Sholom Aleichem

"Uniformly excellent."--The Jewish StandardThis rich medley of stories, poems, and essays features evocations of Chanukah by classic and contemporary authors including Sholom Aleichem, Nobel laureates S. Y. Agnon and Elie Wiesel, I. L. Peretz, Emma Lazarus, Theodor Herzl, Chaim Potok, Mark Strand, A. B. Yehoshua, Emma Green, Joanna Rakoff, and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. There are humorous as well as meditative tales from Israel, Central Europe, and the United States--works that capture the Festival of Lights as observed on Manhattan's Upper West Side alongside accounts of celebrations in shtetls of the Old Country and far reaches of the Diaspora including Africa. The writings underscore what it means to be Jewish in a world that's not always welcoming and include intriguing commentary about Chanukah's origins and what it means now.

This first English translation of Sholom Aleichem’s rediscovered novel, Moshkeleh the Thief, has a riveting plot, an unusual love story, and a keenly observed portrayal of an underclass Jew replete with characters never before been seen in Yiddish literature. The eponymous hero, Moshkeleh, is a robust chap and horse thief. When Tsireleh, daughter of a tavern keeper, flees to a monastery with the man she loves-a non-Jew she met at the tavern-the humiliated tavern keeper’s family turns to Moshkeleh for help, not knowing he too is in love with her. For some unknown reason, this innovative novel does not appear in the standard twenty-eight-volume edition of Sholom Aleichem’s collected works, published after his death. Strikingly, Moshkeleh the Thief shows Jews interacting with non-Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement-a groundbreaking theme in modern Yiddish literature. This novel is also important for Sholom Aleichem’s approach to his material. Yiddish literature had long maintained a tradition of edelkeyt, refinement. Authors eschewed violence, the darker side of life, and people on the fringe of respectability. Moshkeleh thus enters a Jewish arena not hitherto explored in a novel.