achieved a level of fame and attention beyond the Jewish world unusual for Yiddish writers; he would expand his literary focus to include American Jewish life and, controversially, the life of Jesus and his circle in Roman Palestine. The Christian Gospel themes of his 1939 to 1949 trilogy The Nazarene, The Apostle, and Mary—as well as his choice to publish the later volumes first in English—offended some Yiddish readers. Asch spent the last part of his life in Bat Yam, Israel.