Motl, Peysi the Cantor's Son

The first was headed From Home to America (פֿון דער היים קיין אַמעריקע — fun der heym keyn amerike), relating the protagonist's experiences in Europe, and appearing in 1907.

His older brother Elyahu, recently married, tries to lift the family out of poverty through a series of get-rich-quick schemes he learns from a book, to which Motl is a willing accomplice.

At first America only seems to offer new problems, in the form of the austere immigration control on Ellis Island, the sweatshops of the Lower East Side, and the labor riots that often broke out as workers took to the streets to protest working conditions.

Life in New York affords Motl unanticipated new experiences (such as smoking and watching Charlie Chaplin movies), and slowly, the family begins to prosper.

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the author's birth in 2009, a third translation was published by Aliza Shevrin in Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son, with an introduction by Dan Miron (Penguin Classics, New York, ISBN 978-0-14-310560-2).

See Rahel Szalit-Marcus, Menshelakh und stsenes: Sekhtsen tsaykhenungen tsu Shalom Aleichems Verk "Motl peysi dem khasns yingl" (Berlin: Klal-Verlag, 1922).