"Paris in 1923" writes Robert Alter in the introduction, "hardly seems a likely place for the gestation of a novel written in Hebrew that
would offer a searching panoramic vision of the shtetl's disintegration in the historical maelstrom of the Russian Revolution."
Gates of Bronze is a prize-winning landmark of Hebrew fiction. In Hazaz's fictional village of Mokry-Kut, a dot on the vast landscape of Russia, the most portentous currents converge. It is a place where ideologies clash; where a way of life is painfully disintegrating.
Translated by S. Gershon Levi and with an introduction by
Robert Alter, Gates of Bronze assaults the contradictions of Jewish
revolutionary universalism, still so instructive today.
Haim Hazaz (1898-1973) is acknowledged to be one of the masters of modern Hebrew letters. He spent his childhood in a small village in the Ukraine with a mixed population of gentiles and Jews, and received a traditional Jewish education. After spending his early years in Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow, Constantinople, Paris and Berlin, Hazaz made his home in Jerusalem in 1931, where he lived and worked until his death.
He composed a vast body of work, including novels, plays and collections of stories which garnered major awards in Israel. We're delighted to bring his work to the attention of readers and student alike among English speaking audiences.
| |
|
