Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler: Fishke the Lame and Benjamin the Third by S. Y. Abramovitsh

From the Publisher

Born in Belorussia in 1836, S. Y. Abramovitsh was the founding father of modern Yiddish fiction. His stories and novels depict small-town Jewish life in the Russian Pale of Settlement through the hilarious, satiric, and sympathetic tales of his alter ego/narrator, Mendele the Book Peddler ("Mendele Moykher Sforim"). This itinerant peddler, who travels the Pale collecting good stories, was so closely identified with Abramovitsh's fiction that "Mendele" became the author's pen name. This volume - the fourth in Schocken's acclaimed Library of Yiddish Classics - brings together two of Abramovitsh's best-loved novellas: "Fishke the Lame," a bittersweet love story set in the world of beggars, paupers, and rogues, and "The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third," the comical misadventures of a Quixote-Panza pair who set off to see the world outside their town. These tales, in superb new translations by Ted Gorelick and Hillel Halkin, represent Yiddish storytelling at its best - full of heart, humor, and homespun wisdom.

Publishers Weekly

Dubbed "the grandfather of Yiddish literature" by Sholem Aleichem, Abramovitsh (1835-1917) was renowned in the latter half of the 19th century for putting the Eastern European shtetl and its impoverished inhabitants under the magnifying glass of literary realism. Indeed, he has a splendid eye for detail: the pages here bristle with robust descriptions of people, animals and scenery that, in the piquant vernacular of the translation, recall Mark Twain. But unlike Twain, in "Fishke the Lame" (1888), a novella-length monologue by an itinerant country peddler, Abramovitsh doesn't propel his observations with much narrative drive. The overall result is a sluggish, meandering river of words that readers, especially those who have slogged through the 70 pages of dissertation-like introduction, may want to climb out of midstream. The short story, "Benjamin the Third," (1878) would have been a better choice to open this volume. Here, Abramovitsh is in fine form with a smartly paced mock-epic recounting of the misadventures of an ignorant rube from a tiny shtetl who goes off to find the Holy Land. Apart from the latter tale, this tome is best appreciated by those of scholarly bent. (Apr.)

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