Ḥayim Tchemerinsky

Born in the shtetl of Motele (today Motal, Belarus) into an affluent Hasidic family (his father was a timber agent for a local nobleman), Ḥayim Tchemerinsky received a traditional religious education. Orphaned at age thirteen and married in the mid-1880s, he joined his in-laws’ iron business in Krivoi Rog (today Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine). Around 1901, Tchemerinsky moved to Odessa to better pursue his nontraditional intellectual, political, and literary interests. An itinerant thinker who rarely had the patience to see his projects through, he did manage to publish a number of essays, poems, short stories, and fables in Yiddish and Hebrew journals, often under the pseudonym Reb Mordkhele. He wrote his autobiographical memoir, Ayarati Motele (My Dear Shtetl Motele), shortly before his death.