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

Lecture by Professor Dan Miron Admission: $10 YIVO members & students: $5 Watch the video

2017 marks the 100th yortsayt of famed Yiddish author Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh—a writer perhaps better known by his pseudonym, Mendele Moykher Sforim, Mendele the Book Peddler. To commemorate the anniversary of one of Hebrew and Yiddish literature’s major figures, esteemed literary scholar Professor Dan Miron presents a lecture on the essence of Abramovitsh’s historical achievement, one which enabled him to redefine the courses of both Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, and on the question of the continued relevance of his legacy in today’s world. 

About the Speaker

Dan Miron is the Leonard Kaye Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of more than twenty books, in both Hebrew and English. His books include The Prophetic Mode in Modern Hebrew Poetry (2009); a study of the poet and playwright Nathan Alterman, From the Worm a Butterfly Emerges; and two studies of the classics of Yiddish fiction, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (2001) and A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (1996). In 1980 he received the Bialik Prize for Jewish thought, and in 1993 he was awarded the Israel Prize for Hebrew literature.