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Fishke the Lame: Mendele Moykher-Sforim's Most Famous Story

Updated: Feb 2

Sunday, 3/16 4:00 - 5:30 pm, Pacific



By popular request, we are revisiting the Yiddish classics. The book, Fishke the Lame, is the earliest full-length work we will read and its at the head of our list, for March 16. Scroll down for an introduction.


THIS BOOK IS OUT OF PRINT!


A limited number of used copies remain in the $25 range on Amazon. They are going fast.


You can also download a free digital copy from Syracuse University Press.



In the minds of his readers, the writer S. Y. Abramovitsh became so fully identified with his narrator Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Mendele the Book Seller) that Abramovitsh himself is most widely recognized by his character Mendele's name. They are not the identical person by any means.


Mendele the Book Seller appears in several stories by Abramovitsh but is most fully developed as a character in his long story, Fishke der Krumer, or, in English, Fishke the Lame. The story concerns a poor young couple--he a cripple, she blind--in the shtetl Glubsk ("Fools town"), who are described sympathetically and helped by the itinerant and more worldly book seller, Mendele.


The premier scholar of Abramovitsh, Dan Miron, points to three characteristics of Mendele: (1) He is fully an "insider" in the shtetl world; (2) He is nevertheless "uprooted" and an "outsider" because of his travels as a peddler, which makes him "more of an observer than a participant" and, unlike the Glubskers, a "free agent;" and (3) Mendele is an ironic folk intellectual not a scholar, despite the fact that he traffics in holy books.


Abramovitsh was of a different breed than his famous character Mendele. He was an educated professional living in urban environments, a trained scientist and widely acquainted with secular literature. He became the first of three "classic" Yiddish writers credited with launching modern Yiddish literature:


S. Y. Abramovitsh (1835–1917)

Y. L. Peretz (1852-1915)

Solomon Rabinovitch (Sholem Aleichem) (1859-1916)


Abramovitsh, Peretz, and Rabinovitch represent a wave of modernist, enlightenment (Heb. Haskalah; Yid. haskole) thinking that swept Eastern Europe in the 19th century. Typical of the Haskalah writers, these ground-breaking Yiddish authors did their early writing in Hebrew. But they realized that to write exclusively in loshen koydesh (Yid. the holy tongue) meant that their readers would be limited to the small educated elite. Their readers would consist only of maskils (adherents of Haskalah) like themselves.


As these writers aspired to reach and build a critical consciousness among ordinary Jews concerning the intense poverty, oppression, insularity, and cultural particularity of the shtetls, each began to write in Yiddish, beginning with Abramovitsh. It was Abramovitsh who first applied liberal doses of biting satire to his observations in Yiddish of a basically medieval shtetl culture and its encounter with a galloping modernity.


Consequently, Fishke the Lame has been compared to Cervantes' great satire Don Quixote, which Abramovitsh certainly had read. In Fishke, a critique of shtetl mentalities is present on every page as the characters of Glubsk contemplate and grapple with economic, technological, and ideological forces beyond their direct control. To write in Yiddish was a radical departure from intellectual conventions. If writing specifically for a Jewish audience there were only two choices, Yiddish and Hebrew.


But Yiddish was looked down upon by the Jewish elite as not a bona fide language but a bastard dialect or dzhargon (jargon). Yiddish was the language of workers, not scholars--the speech of uneducated common folk, insufficient for expressing higher thoughts. Yiddish was the language of everyday transactions in the marketplace. Yiddish was the language on the Jewish street. Its orthography, a phonetic use of Hebrew letters, was unstandardized. Only in the 1920s was an attempt made by YIVO (the Yiddish Scientific Institute) in Vilna to standardize the language. Even today, Yiddish words are often spelled according to variant regional pronunciations and other idiosyncrasies.


Above all, Yiddish was the mame-loshen, the "mother tongue," a designation that carries at least two meanings. As the mother-tongue, Yiddish was indeed the native language of Eastern European Jews spoken from birth. And, further, Yiddish was also the distinct language of the family and home, in contrast to the study hall and synagogue. Yiddish was hyper-associated with the female domestic sphere, in contrast to the prestigious religious sphere, where women were systematically and rigorously excluded.


In other words, Yiddish was widely viewed as a lesser, feminized language as compared with Hebrew, the prestige language of religious continuity and entrenched patriarchy. Consequently, the decision to write in Yiddish meant taking a risk. Abramovitsh, Peretz, and Rabinovitch risked their professional identities in making the switch to Yiddish. In this struggle, the three classic writers emerged victorious as founders of a new modern Yiddish tradition, although Abramovitsh, for one, continued to bifurcate his cultural production, issuing rewrites and new editions of his work in both Yiddish and Hebrew.


On the other hand, women readers in Yiddish comprised a significant audience. By the late 19th century, enough women were literate enough in Yiddish to support a thriving market for collections of tkhines (Yid. prayers especially written for and, later, also by women). Obtained from book peddlers like the character Mendele, these popular collections contained prayers for women hoping to reach the ear of God with pleasingly composed supplications concerning illness, childlessness, or other of women's primary concerns.


This women's audience and market did not escape the attention of some authors willing to write potboilers and romances in Yiddish. The rise of such non-canonical works, which the scholar Khone Shmeruk links to publications first introduced by Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitch in the late 1870s, was a popular phenomenon criticized and dismissed by elites as shund (Yid. trash, offal).


But if the modernists wished to create a vibrant new literature for the Jewish masses, a literature certainly influenced by the great Russian and western European writers of their age, then Yiddish was the key. Abramovitsh, Peretz, and Rabinovitch had to overcome their own prejudices and fears of being associated with a low status, feminized mode of expression.


To reach the Yiddish-speaking masses with their modern literary, sociological, psychological, and political insights, it would be necessary to write in dzhargon, Yiddish. In Yiddish and in translations to all the modern languages, they continue to reach readers today.


 

On Sunday, March 16, we will first read Abramovitsh among ourselves with supplementary background and criticism by his almost unbelievably insightful and interesting interpreter, the Israeli-American Yiddish scholar Dan Miron (b. 1934). Be sure to read Miron's Introduction, pp. vii-xix.


In April we will get an introduction to Yiddish cinema and Yiddish acting with the 1939 film The Light Ahead, based on Fishke the Lame. The film is in Yiddish with English subtitles.


In May, we will have a master class comprised of two sessions, reading selected stories of Y. L. Peretz, the next of the "classic" Yiddish writers. We are excited to welcome Goldie Morgentaler, professor of English literature and translator Peretz's work. Shmoozers will remember with enduring appreciation the sessions led by Dr. Morgentaler about stories by her mother Chava Rosenfarb, author of The Tree of Life triology, that Morgentaler translated from Yiddish to English. Since then, In the Land of the Postscript: The Complete Short Stories of Chava Rosenfarb was published in 2023.


And in June, we have tentatively booked Marc Caplan, pending his teaching schedule, author of the books How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms andWriters in Weimar Berlin. Caplan is certainly among the most creative and thought-provoking scholars in the field of Yiddish literature today.


Supplementary sources:


  • Lecture by Dan Miron

    "A Traveler Undisguised: 'Mendele Moykher Sforim' as a Modern Jewish Intellectual"

Start here: Introduction by Eddy Portnoy, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (4:30 min)



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