Boy Motle

The beginning of the twentieth century, the book of the great Jewish writer Sholom-Aleicham (1859-1916) "Boy Motle" was considered funny: the nine-year-old hero lives in a Jewish town of a rich life of a “happy orphan”, surrounded by Charlie Chaplin ”... But funny-such an fragile substance! It seems to be eliminated from books as reader generations are changing. And perhaps today the main ethnographic component of the story seems to be the main thing for someone: this is how those who are written about. Here"s how they ate, that"s how they dressed, that’s what their customs and habits were, that"s how they talked. That"s how they ran, fleeing the pogroms, how they emigrated over the ocean. But all this was still “before”, before the disaster ... and the heroes of the "boy Motle" spoke Yiddish - a language destroyed in the middle of the twentieth century. And yet: this book was once considered funny. Maybe you can read it like that.

Translation from Yiddish Mikhail Shambadala. Accessive article