MORTKHE-MENAKHEM YUDELEVSKI

MORTKHE-MENAKHEM YUDELEVSKI

            He came from a small town near Warsaw.  He lived in Kalish (Kalisz), Lodz, and Warsaw—in Poland.  For a time he worked as an itinerant school teacher, later as a merchant.  After 1865 he owned a Jewish publishing house that brought out storybooks and religious texts as well.  He authored several of these storybooks (which he signed with the initials: M. M. or M. M. Y.), among them: Ester un khane (Esther and Hannah) (Warsaw, 1872), 60 pp.; and (using his full name) Mayse fun khanele (A tale of little Hannah), “a novel in two parts which one finds in the year 1663 in the large city of Nalikov, near the Black Sea.  Her sadness, which she suffered as a result of a terrible man, and how she is helped thereafter” (Warsaw, 1875), 60 pp.  Also: Menashe der eltster gazlen fun amerika mit a kompanye fun 1000 man (Menashe, the oldest thief in America with a gang of 1000 men) (Warsaw, 1912), 16 pp.

Khayim Leyb Fuks

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 300.]