Yosele Solovey () is an 1886 Yiddish novel by Sholem Aleichem, the bildungsroman of a young boy with a beautiful voice, which earned him the nicklame "solovey", meaning "nightingale" in Russian. It was translated into English for the first time by Aliza Shevrin in 1985, under the title The Nightingale (full title: "The Nightingale, or The Saga of Yosele Solovey the Cantor"Aliza Shevrin, The Nightingale
In the dedication, Sholem Aleichem writes that the novel was written in 1886 and that it was his second novel. It is one of the three Sholem Aleichem's novels about musicians, the other two being Stempenyu and Wandering Stars.Anita Norich, Portraits of the Artist in Three Novels by Sholem Aleichem, Prooftexts, Vol. 4, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER 1984), pp. 237-251,
Yosele lives in a fictional Ukrainian shtetl of Mazepevke/Mazepovka. Aliza Shevrin, the translator of the novel, characterises Yosele as follows:
Superficially the novel looks like a melodrama. The hero is in love with an idealized shtetl woman, his childhood friend Esther, but eventually falls in the hands of a rich and practical woman, madame Perele, and marries her (Stempenyu had a similar predicament). In the end, when Yosele learns about the marriage of Esther, he becomes a madman. However the three novels have a significant focus on the society, rather than on the heroes and includes significant critique of the society.
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References
External links A print of the 1948 book that contains Stempenyu and Yosele Solovey, Yiddish Book Center