Mordechai Spector was born on 10 May 1858, in
Uman in the Russian Empire (now in
Ukraine). He was born into a
Hasidic family and received a strict religious education. During his teenage years, he met writer
Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski and playwright
Avrom Goldfadn, considered to be the father of Yiddish theater, and got involved with literature of the contemporary
Haskalah movement (also called Jewish Enlightenment), which promoted a renewal of the
Hebrew language but also a new interest in
rationalism,
enquiry, and secular culture. He started writing relatively young: his first work,
Roman On a Nomen (
Novel without a Title), appeared in installments in the
St. Petersburg-based newspaper
Yidishes Folksblat in 1883 when he was 24 years old. He also published multiple
feuilletons in the same newspaper, ran by
Alexander Zederbaum. The following year he published his breakthrough work, a novel of
Zionist inspiration entitled
Der Yidisher Muzhik (
The Jewish Farmer, 1884) which advocated for a return to the ancestral lands. Following the success of this second novel,
Zederbaum invited Spector to join him in
St. Petersburg as an assistant editor to the
Yidishes Folksblat. Over the course of the following three years, he published numerous feuilletons, reviews, travel sketches, and
short stories influenced by the realistic genre of the Haskalah. During his last year in St. Petersburg, in 1886, Spector married Berta Friedberg, the daughter of Hebrew and Yiddish author
Abraham Shalom Friedberg. Herself a writer, she later collaborated with him on several works, and published under the pen name
Isabella Grinevskaya multiple novels on education and against the idea of assimilation. In 1887, following Spector's failed attempts to publish his own newspaper in St. Petersburg, he and his wife settled down in
Warsaw and Spector started curating
Hoyz-fraynd, a Yiddish literary anthology in five volumes published between 1887 and 1896 to whom both he andhis wife contributed, in addition to multiple other Yiddish authors. The collection also includes Spector's longest but unfinished historical novel
Baal Shem-Tov, which pushed the boundaries of typical Haskalah literature and cast an innovative and positive light onto the beginnings of
Hassidism. Starting from 1894, Spector collaborated with
I. L. Peretz,
Jacob Dinezon, and
David Pinski on (
Holiday Pages), another landmark Yiddish literary anthology, as well as (
Weekly Pages). He also worked intensively on
Jewish folklore: he collected thousands of Jewish sayings, proverbs,
incantations and other folk expressions submitted by his readers, and he published them in the
Hoyz-fraynd as well as in a separate publication entitled
Di yidishe shprikhverter (
The Yiddish sayings). Spector was very close to fellow Yiddish authors
Sholem Aleichem and
I. L. Peretz, who were also active in Warsaw. In early August 1899 (according to N. Mayzil), Spector and Peretz were arrested together "because of their presence at illegal meetings of labor revolutionaries". Over the years, Spector contributed to a multitude of Yiddish newspapers and anthologies:
Der Fraynd,
Hilf,
Der Yid (
Kraków 1899–1902, in which he published, among others, his short stories
Kalikes,
A streik von Kapzunem -
A strike of the poor,
Brilen -
Eyeglasses),
Di Yidishe Folkstseitung (
The Jewish Newspaper) and its supplement
Froyen-velt, ''Ladies' World
(1902–1903 with Dr. Kh. D. Hurvits), Moment
, Tog
, Veg
, Die Zeit
(Vilnius 1906), Freytag
(Warsaw 1907), Undzer Lebn
(1907–1909 with Sch. Hochberg), Di naye velt'' (from 1909, later merged with Warsaw's
Moment), and others. Spector was extremely productive, and was the only Yiddish author of his generation to be able to live entirely off of his writing. As
World War I began and the German army started marching on Warsaw, Spector moved to
Odessa (1914) where he continued his literary work, which made him famous all across Europe. Although information about his first marriage is scarce, it is known that in this period he remarried with a sister of his friend and fellow author
David Pinski's wife. As the war progressed and the 1917
Russian Revolution began, life conditions became extremely harsh and Spector's health worsened. In 1920, Spector and his second wife escaped Ukraine and travelled through Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, Switzerland, and France to make their way to a ferry to the
United States. During their travel, local Jewish communities enthusiastically welcomed Spector as a great author. Spectors reached
New York in the fall of 1921, and Spector continued working in the literary and journalistic field. In particular, he published numerous short stories, feuilletons, and
reportages in the
Yidishes Tageblat, including
Von jener velt,
Soides,
Der Groisser Jakhsen,
Helden fun der Zat,
Yidishe Studenten,
Varblondzete,
Dem Apikoires vab. ==Legacy==