For many first-generation immigrants to the U.S., the trip to America—necessitated by poverty and persecution in their native land—is shadowed by the tragedy of leaving behind friends, family, and familiar sights, as well as the risk of the journey. But Sholem Aleichem’s Motl has a special talent for looking at the bright side; when his father, a respected cantor, passes away during the holiday of Shavuos, Motl famously exclaims, “Mir iz gut—ikh bin a yosem!” (“Lucky me—I’m an orphan!”).

This is a classic joke, but Motl’s elation stems from solid reasoning: having lost his father, he’s excused from school and choir practice, and no one dares smack him around anymore, not even his older brother Elye. Of course, Motl’s statement can be interpreted more broadly: Motl’s father was a traditionalist, and Motl’s destiny is enlightenment and the modern world. After a few disastrous attempts to earn a living in their hometown of Kasrilevke, and spurred on by the entrepreneurial Elye and his poetic friend, Pinye—a devotee of “Kahnegi,” “Rahknfelleh,” and “Vedehbilt,” to whom America is “the only country in the world with real freedom and equality”—Motl’s family sets their sights on “Ella’s Island.” Their trip winds westward through Germany, Austria, Belgium, and England, and eventually they reach New York, where they proceed to mangle the English language with stunning perspicacity. Hillel Halkin’s inventive translation offers the English-language reader access, of a sort, to Sholem Aleichem’s signature punning and wordplay, rendering the family’s attempts to speak English in phonetic form: where does the word “foinitsheh” (i.e., furniture) come from, they wonder—maybe from “fein” (fine) and “tsheh” (chair)? When he’s not playing with pronunciation, Sholem Aleichem can’t resist literalizing an idiom or two: settled in New York just long enough to feel superior to more recent arrivals, Motl, who aspires to a career as a painter, draws a picture of an immigrant “with a big green horn on his forehead”—in other words, a “grinhawn.”

Sadly, Sholem Aleichem died in 1916 while writing the second half of Motl’s story, which ends abruptly just as the family begins to taste the success made possible in America. A newspaper account claims that 100,000 mourners flooded the streets of New York on the day of the author’s funeral. One can’t help wondering where the author, whose trips and final move to New York inspired this tale, would have taken his characters if he had lived longer; but we’re lucky to have even this much of an American odyssey from the writer known as the Yiddish Mark Twain, and one of the all-time greats of modern Jewish literature.