Mendele Mocher Sforim

Mendele Mocher Sforim, born Sholem Yankev Abramovich, was a Belarusian Jewish writer and one of the founders of modern literature in both Yiddish and Hebrew. He was born in 1836 in Kapyl, in Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire, and died in Odessa in 1917. His pen name, roughly 'Mendele the Book Peddler', hints at his wish to reach a wide and varied readership.

His youth was hard. His father died shortly after his bar mitzvah, and he studied in yeshivas in Slutsk and Vilna while living on very little, often hungry. For years he wandered through Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania in the company of an abusive beggar, Avreml Khromoy, who would later inspire one of his best-known characters. In Kamianets-Podilskyi he met the writer Avrom Ber Gotlober, who introduced him to secular culture, philosophy, history and several languages.

His first publications appeared in Hebrew, and his career took him through Berdychiv, Zhytomyr and finally Odessa, where he led a traditional school. He initially wrote in Hebrew and coined many words in it, but he eventually switched to Yiddish to reach more readers, at a time when that language of the ghetto was widely considered unfit for serious literature. His work, shaped by the Haskalah, began as sharp satire: he denounced corruption among community leaders and, in The Nag, turned an enchanted prince into an allegory of the Jewish people. Over time his writing grew gentler and more humane, focusing on poverty, the hunger for learning and the tension between universal brotherhood and Jewish nationalism.

Sholem Aleichem called him the 'grandfather of Yiddish literature', and his style shaped several generations of writers in both languages.