Who knows, but I am the last singer of Zion,
    And you are the last who my songs understand.

These lines were penned on the threshold of the new era of the eighties.  The exponent of Jewish self-criticism lived to see not only the horrors of the pogroms but also the misty dawn of the national movement, and he could comfort himself with the conviction that he was destined to be the singer for more than one generation.

The question “For whom do I labor?” was approached and solved in a different way by another writer, whose genius expanded with the increasing years of his long life.  During the first years of his activity, Shalom Jacob Abramovich (born in 1836) tried his strength in various fields.  He wrote Hebrew essays on literary criticism (Mishpat Shalom [1] 1859), adapted books on natural science written in modern languages (Toldot ha-teba’, “Natural History,” 1862, ff.), composed a social Tendenzroman under the title “Fathers and Children” (Ha-abot we-ha-banim, 1868 [2]); but all this left him dissatisfied.  Pondering over the question “For whom do I labor?,” he came to the conclusion that his labors belonged to the people at large, to the down-trodden masses, instead of being limited to the educated classes who understood the national tongue.  A profound observer of Jewish conditions in the Pale, he realized that the concrete life of the masses should be portrayed in their living daily speech, in the Yiddish vernacular, which was treated with contempt by nearly all the Maskilim of that period.

[Footnote 1:  “The Judgment of Shalom,” with reference to the author’s first name and with a clever allusion to the Hebrew text of Zech. 8.16.]

[Footnote 2:  Written under the influence of Turgenyev’s famous novel which bears the same title.  See above, p. 210, n. 1.]

Accordingly, Abramovich began to write in the dialect of the people, under the assumed pen-name of Mendele Mokher Sforim (Mendele the Bookseller).  Choosing his subjects from the life of the lower classes, he portrayed the pariahs of Jewish society and their oppressors (Dos kleine Menshele, “A Humble Man"), the life of Jewish beggars and vagrants (Fishke der Krummer, “Fishke the Cripple"), and the immense cobweb which had been spun around the destitute masses by the contractors of the meat tax and their accomplices, the alleged benefactors of the community (Die Taxe, oder die Bande Stodt Bale Toyvos, “The Meat Tax, or the Gang of Town Benefactors").  His trenchant satire on the “tax” hit the mark, and the author had reason to fear the ire of those who were hurt to the quick by his literary shafts.  He had to leave the town of Berdychev in which he resided at the time, and removed to Zhitomir.