MENDELE MOYKHER SFORIM

born Nov. 20, 1835, Kopyl, near Minsk, Russia [now in Belarus] died Dec. 8, 1917, Odessa [now in Ukraine] also spelled Mendele Mokher Seforim, pseudonym of Shalom Jacob Abramowitsch 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). At Berdichev in the Ukraine, where he lived from 1858 to 1869, he began to publish fiction both in Hebrew (a short story, 1863; the major novel ha-Avot ve-ha-vanim [Fathers and Sons], 1868) and in Yiddish (first story, Dos klein mentshele [The Little Man], 1864, in the Yiddish periodical Koyl Mevasser, which was itself founded at Mendele's suggestion). He also adapted into Hebrew H.O. Lenz's Gemeinntzige Naturgeschichte, 3 vol. (186272). 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 panorama of Jewish life in Russia. After living from 1869 to 1881 in Zhitomir (where he was trained as a rabbi), he became head of a traditional school (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), 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 former Yiddish works in Hebrew. His stories, written with lively humour and gentle satire, are an invaluable source for studying Jewish life in eastern Europe at the time when its traditional structure was giving way.