13 Facts About Mordecai Spector

Mordecai Spector was a Yiddish novelist and editor from the Haskalah period.

Mordecai Spector is the author of about 50 realist novels and short stories depicting the life of ordinary people, workers, artisans, and Jewish families in his time.

Mordecai Spector is best known for his 1884 novel Der Yidisher Muzhik.

Mordecai Spector spent most of his life in Ukraine and moved to the United States in 1921.

Mordechai Spector was born on 10 May 1858, in Uman, Ukraine.

Mordecai Spector was born into a Hasidic family and received a strict religious education.

Mordecai Spector started writing relatively young: his first work, Roman On a Nomen, appeared in installments in the St Petersburg-based newspaper Yidishes Folksblat in 1883 when he was 24 years old.

Mordecai Spector published multiple feuilletons in the same newspaper, ran by Alexander Zederbaum.

In 1887, following Mordecai Spector's failed attempts to publish his own newspaper in St Petersburg, he and his wife settled down in Warsaw and Mordecai Spector started curating Hoyz-fraynd, a Yiddish literary anthology in five volumes published between 1887 and 1896 to whom both he andhis wife contributed, in addition to multiple other Yiddish authors.

Mordecai Spector worked intensively on Jewish folklore: he collected thousands of Jewish sayings, proverbs, incantations and other folk expressions submitted by his readers, and he published them in the Hoyz-fraynd as well as in a separate publication entitled Di yidishe shprikhverter.

Mordecai Spector was extremely productive, and was the only Yiddish author of his generation to be able to live entirely off of his writing.

Mordecai Spector was credited as an "excellent observer of reality", and his works reproduce the colloquial speech of Jewish families in everyday situations.

Mordecai Spector was considered "a pioneer of Yiddish folklore and of Yiddish writing for children", and he was one among the first Yiddish authors to collect and publish Jewish proverbs and sayings.