Mendele Mokher Sefarim

"The events of this novel unfold through the eyes of Hershl, who leaves his small town to become educated only to return to the Pale of Settlement in the wake of the pogroms in 1881. S.Y. Abramovitsh's famed epic novel explores the social upheaval of Russian Jews who are forced by poverty to leave their homes. As he traces the dissolution of the Eastern European shtetl and traditional Jewish life, Abramovitsh narrates a coming-of-age story of a shtetl child with a fresh and inspired perspective. The novel achieved canonical status both in its Yiddish original and in its Hebrew version, but under the title, In the Vale of Tears." "In this work Michael Wex renders the time-honored tale with the skill and ease of a modern storyteller and humorist. Abramovitsh's artistry lies not in the plot but in the descriptions and ever-shifting narrative voice. Sometimes the narrator (Mendele the Book Peddler) speaks from within the shtetl and sometimes from outside; and often he interweaves the high rhetorical prose of Hershl himself, reborn by the novel's end as Heinrich Cohen."--Jacket.

A satire of two small-town innocents who wander out into the wide world, invariably coming to grief, yet maintaining the nobility of innocence.