The one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the “grandfather of Yiddish literature,” Mendele Moicher Sforim (S. J. Abramovitch), will be officially celebrated next December, the Yiddish Scientific Institute has announced here.
The statement of the Institute comes in connection with various assertions that the anniversary falls in December of 1935. To support its contention concerning the date of birth of the creator of modern Yiddish literature the Institute adduces the following evidence:
1—Mendele’s family and close friends considered December of 1835 the date of the writer’s birth. With that date as a basis, Mendele’s seventy-fifth birthday was celebrated in 1910 in Warsaw, Odessa, St. Petersburg and many other cities.
2—The date was referred to in 1910 in the Warsaw “Fraint” in reprinting a telegram signed by the late Chaim Nachman Bialik. The telegram reminded Mendele’s friends that his seventy-fifth birthday came on December 26 (1910) and gave Mendele’s address.
3—Mendele’s first biographer, L. Bienstock, writing in Woschod, in 1884, gave 1935 as the year of Mendele’s birth.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
