The Little Man; or, Portrait of a Life

The so-called father of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh is a monumental figure in East European Jewish literature. He was born in Kapulye, Belorussia, began his literary career in Hebrew, and produced maskilic works that sought to educate readers about the natural world and the sciences. He then reached out to a broader readership by writing in Yiddish, adopting the persona of a simple book peddler, Mendele Mokher Sforim, the name by which Abramovitsh himself is most commonly known. Abramovitsh moved to Odessa in the early 1880s where he not only completed several new works of short Hebrew and Yiddish fiction, but also retooled his entire previous oeuvre, adapting and translating his work to better fit the new political and cultural moment. It was at this time that he, in the guise of Mendele, became a venerated figure and, in some circles, a household name who concretized his reputation as the original master of both literatures.