Mendele Moykher Sforim

Mendele Moykher Sforim (born November 20, 1835, Kopyl, near Minsk, Russia [now in Belarus]—died December 8, 1917, Odessa [now in Ukraine]) was a 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 in Berdychiv, 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.