Mendele Moykher Sforim (redirected from Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh)

Mendele Moykher Sforim

 or Mendele Mokher Sefarim orig. Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh
(Yiddish; “Mendele the Book Peddler”)

(born Nov. 20, 1835, Kopyl, near Minsk, Russia—died Dec. 8, 1917, Odessa) Russian author. He lived much of his life in Ukraine, becoming a rabbi and head of a traditional school (Talmud Torah) at Odessa. His stories, written with lively humour and gentle satire, are invaluable in the study of Jewish life in Eastern Europe at the time when its traditional structure was giving way. His greatest work is The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third (1875), a panorama of Jewish life in Russia. He is considered the founder of both modern Yiddish and modern Hebrew narrative literature and the creator of modern literary Yiddish.