As this Shabbos I finally had enough time to read some Hebrew short stories, I realized that outside the libraries, there it is not too much known about the Hebrew authors, except big names as Bialik and Agnon. Hence, my interest for a post presenting the biographies of a couple of them.
Micha Yosef Berichevsky was born in Ukraine, in a Hasidic rabbinical family. His father was the rabbi of Medzhybizh, from Western Ukraine. He started to study in the Volozhin Yeshiva, but ended up being more attracted by the Haskala movement. Berichevsky, who later will adopt the surname Bin Gurion - that is inscribed on his tomb in Berlin Weisensee Jewish cemetery - studied in Berlin, Breslau and Bern philosophy, and published dozen of books, articles and short stories. In many cases he supported the ideas of 'emancipation' seen as the liberation from the 'yoke' of religion. His PhD in philosophy is focused on the relation between ethics and aesthetics, with a special focus on works of Nietzsche and Hegel.
Another Jewish writer who died in Berlin is David Frischmann. Born in Poland in 1859, he is considered one of the most proeminent satirists and journalists of his time. His formative years were spent in Lodz where he published in the local Jewish publications essays and articles outlining the conflict between tradition and modernity in the Jewish culture. Between 1886 and 1888 he was assistant editor of the first Hebrew daily Ha-Yom. He graduated in the field of the history of art, at the University of Breslau. In 1911 and 1912 he visited Eretz Israel. Besides a rich editorial activity, he also translated into Hebrew scientific works by Lippert and Bernstein, as well as works by Oscar Wilde, Goethe, Tagore, Andersen, Grimm Brothers etc.
An almost forgotten writer is Simhah Ben-Zion, the pseudonym of Simhah Alter Gutmann. Born in Bessarabia of a traditional family, he write in Yiddish and Hebrew. As an author and teacher, he was influenced by Tolstoy's works on morality. He started his teaching career in Odessa, being one of the first to inrtoduce the 'Hebrew in Hebrew' method. Since 1905, he settled in Eretz Israel and continued both his editorial work but also started to get involved into public affairs. His early stories describe the small-town Jewish life in Bessarabia at the end of 19th century, but later on his work got a lyrical visionary perspective.
Born in Orsha, situatd in the nowadays Belarus, Gershom Shofman fought a difficult childhood and poverty, as an orphan. His primary education was acquired in the heder and several yeshivot, but he also got in touch with the local Russian and Hebrew literature. Before settling in Eretz-Israel in 1938, he edited various journals in Poland and Austria and spent three years in the Tzarist Army. His first collection of stories was published in 1902 in Warsaw, under the title 'Stories and Sketches' ('Sipurim ve-tsiyurim'). His later short stories describe realistically the Jewish life of the time, the brothels and the hard times in Europe between the two world wars.
The English-speaking references do not offer too much space to the novelist Uri Nissan Gnessin, a pioneer of Hebrew literature. He was born in Starodub, in the then White Russia in a rabbinic family. He sturdied for a while in his father's yeshiva while self-educating in the domain of secular studies ending up by being attracted by the ideas of the Haskala. His long-time friendship with the Hebrew modernist Yosef Haim Brenner involved him in several projects aimed to support the birth of Hebrew literature. In 1904, he co-founded the Hebrew language publishing house 'Nisyoniot' ('Attempts'). He later moved to London in order to work together with Brenner at the project of the Hebrew periodical Ha'Meorer. He had a life of wandering, that included a short time spent in Eretz-Israel, his return to Russia, in 1908, and his stay in Warsaw, where he died of a heart attack.
Haim Hazaz wondered several years across the world before settling down in Jerusalem, in 1931, where he died in 1970. He was born in Sidorovich, the Kiev Governorate, and witnessed many of the pogroms of the time. His main stops before Eretz-Israel were Kiev, Harkiv, Moscow, Istanbul, Paris and Berlin. He married poet Yocheved Bat-Miriam, and their only son Nachum died in the Independence war in 1948. Awarded several Israeli prizes for literature, his stories are depicting the local life in the Jewish shtetl in Ukraine, but also the Yemenite tradition in Israel, the absorption problems in the new state of Israel and the fight for independence in the 'British Mandate of Palestine'.
Yaakov Rabinowitz wrote his works in Hebrew, Yiddish and German, not few of them being dedicated to the Zionist project. Born in Volkovysk, the then White Russia, he studied first in the yeshiva, but acquired as well a secular education. He taught in Vitebsk, before dedicating most of his time and energy to the Zionism. He visited Eretz-Israel several times, in 1905 and 1908 and decided to settle there in 1910. He was one of the editors of the literary periodical 'Hedim'. His articles present the struggle for building the state of Israel, while his novels are often dedicated to the life of Jewish intellectuals, some of them with intimate descriptions. He also translated into Hebrew works by Hermann Bang, Flaubert or Selma Lagerloef.
I promise to dedicate more space to the Sephardi writers, but for this post I want to focus on one of them. Shemi Yitzhak was born in Hebron, of a Sephardi family. He taught also in Damascus and Bulgaria, as well as in Haifa and Hebron. He is one of the first who decribed the life of Sephardi Jews and bedouins in Eretz-Israel, one of his most significant works being 'Revenge of the Fathers'.
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