The Hebrew Novel in Czarist Russia

Oppression and suffering sharpened Jewish self-consciousness and this was given expression in the first works of fiction in modern Hebrew literature. This volume studies the work of Hebrew novelists following the death of Abraham Mapu in 1867. These twenty years correspond with the last phase of the Hebrew movement of Enlightenment, the Haskalah. Compounded of fantasy and realism, primitive in structure and characterization, and concerned for the most part with conditions of contemporary Jewish life within the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Czarist Russia, these works shed much light on the development of modern Hebrew literature, as well as the social history of the era.