Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) was the most popular and influential writer in modern Yiddish literature, best known for creating Tevye the Dairyman, who inspired the popular musical Fiddler on the Roof. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and epistolary satire that captured the life, particular humour, and well-grounded anxieties of Eastern-European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Moshkele the Thief (Moshkeleh Ganev in Yiddish, and the words are well-explained in the book’s first chapter) is a gritty, fast‑moving novella about a horse thief in a small Pale of Settlement town, and it stands out in his canon for focusing on the Jewish underclass and for its unusually direct portrayal of relationships between Jewish and non‑Jewish. First serialised in a Warsaw newspaper in 1903, it was published several times in Poland and the USSR in the early 20th century but remained marginal in collected editions. A new English translation by Curt Leviant brought it wider attention in 2021, and now we have it in Italian too.
The events in the story, the tone, the characters… it’s all very Yiddish, and if you don’t like the humour in Jewish tales, you won’t like this either. More than a novel, it’s a short story of a thief with stupendous strength who gets the girl and some other things as well. You read it for the flavour, for the way interactions between Jewish and non-Jewish is depicted, for the insight into holidays, and customs and celebrations. And, yes, for the Yiddish humour. Provided you like it to begin with. If you don’t, I’ve got nothing to tell you.
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