Mordecai Spector was a Yiddish novelist and editor from the Haskalah period. He is the author of about 50 realist novels and short stories depicting the life of ordinary people, workers, artisans, and Jewish families in his time. He is best known for his 1884 novel Der Yidisher Muzhik. He spent most of his life in the Ukraine region and moved to the United States in 1921.

Isaac Leib Peretz, also sometimes written Yitskhok Leybush Peretz was a Polish Jewish writer and playwright writing in Yiddish. Payson R. Stevens, Charles M. Levine, and Sol Steinmetz count him with Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholem Aleichem as one of the three great classical Yiddish writers. Sol Liptzin wrote: "Yitzkhok Leibush Peretz was the great awakener of Yiddish-speaking Jewry and Sholom Aleichem its comforter.... Peretz aroused in his readers the will for self-emancipation, the will for resistance against the many humiliations to which they were being subjected."