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Everyday Jews: Scenes from a Vanished Life
When Everyday Jews was first published in Poland in 1935, the Jewish Left was scandalized by the sex scenes, and I. B. Singer complained that the novel was too bleak to be psychologically credible. Yet within two years Perle’s novel was heralded as a modern Yiddish masterpiece. Offering a unique blend of raw sexuality and romantic love, thwarted desire and spiritual longing, Everyday Jews is now considered Perle’s consummate achievement.
The voice of Mendl, the novel's 12-year-old narrator, is precisely captured by this artfully simple translation. Mendl's impoverished and dysfunctional family struggles to survive in a nameless Polish provincial town. In his unsettled world, most ordinary people yearn to be somewhere elseor someone else. As Mendl journeys to adulthood, Perle captures the complex interplay of Christians and Jews, weekdays and Sabbaths, town and country, dream and reality, against a relentless and never-ending battle of the sexes.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1935
26 people are currently reading
177 people want to read
About the author
Yehoshue Perle
4 books2 followersYehoshue Perle (1888-1943) was one of Poland’s most popular, controversial, and prolific Yiddish novelists of the interwar—and wartime—period.
aka Iehoshua Perle, Yehoshua Perle, Shie Perle
aka Iehoshua Perle, Yehoshua Perle, Shie Perle
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 8, 2025
If you want to know where Mendl lives, picture a town so cold the winters pay rent and never move out, a place where a ruble works harder than the people who chase it, and everyone has at least three ways of making almost nothing. In such a town, even the cats complain. And there, right in the middle, you have little Mendl, poor child, trying to grow a head on his shoulders and maybe a heart in his chest, though the air in his house is rationed stricter than the bread.
His father is a man whose big dreams were once steaming bowls of kasha but are now the sad leftovers scraped from the bottom. His mother does her best to keep the household from collapsing like a wedding canopy set up on a windy day, but with so much worry, who has the strength to even sigh properly.
And between these two pillars of exhaustion stands Mendl, absorbing life lessons the way a sponge absorbs dishwater. How many mouths can one loaf feed? How many wishes can one family afford? If you count twice and cry once, you have the right answer.
His brother Moysheh, may the angels remember him kindly, is the shining one, the pride of the whole street. He writes, he charms, he makes people believe a better future might fall into their laps. Then suddenly illness snatches him like a thief in the night. One day the house is full of kvetching, the next it is full of fear. A boy learns very quickly that nothing in life is nailed down, not even hope.
As Mendl grows taller, his troubles grow faster. In a house as crowded as a prayer bench on Yom Kippur, a child sees more than he should. Curtains do not close, walls do not muffle, and grownups forget that children have eyes and ears.
A servant girl here, a neighbor there, a woman passing through the house, a whisper, a rustle, a glimpse, and suddenly the poor boy is initiated into the mysteries of adulthood long before he has the language to describe any of it.
Jewish holidays come marching in along with beloved relatives who always arrive hungry. Shabbes brings a breath of peace, a little light, a little warmth, a reminder that the world is not entirely upside down. Sukkes and Pesach come with the usual panic: Where will we get this, how will we afford that, who will help, who will complain. The joy is real, even if the pocketbook suffers. In this house you celebrate first and worry afterward.
Education for Mendl is not a ladder but a collection of mismatched wooden steps. In cheder the teachers shout, the students sweat, and everyone pretends the world outside does not exist. Then Mendl sees the gymnasium boys with their tidy collars and shiny futures, and something inside him begins to itch. A book opens, a word sparks, and suddenly he realizes that knowledge might be the one thing that lets him breathe.
Around him, people live life like a pot about to boil over. Neighbors argue, families fall apart, servants run off, husbands invent plans so foolish even a goat would not listen. The women work until they have no strength left. The men chase dreams that run faster than they do. Every day brings a new misfortune, and every misfortune brings a new excuse.
And despite all this noise and nonsense, little victories happen. A lesson sticks. Someone gets better. A coin appears where a coin was not expected. Two relatives who fight like roosters suddenly speak kindly for one minute. These are miracles. Small, but miracles.
The shtetl town is not merely a setting but a character itself. It frowns, it groans, it scolds, yet sometimes it surprises you with a soft moment: a festival that lifts the spirits, a walk that feels free, a second when life seems less crooked than usual.
Mendl grows, stumbles, studies, blushes, argues, and wonders why grownups act as if happiness will give them a rash. He aches to understand the world, even the crooked parts, and he learns the terrible truth that knowledge is both a gift and a burden.
This story is not sugared. It is poverty, hunger, stubbornness, love, foolishness, heartbreak, and ridiculousness all stirred into the same pot. People fall, people rise, people fight, people forgive, and most of all, people endure, because what else is there.
Perle shows you a world so small it fits in the cracks of memory, yet so rich it could fill a thousand books. He catches ordinary Jews in their glory and their foolishness, and he refuses to make them prettier than they are.
His honesty startled the critics who prefer their literature pressed and ironed. His frankness about bodies and desire would have made the prudish readers of his time cover their eyes with both hands. And because he wrote without the mystical smoke or nostalgic perfume that Agnon and Singer used, his voice never traveled far enough. Then the Shoah silenced him and millions of others, taking away the years they should have had.
In the book you find humor that laughs while sighing, because that is how Jews survived long before anyone bothered writing it down. You find antisemitism not as an explosion but as weather, constant and changing only in intensity.
In my humble opinion, it is an essential Jewish text. It shows how ordinary Jews actually lived before the world burned. It preserves their troubles and their tenderness, their jokes and their pains, their daily grind and their stubborn hopes. It saves a world that physically vanished without a trace, and in saving it, gives it a kind of immortality.
So much writing about that world comes from nostalgia, fantasy, theology, or political agenda. Perle wrote what people actually lived. The noise, the hunger, the gossip, the contradictions, the tenderness, the disappointments, the raw edges. If Jewish history is going to be understood rather than idealized, books like this are required reading.
His father is a man whose big dreams were once steaming bowls of kasha but are now the sad leftovers scraped from the bottom. His mother does her best to keep the household from collapsing like a wedding canopy set up on a windy day, but with so much worry, who has the strength to even sigh properly.
And between these two pillars of exhaustion stands Mendl, absorbing life lessons the way a sponge absorbs dishwater. How many mouths can one loaf feed? How many wishes can one family afford? If you count twice and cry once, you have the right answer.
His brother Moysheh, may the angels remember him kindly, is the shining one, the pride of the whole street. He writes, he charms, he makes people believe a better future might fall into their laps. Then suddenly illness snatches him like a thief in the night. One day the house is full of kvetching, the next it is full of fear. A boy learns very quickly that nothing in life is nailed down, not even hope.
As Mendl grows taller, his troubles grow faster. In a house as crowded as a prayer bench on Yom Kippur, a child sees more than he should. Curtains do not close, walls do not muffle, and grownups forget that children have eyes and ears.
A servant girl here, a neighbor there, a woman passing through the house, a whisper, a rustle, a glimpse, and suddenly the poor boy is initiated into the mysteries of adulthood long before he has the language to describe any of it.
Jewish holidays come marching in along with beloved relatives who always arrive hungry. Shabbes brings a breath of peace, a little light, a little warmth, a reminder that the world is not entirely upside down. Sukkes and Pesach come with the usual panic: Where will we get this, how will we afford that, who will help, who will complain. The joy is real, even if the pocketbook suffers. In this house you celebrate first and worry afterward.
Education for Mendl is not a ladder but a collection of mismatched wooden steps. In cheder the teachers shout, the students sweat, and everyone pretends the world outside does not exist. Then Mendl sees the gymnasium boys with their tidy collars and shiny futures, and something inside him begins to itch. A book opens, a word sparks, and suddenly he realizes that knowledge might be the one thing that lets him breathe.
Around him, people live life like a pot about to boil over. Neighbors argue, families fall apart, servants run off, husbands invent plans so foolish even a goat would not listen. The women work until they have no strength left. The men chase dreams that run faster than they do. Every day brings a new misfortune, and every misfortune brings a new excuse.
And despite all this noise and nonsense, little victories happen. A lesson sticks. Someone gets better. A coin appears where a coin was not expected. Two relatives who fight like roosters suddenly speak kindly for one minute. These are miracles. Small, but miracles.
The shtetl town is not merely a setting but a character itself. It frowns, it groans, it scolds, yet sometimes it surprises you with a soft moment: a festival that lifts the spirits, a walk that feels free, a second when life seems less crooked than usual.
Mendl grows, stumbles, studies, blushes, argues, and wonders why grownups act as if happiness will give them a rash. He aches to understand the world, even the crooked parts, and he learns the terrible truth that knowledge is both a gift and a burden.
This story is not sugared. It is poverty, hunger, stubbornness, love, foolishness, heartbreak, and ridiculousness all stirred into the same pot. People fall, people rise, people fight, people forgive, and most of all, people endure, because what else is there.
Perle shows you a world so small it fits in the cracks of memory, yet so rich it could fill a thousand books. He catches ordinary Jews in their glory and their foolishness, and he refuses to make them prettier than they are.
His honesty startled the critics who prefer their literature pressed and ironed. His frankness about bodies and desire would have made the prudish readers of his time cover their eyes with both hands. And because he wrote without the mystical smoke or nostalgic perfume that Agnon and Singer used, his voice never traveled far enough. Then the Shoah silenced him and millions of others, taking away the years they should have had.
In the book you find humor that laughs while sighing, because that is how Jews survived long before anyone bothered writing it down. You find antisemitism not as an explosion but as weather, constant and changing only in intensity.
In my humble opinion, it is an essential Jewish text. It shows how ordinary Jews actually lived before the world burned. It preserves their troubles and their tenderness, their jokes and their pains, their daily grind and their stubborn hopes. It saves a world that physically vanished without a trace, and in saving it, gives it a kind of immortality.
So much writing about that world comes from nostalgia, fantasy, theology, or political agenda. Perle wrote what people actually lived. The noise, the hunger, the gossip, the contradictions, the tenderness, the disappointments, the raw edges. If Jewish history is going to be understood rather than idealized, books like this are required reading.
February 28, 2012
It's easy to see why this was a shocking book to Polish Jews in 1935. Topics are discussed here that were generally off-limits ... sexual awakening, marital infidelity, attempted rape (of a young boy by an older woman).
There is also a very clear sense of the value of persistence - a need to just keep going in the face of whatever problems life brings - that was very much a part of the Polish Jew's psyche.
I'm planning to have Anna, my main female character in the novel I'm writing, who will be 18 when 'Everyday Jews' is published, discuss and react to these issues with her close friend at university in Warsaw. I think it will provide many nuanced opportunities to explore Anna's thoughts as she changes from a girl to a woman.
There is also a very clear sense of the value of persistence - a need to just keep going in the face of whatever problems life brings - that was very much a part of the Polish Jew's psyche.
I'm planning to have Anna, my main female character in the novel I'm writing, who will be 18 when 'Everyday Jews' is published, discuss and react to these issues with her close friend at university in Warsaw. I think it will provide many nuanced opportunities to explore Anna's thoughts as she changes from a girl to a woman.
December 26, 2012
A novel about a working-class Hassidic Jewish family in Poland sometime in the early 20th century, as narrated by twelve-year-old Mendl. There isn't really a plot, just a slice of life from that time and place. The book becomes all the more significant because it was published in 1935 and the modern reader knows that way of life is about to be destroyed forever: hence the subtitle, "Scenes from a Vanished Life." The author himself died in Auschwitz.
Although the narrator of Everyday Jews is a child, this book isn't a children's book by any means. Everyone is sleeping with everyone else, and it's not strictly married couples or even girlfriends and boyfriends who are doing this. Mendl has half-siblings from both parents, and at one point in the story his mother's son tries to have sex with his father's daughter. (Or maybe it was the other way around, I don't remember.) One of his half-sisters becomes pregnant by her employer and then miscarries. A maid and a neighbor girl both try to seduce Mendl himself, though he hasn't even had his bar mitzvah yet. The Polish Jewry of the 1930s was shocked by this book when it came out, though it all seems pretty tame to me, not graphic at all.
I would recommend this book to people interested in Hassidic and/or pre-Holocaust Jewry. It has a few footnotes for clarification and also defines some terms for the Gentile reader. It's a slow-moving story without a lot of action, but beautifully written with some lovely similes, and it really taught me a lot about the prewar Polish Jews.
Another, similar book is Botchki: When Doomsday Was Still Tomorrow by David Zagier, who grew up in the inter-war period in a shtetl much like the one in Everyday Jews.
Although the narrator of Everyday Jews is a child, this book isn't a children's book by any means. Everyone is sleeping with everyone else, and it's not strictly married couples or even girlfriends and boyfriends who are doing this. Mendl has half-siblings from both parents, and at one point in the story his mother's son tries to have sex with his father's daughter. (Or maybe it was the other way around, I don't remember.) One of his half-sisters becomes pregnant by her employer and then miscarries. A maid and a neighbor girl both try to seduce Mendl himself, though he hasn't even had his bar mitzvah yet. The Polish Jewry of the 1930s was shocked by this book when it came out, though it all seems pretty tame to me, not graphic at all.
I would recommend this book to people interested in Hassidic and/or pre-Holocaust Jewry. It has a few footnotes for clarification and also defines some terms for the Gentile reader. It's a slow-moving story without a lot of action, but beautifully written with some lovely similes, and it really taught me a lot about the prewar Polish Jews.
Another, similar book is Botchki: When Doomsday Was Still Tomorrow by David Zagier, who grew up in the inter-war period in a shtetl much like the one in Everyday Jews.
Read
July 31, 2020Written in the 1930s, this is a novel about Mendl, a Jewish boy in a Polish shtetl. I planned on only reading a few chapters for research, but found the stories intriguing, so I read the entire book. There isn't much of a story line--it's more episodic events in his life. With no real story arc, it's more like snapshots of Mendl's life, but it paints a clear picture of life in the early 1900s that I've never seen before, and gave me a picture of what life may have been like for my own ancestors. At the time of its publication, it was controversial because it talks about sex, adultery, though now it is tame. Despite its dated nature, it was quite readable. The book ends rather abruptly, but I didn't mind. Very interesting.
December 1, 2013
Yehoshue Perle (1888-1943) was a popular and prolific Polish Yiddish novelist, and in this book he chronicles a year in the life of 12 year old Mendl and his family in a Polish provincial town around the turn of the 20th century. Based largely on his own life, it is an unflinching look at the struggles faced by a community of poor Jews and confronts the harsh reality of growing up at that time. Perle shows much empathy for his characters, vividly describes the hustle and bustle of daily life and depicts both humorously and gently the complexities of traditional Jewish ways in a working class family. Whilst there is little plot as such, as a representation of pre-war Polish Jewish life, one not yet overshadowed by the Holocaust, it is both moving and authentic. This is a lost world, but one which Perle brings to life for the modern reader. It is perhaps not of great literary merit, being more of a succession of sketches than a complete novel, but as such it is an important historical document as well as being a very enjoyable and compelling read.
The excellent and informative introduction by David G Roshkies is invaluable to give the reader the necessary background to fully appreciate both book and author, and I found it very helpful indeed.
This is a wonderful addition to the very good New Yiddish Library series – translations into English of lost Yiddish classics. Published in 1935 and looking back to Perle’s own childhood, the modern reader is only too aware of what was soon to come and thus the book gains an extra poignancy. All in all this is a wonderful little window into a forgotten world, and I am very glad to have discovered it – along with the many other excellent books in the series.
The excellent and informative introduction by David G Roshkies is invaluable to give the reader the necessary background to fully appreciate both book and author, and I found it very helpful indeed.
This is a wonderful addition to the very good New Yiddish Library series – translations into English of lost Yiddish classics. Published in 1935 and looking back to Perle’s own childhood, the modern reader is only too aware of what was soon to come and thus the book gains an extra poignancy. All in all this is a wonderful little window into a forgotten world, and I am very glad to have discovered it – along with the many other excellent books in the series.
July 29, 2018
יידן פון א גאנץ יאר
"יהודים של כל השנה"
or
"יהודים סתם"
In the Hebrew translation
==
This is the autobiographically-based story of Yehoshue Perle who wrote it in 1936, and is describing a year in the life of a Jewish Family in the Shtetl (in Poland of course) around the year 1900.
==
This book gives us a rare and authentic access, through the eyes of the growing-up Mendl, to a way of life that was, is no longer, and surely will never recur ever again. Surprisingly, the writing is quite modern, and the troubles and tribulations still relevant a reader of our own times.
==
Also are mentioned gentiles living there and interacting with the Jews (unlike for instance Sholem Aleichem's Jewish-centric stories which thus provide a somewhat artificial rendering), the battle of the sexes, the family dynamics, the ills, beliefs, struggles, socio-economic distinctions, and more and more, and when the book is finished, there indeed is left a desire for more, and not just due to the fact that the two additional volumes of this trilogy were lost together with their author in the Shoah.
==
This book is especially recommended to those who enjoy reading on different ways of life lived in different places, times and culture, and who perhaps enjoyed as much as I did books such as
Ginzburg's "Family Sayings" or Gorky's "My Childhood".
"יהודים של כל השנה"
or
"יהודים סתם"
In the Hebrew translation
==
This is the autobiographically-based story of Yehoshue Perle who wrote it in 1936, and is describing a year in the life of a Jewish Family in the Shtetl (in Poland of course) around the year 1900.
==
This book gives us a rare and authentic access, through the eyes of the growing-up Mendl, to a way of life that was, is no longer, and surely will never recur ever again. Surprisingly, the writing is quite modern, and the troubles and tribulations still relevant a reader of our own times.
==
Also are mentioned gentiles living there and interacting with the Jews (unlike for instance Sholem Aleichem's Jewish-centric stories which thus provide a somewhat artificial rendering), the battle of the sexes, the family dynamics, the ills, beliefs, struggles, socio-economic distinctions, and more and more, and when the book is finished, there indeed is left a desire for more, and not just due to the fact that the two additional volumes of this trilogy were lost together with their author in the Shoah.
==
This book is especially recommended to those who enjoy reading on different ways of life lived in different places, times and culture, and who perhaps enjoyed as much as I did books such as
Ginzburg's "Family Sayings" or Gorky's "My Childhood".
March 22, 2014
Is it a bildungsroman or an entwicklungsroman? I can't keep my terms straight. One way or another, it's too episodic to build much dramatic tension except in isolated plot segments, and while the insight into ordinary life for working class Jews in Eastern Europe around 1900 is strong, it could probably have been done in a novel half this length. Often funny, often touching, but a bit too much of a good thing.
December 5, 2017
Enjoyed this glimpse into the lives of 19th century Polish Jews. Far from an idealistic picture, it reveals life's seamier side. I felt the translation was a bit clumsy at times. The Norse are helpful.
May 31, 2018
This book is remarkable because of when it was written and the author's backstory. Nothing really happens in the book but it is an intricate story of a young boys life in Poland before WWII. It is like being there with him and his family going through everyday life. Part one of what was to be a 3 part series it was never completed because he died in a concentration camp thinking h was on a train to freedom.
April 11, 2014
Quite a gripping read. Young Mendl calls like he sees it. Life is a struggle for all concerned. Even the "rich" Jews in the capital struggle to keep up appearances.
People are upwardly mobile and at the same time downwardly. There are not that many narratives which speak of this time and place.
People are upwardly mobile and at the same time downwardly. There are not that many narratives which speak of this time and place.
Read
March 17, 2018Good story but ended rather abruptly.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews