Sholem Aleichem Rediscovered: The Newly Translated Moshkeleh Ganev

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Sholem Aleichem's Moshkeleh Ganev was a first for Yiddish literature in featuring as its hero a rowdy, uneducated horse thief. The novel is unique for its focus on the underclass and portrayal of Jews interacting with non-Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Breaking norms, it centers on characters on the fringe of respectability.

Originally written in 1903 and published three times in Poland and in the Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century, the novel was for some unknown reason not included in Sholem Aleichem’s collected works. Upon encountering the forgotten novel a few years ago, the lauded Sholem Aleichem translator Curt Leviant has brought the text into the light with its first translation into English.

Join Curt Leviant, in conversation with Dvora Reich, about Sholem Aleichem and this newly re-discovered novel.

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About the Participants

Besides Moshkeleh the Thief, Curt Leviant has translated five other collections of Sholom Aleichem’s works. Among his fifteen volumes of translations from the Yiddish are novels by Chaim Grade, a memoir by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and collections of stories by Avraham Reisen and Lamed Shapiro.

Some of Leviant’s 12 novels have been published in nine European languages, in Israel, and in South America. His novel, Diary of an Adulterous Woman, was an international best seller and was cited in France in 2008 as one of the “Seven Best Novels of the Year”.

His most recent novels are the critically acclaimed King of Yiddish and Kafka’s Son. Critics have hailed the French translation of Kafka’s Son and called Leviant “a worthy heir to Kafka.” A Turkish version appeared in 2020.

A new novel, a love story set in the Jewish Ghetto of Venice, is titled, Me, Mo, Ma, Mu & Mod; or, Which Will It Be, Me and Mazal or Gilah and Me? will appear in Fall, 2021.

Curt Leviant’s books have been praised by two Nobel Laureates, Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel, and critics have compared his imaginative fiction to that of Tolstoy, Flaubert, Italo Calvino, Borges and Kafka.

Dvora Reich earned a BA in English literature from Barnard College at Columbia University and continued her graduate studies in literature at McGill University in Montréal. As Senior VP of a NYC public relations firm, she wrote publicity items that appeared in leading newspapers and magazines as well as speeches and articles in her field. She currently advises high school students on how to write compelling college admission essays. Fluent in Hebrew and with a knowledge of Yiddish, she reads those literatures in the original and has read and admired all of Curt Leviant’s Sholom Aleichem translations as well as Leviant’s own many novels.