Simkhe Platke, or the Universal Swindler

Born in Piotrków, Russian Empire (today in Poland), Yankev Morgenshtern settled in Łódź and earned a living teaching basic Hebrew and Yiddish literacy to working women, performing as a badkhn (wedding jester), and working as a shadkhn (matchmaker). In the 1870s, he began a highly successful career as a writer of accessible, entertaining Yiddish stories drawn from Jewish folklore and traditional ethical preaching as well as from the global folklore corpus like One Thousand and One Nights. Printed in cheap, affordable chapbook form and reprinted many times, his most popular works included a moralistic tale of three brothers rewarded by heaven for their scrupulous religious observance; a concatenation of Jewish folk stories about Ashmodai and Lilith, the king of the demons and his consort; and the anti-Hasidic Simkhe Platke, or, The Universal Swindler. Published in Warsaw and distributed widely throughout the region, Morgenshtern’s stories became very popular in the late nineteenth century and influenced adaptations of Yiddish folk literature in the twentieth century. He at times wrote under the pseudonym Y. Katchko.