The wishing-ring
Subtitle: a novel
By: S. Y. Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher Sforim) ; translated from the Yiddish by Michael Wex.
Contributors: Wex, Michael, 1954-
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Judaic traditions in literature, music, and art
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Syracuse, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 280
Description: "The events of this novel unfold through the eyes of Hershl, who leaves his small town to become educated only to return to the Pale of Settlement in the wake of the pogroms in 1881. S.Y. Abramovitsh's famed epic novel explores the social upheaval of Russian Jews who are forced by poverty to leave their homes. As he traces the dissolution of the Eastern European shtetl and traditional Jewish life, Abramovitsh narrates a coming-of-age story of a shtetl child with a fresh and inspired perspective. The novel achieved canonical status both in its Yiddish original and in its Hebrew version, but under the title, In the Vale of Tears."

"In this work Michael Wex renders the time-honored tale with the skill and ease of a modern storyteller and humorist. Abramovitsh's artistry lies not in the plot but in the descriptions and ever-shifting narrative voice. Sometimes the narrator (Mendele the Book Peddler) speaks from within the shtetl and sometimes from outside; and often he interweaves the high rhetorical prose of Hershl himself, reborn by the novel's end as Heinrich Cohen."--Jacket.
Notes: "This book was first published in Yiddish in 1865 as Dos vintshfinger! (The wishing ring). This translation folows the text of the Warsaw ed. of Abramovitsch's complete Yiddish works published in 1936 by Mendele Farlag."-T.p. verso.