Mendele Mokher Sefarim

Mendele
Moykher Sforim, Moykher also spelled
Mokher or Mocher, Sforim also spelled
Seforim or Sefarim, pseudonym of Sholem
Yankev Abramovitsh (b. Nov. 20, 1835,
Kopyl, near Minsk, Russia [now in
Belarus]—d. Dec. 8, 1917, Odessa [now in
Ukraine]), Jewish author, founder of
both modern Yiddish and modern Hebrew
narrative literature and the creator of
modern literary Yiddish. He adopted his
pseudonym, which means “Mendele the
Itinerant Bookseller,” in 1879.
Mendele
published his first article, on the
reform of Jewish education, in the first
volume of the first Hebrew weekly,
ha-Maggid (1856). He lived from 1858 to
1869 at Berdichev in the Ukraine, where
he began to write fiction. One of his
short stories was published in 1863, and
his major novel ha-Avot ve-ha-banim
(“Fathers and Sons”) appeared in 1868,
both in Hebrew. In Yiddish he published
a short novel, Dos kleyne mentshele
(1864; “The Little Man”; Eng. trans. The
Parasite), in the Yiddish periodical Kol
mevaser (“The Herald”), which was itself
founded at Mendele’s suggestion. He also
adapted into Hebrew H.O. Lenz’s
Gemeinnützige Naturgeschichte, 3 vol.
(1862–72).
Disgusted with the woodenness of the
Hebrew literary style of his time, which
closely imitated that of the Bible,
Mendele for a time concentrated on
writing stories and plays of social
satire in Yiddish. His greatest work,
Kitsur massous Binyomin hashlishi (1875;
The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin
the Third), is a kind of Jewish Don
Quixote. After living from 1869 to 1881
in Zhitomir (where he was trained as a
rabbi), he became head of a traditional
school for boys (Talmud Torah) at Odessa
and was the leading personality (known
as “Grandfather Mendele”) of the
emerging literary movement. In 1886 he
again published a story in Hebrew (in
the first Hebrew daily newspaper, ha-Yom
[“Today”]), but in a new style that was
a mixture of all previous periods of
Hebrew. While continuing to write in
Yiddish, he gradually rewrote most of
his earlier Yiddish works in Hebrew. His
stories, written with lively humour and
sometimes biting satire, are an
invaluable source for studying Jewish
life in eastern Europe at the time when
its traditional structure was giving
way.