The Adventures of Menahem-Mendl

Name: The Adventures of Menahem-Mendl
ISBN: 9781929068029

Sholem Aleichem and Tamara Kahana, Translator

Menahem-Mendl is one of Sholom Aleichem's richest characterizations. An incurable optimist, whose every venture ends in disaster, he is the perennial Luftmensch who never ceases to build castles in the air.

The exchange of letters between Menahem-Mendl, trying his luck in the bigger cities of Czarist Russia, and his wife, who remains behind in a small town in the hinterlands, relates his hilarious, but frustrating, experiences as he seeks his fortune-first as a currency and stock speculator (who cannot speculate), as a matchmaker (who cannot arrange marriages), as an author (who cannot write), and as an agent (who buys what he cannot sell).

As his hopes repeatedly rise only to vanish in smoke, as he becomes involved with rascals and rogues, rich men and poor, the reader is at once amused and astounded by the predicaments in which he becomes entangled. But no more so than his long-suffering, ever-faithful wife, Sheineh-Sheindlscolding and querulous, but ever ready to succor him in his most desperate moments.

In re-creating a vanished way of life with warmth and considerable verve, the book reflects the eternal human condition, equally true and meaningful today. The Adventures of Menahem-Mendl is a memorable achievement—a masterwork by an eminent figure of world literature.

About the Authors

Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), the pen name of Solomon Rabinovich, was born in Pereiaslav, Ukraine, and became the most beloved voice of Yiddish literature. His name is the traditional Hebrew greeting “peace be upon you.” At a time when Yiddish was dismissed by many as a “jargon,” he chose it as a literary language, and he championed its dignity by editing and funding the Yidishe folksbibliotek (Jewish People’s Library), which brought emerging Yiddish writers to a wide audience. His fiction centers on the Pale of Settlement and its fictional shtetl of Kasrilevke. Through humor tinged with sorrow, he captured a world of poverty, piety, family obligation, and communal solidarity. Tevye the Dairyman, his best-known creation, wrestles with faith, tradition, and the pull of a changing world, and the stories inspired the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Menachem-Mendl, the hapless dreamer and speculator, and Motl, the cheerful child narrator of a family’s migration, round out a gallery of characters that has come to represent Eastern European Jewish life.

Sholem Aleichem’s work is rooted in the historical upheavals that shaped modern Jewish life: economic precarity, the pogroms of the early 1900s, the pressures of assimilation and revolution, and mass emigration to America. After the 1905 Kiev pogroms he left Russia, eventually settling in New York, where he died in 1916. A reported 100,000 or more mourners joined his funeral procession, a measure of his place in Jewish memory. His stories endure for their wit, their moral warmth, and their affirmation of resilience, family, and humor as sources of survival. Often called the “Jewish Mark Twain,” he remains central to the Yiddish canon and to world literature.