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The Novelist of Jewish Unity

Did Jews recognizably still exist as a people in the late 19th century? Many questioned it. In his packed and vibrant fiction, the great Peretz Smolenskin proved them wrong.

A 1909 auction of the first lots of what would become Tel Aviv. Avraham Soskin/Wikipedia.

A 1909 auction of the first lots of what would become Tel Aviv. Avraham Soskin/Wikipedia.
Observation
Hillel Halkin
Dec. 28 2015
About the author

Hillel Halkin’s books include Yehuda Halevi, Across the Sabbath River, Melisande: What are Dreams? (a novel), Jabotinsky: A Life (2014), and, most recently, After One-Hundred-and-Twenty (Princeton). 

This essay is the third in a series of fresh looks by Hillel Halkin at seminal Hebrew writers and thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The first two essays, on the proto-Zionist novelists Joseph Perl and Abraham Mapu, are available here and here.

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More about: Arts & Culture, History & Ideas, Israel & Zionism, Proto-Zionist Writers

 
 
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