Mendele Mocher Sforim (1836–1917)

Mendele Mocher Sforim was the pen name of Sholem Yankev Abramovich, born to an impoverished Jewish family in Kopyl, Russia (present-day Belarus). He adopted his pseudonym, which means "Mendele the Book Peddler," in 1879. His father died shortly after his 13th birthday. Mendele studied at yeshivas in Slutsk and Vilna until he was 17. He traveled extensively around Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine in the company of a man who served as the source for the title character of Mendele's later stories about Fishke der Krumer (Fishke the Lame). Mendele's first published article, on educational reform, "Letter on Education," appeared in 1857 in the first Hebrew weekly newspaper, Ha-maggid. In Berdichev, Ukraine, where he lived from 1858 to 1869, he began to publish fiction in Hebrew and Yiddish. His work realistically portrayed Jewish life and the world of the shtetl with all its poverty and oppression, but with humor and social satire. He left Berdichev for Zhitomir, where he trained as a rabbi, and then became the head of the traditional Jewish school for boys in Odessa in 1881. In Odessa, he became an influential leader of an emerging Yiddish literary movement, and is today credited by many as the "grandfather of Yiddish literature." His writings stand along those of Sholem Aleichem and I.L. (Isaac Leib) Peretz as classics. His greatest Yiddish work, Kitsur massous Binyomin hashlishi (The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third, 1875), is a kind of Jewish Don Quixote.