ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the depiction of the impoverished East European Jews, notably in the Yiddish and Hebrew fiction of Mendele the Bookpeddler (pen name of S.J. Abramowitz, 1835–1917). This, the first literature with a mostly working-class readership, depicted daily life in the Russian Pale of Settlement, containing the largest Jewish community in the world, about five million by 1900, living under an anti-Semitic government, mostly in poverty so severe that by 1914 about two million emigrated, mostly to America but some to England, Palestine, and elsewhere. The pogroms of 1881–2 were a major turning point in modern Jewish history as they largely destroyed the hope of the Jewish Enlightenment (in Hebrew: Haskalah) that emancipation, civil rights, and reform were possible under autocratic Tsarist rule. Apart from Mendele, this chapter considers a number of writers whose main subjects and readers were the impoverished East European Jews: Sholom Aleichem and I.L. Peretz in Russia; J.H. Brenner in Palestine; and Abraham Cahan and Michael Gold in America. For Jews in the free world, the literature of poverty mostly ended by 1939.
