Image via the Jewish Publication Society
Moshkeleh the Thief
Shalom Aleichem is remembered for the stories that inspired Fiddler on the Roof, but there was more, much more. Aleichem’s collected works fill 28 volumes and yet, at least one story was omitted. A 1903 novella originally published in a Warsaw newspaper, Moshkeleh the Thief, was recently discovered by the author’s English-language translator, Curt Leviant.
Like a Yiddish Mark Twain, Aleichem was an ironic optimist depicting human nature and social conventions in his society—usually a shtetl. As Leviant writes in his introduction, Moshkeleh is “a complete human comedy whose members represent various segments of the moral spectrum” in an uneasy relationship between minority (Jewish) and majority (Russian) cultures. Why was it omitted from his collected works? Leviant speculates that its portrayal of a criminal subculture left the editors uncomfortable.
