Lapas attēli
PDF
ePub

SLOUSCHZ

[graphic]

atmosphere of Soviet Russia, however, this society could not thrive; it dissolved, and Slonimsky drew closer to Soviet life.

His first book of stories, Shestoi strelkovyi (The Sixth Rifle Battalion), came out in 1922; it described the falling apart of the czarist army early during the revolution. Udar (The Blow; 1924) and Mashina Emeri (The Emeri Machine; 1924) are books replete with adventure. Their heroes are intellectuals, strong-willed and victors in life's struggle. Their opponents were shown as weak-willed creatures and therefore losers.

Slonimsky's most mature work, according to Soviet critics, was Laurovy (The Lavrovs; 1926), which depicts the downfall and stratification of a family as the result of war and revolution. This work was followed by a sequel, Foma Kleshnev (1929). All his works were published in three volumes in Leningrad (1933).

SLONIMSKY, NICOLAS, musicologist, conductor, and composer, b. St. Petersburg, 1894. He was the grandson of Hayim Selig Slonimsky, and the son of Leonid Zinovievitch Slonimsky (treated under the Slonimsky family). Nicolas Slonimsky studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

In 1923 he came to the United States and became a faculty member of the Eastman School of Music (1923-25). Koussevitzky brought him to Boston to act as his secretary and musical assistant. In 1927, Slonimsky conducted the Harvard University orchestra and was so successful that, a year later, he founded the Boston Chamber Orchestra which featured unusual music. Slonimsky distinguished himself particularly as an interpreter of modern music, directing such programs in Havana, New York, South America, Paris, and Berlin. In 1938, he conducted a program of American and Latin American music at the IberoAmerican Music Festival at Bogota, Colombia, and in 1941 he toured South America extensively as conductor and lecturer.

Slonimsky wrote extensively on music for newspapers and magazines, was the author of Music Since 1900 (1937) and of Panorama of Latin American Music (1943), and assisted in the preparation of several important musical dictionaries. In 1943 he was associate editor of New Music. As composer he wrote pieces which were featured by Roland Hayes, Jascha Heifetz and George Copeland.

SLOSS, MARCUS CAUFFMAN, lawyer and justice, b. New York city, 1869. He was educated at Harvard University (M.A., 1893) and at Harvard Law School (LL.B. 1893). He entered the practice of law in San Francisco, becoming associated with the firm of Chickering, Thomas and Gregory, which later became Chickering, Thomas, Gregory, Gerstle and Sloss. In 1900 he was elected judge of the superior court for the city and county of San Francisco, following which, in 1906, he was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court of California to fill a vacancy caused by death. Having filled this post for a term of twelve years, he was elected to it in 1918, but resigned in 1919 to resume the private practice of law.

Sloss was active in endeavors philanthropic and civic, Jewish and general. He was president of the Jewish National Welfare Fund of San Francisco and of the Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum and Home Society; a member of the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University and a trustee of the San Francisco Public Library. He served on the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and on the San Francisco Survey Committee and was also active in the San Francisco Community Chest.

HATTIE HECHT SLOSS, Communal worker (b. Boston, Massachusetts, 1874), was the wife of Marcus Cauff

Nicolas Slonimsky

man Sloss. She was educated in private schools and received special instruction from faculty members of Harvard University. She was the founder and first president of the San Francisco section of the Council of Jewish Women and a founder and guiding spirit in the Community Chest of San Francisco. From 1919 to 1924 she was a member of the California State Board of Charities. She was also a director of Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco.

Hattie H. Sloss was instrumental in the establishment and continuance of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Opera Association. She was literary director of the Browning Society and compiled Certain Poets of Importance, an anthology of Victorian verse (1929). In 1942, Mills College awarded her the honorary degree of Master of Arts. IRVING F. REICHERT.

SLOT, GERALD MAURICE JOSEPH, physician, b. Johannesburg, South Africa. He was educated at St. John's College, Oxford, and at the University of London (M.D.) and became connected with several British hospitals. Slot was an editor of the MedicoLegal Journal and Criminological Review. He published several works on the treatment of rheumatism and sciatica, on fume diseases and heart diseases, and on medico-legal topics. He was a Chadwick lecturer in 1930.

SLOUSCHZ, NAHUM, philologist, orientalist and traveler, b. Odessa, Russia, 1872. He received his rabbinical education from his father, Rabbi David Solomon Slouschz, and in the late 1880's was cofounder of the Odessa Hebrew society Safah Berurah.

Nahum Slouschz visited Palestine on two occasions, the first time in 1891 to 1892, when, under the auspices of the Odessa Chovevei Zion society, he made an unsuccessful attempt to found an agricultural colony in the Holy Land. and the second time in 1896; on the latter occasion he first traveled through Lithuania and Egypt, later writing works dealing with his journeys in these two countries.

Slouschz studied at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, from 1898 to 1899. In the latter year he went to Paris, and studied oriental languages and literature at the Sorbonne from 1899 to 1904, being a pupil of Julius Oppert and Joseph Halévy. He received the Ph.D. degree

SMALLENS

from the Sorbonne in 1904, and in that same year became lecturer on modern Hebrew at that institution, serving until 1919, when he went to Palestine, settling in Jerusalem. During his student days he supported himself as the Paris correspondent of several famous Hebrew periodicals, notably Hamelits and Hatzefirah, and from 1903 to 1918 he taught also at the oriental school for teachers in Paris.

During the first two decades of the 20th cent. Slouschz devoted a great deal of time to travels and studies in North Africa, particularly for researches on the history and antiquity of the Jews in the various countries of North Africa, and on the vestiges of Phoenician civilization in these lands. His most important journeys to these regions were made in the period from 1906 to 1914, and included Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Tripoli; he made several trips to the Atlas Mountains of Algeria. His report on a large Jewish tribe which lived in the regions of Morocco was published in Unser Leben (1909). While in Morocco he taught for some time at the academy of Rabat; later, in appreciation of his educational and archeological services in behalf of Morocco, he was awarded an honorary captaincy in the Sultan's Legion of Morocco. From 1908 on Slouschz headed several expeditions of exploration to Africa under the auspices. of various French scientific institutes. During the first World War he visited the United States, serving as editor of the Jewish Morning Journal, and teaching for a time in the Yeshiva Rabbi Isaac Elchanan in New York city. In 1920, shortly after the end of the War, he made archeological excavations in Tiberias, Palestine, and in Jerusalem. In both cities he unearthed numerous objects of value for the study of the life and history of the Jews of the ancient period, and at Hamath he uncovered an ancient Hebrew synagogue.

From his early youth Slouschz was an ardent Zionist, a disciple of Theodor Herzl and affiliated with the Chovevei Zion movement, although he was, for a time, a Territorialist associated with Israel Zangwill. After the organization of the political Zionist movement he became an active and organizing member of the Odessa Palestine Committee, aiding in the establishing of Zionist groups in Odessa, in other cities of southern Russia, and in several other countries; he was a co-founder of the Zionist Federation of Switzerland. He served as delegate to six Zionist congresses, from the second to the seventh, and acted also as correspondent at several of them. In 1901 he wrote a Hebrew work on the fourth Zionist Congress, Hakongres Hatziyyoni Harebii.

Slouschz was a director of the Palestine Jewish Exploration Society, and edited its collections. He was co-editor of the Corpus inscriptionum semiticarum (Paris, 1881-1935), as well as of the Revue du monde musulman. He wrote many scientific articles for various French and Hebrew periodicals. As a result of his visits to and his interest in the various Marrano Jewish communities of Portugal, to which he devoted his Hebrew work Haanusim Beportugal (1934), he was made an honorary member of several of these communities. In 1942 he was the winner of the Bialik award for that year, for his research work in the scientific field.

Slouschz wrote many works in Hebrew and French, several of which were translated into English, on Jewish history and literature, travel and archeology. He translated two works by Paolo Montegazza from Italian into Hebrew, as well as individual novels from the French by Emile Zola (Kobetz Sippurim, Warsaw, 1899), Gustave Flaubert (Salammbo) and Guy de Maupassant (Kethabim Nibharim, 7 vols., 1904-5, containing selections from Maupassant's works and a biographical sketch by Slouschz). His other works include: Massa Belitah (1897); Keneseth Hagedolah (1898); Emil Zola, Hayyav Usefarav (1900); Massa Bemitzrayim (1902); La renaissance de la littérature hébraïque

[graphic][merged small]

(1902, treating the period from 1743 to 1885; English trans., Henrietta Szold, The Renascence of Hebrew Literature, Philadelphia, 1909); Koroth Hasifruth Haibrith Hahadashah (Hebrew and French, 1903 and 1905; a supplement and sequel to La renaissance de la littérature hébraïque); Hébréophéniciens et Judéo-berbères (1908); La poésie lyrique hébraïque contemporaine (Paris, 1911; treating the period from 1882 to 1910); Beiyye Hayam (1917); Travels in North Africa (Philadelphia, 1927; this is included in, and forms part 1 of vol 1, of his Sefer Hamassaoth, under the title of Massaai Beeretz Lub [Travels in Libya]; Tel-Aviv, 1938); Poésies hébraïques de Don Jehuda Abrabanel (Messer Leon Ebreo) (1928); Dahiyah Kahinah (1934; on the 7th cent. princess and prophetess of the Djarwa, a Jewish tribe of Berbers who lived in the Atlas Mountains of Northern Africa, the modern Algeria). His thesaurus of Phoenician inscriptions, containing eleven maps and tables, was published by the Bialik Foundation at Tel-Aviv in 1942, under the title of Otzar Hakethoboth Hafenikiyyoth.

ABRAHAM I. SHINEDLING.

SLOVAKIA, see CZECHOSLOVAKIA.

SLUTSKAYA, VERA BRONISLAVOVNA (original name Berta Klementevna), revolutionary, b. Russia, 1874; d. in battle in Russia, 1917. She took part in the underground movement from early youth. She aided in the 1905 revolution at Minsk as a member of the Social Democratic Labor Party.

In 1907 she was sent to London by her party as a delegate to its Fifth Congress. Between 1909 and 1912 she lived abroad, and upon her return to Russia engaged in revolutionary work in St. Petersburg, but in 1913 she was arrested and sent into exile.

The February (1917) Revolution set her free and she returned to St. Petersburg, then became a member of the Bolshevik Party Committee. She worked as a women's organizer and also actually fought in battle against the troops of Kerensky in the October (Bolshevik) Revolution. She was killed in battle. The town of Pavlovsk was renamed Slutsk in her honor.

SMALLENS, ALEXANDER, conductor, b. St. Petersburg, 1889. He came to the United States as a child, and studied in the public schools, the College of the City of New York, and the Institute of Musical Art.

His music study was completed at the Paris Conservatory. In 1911 Smallens served as assistant conductor of the Boston Opera Company. Numerous engagements followed, with Anna Pavlova (on tour in South and Central America), the

Century Opera Company, and the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. He was the first North American conductor to direct performances at the Teatro Colon, and at the National Theatre in Havana.

In 1919 Smallens was appointed principal conductor of the Chicago Opera Company, remaining there for four years. During this period he served as a guest conductor at leading opera houses in Berlin and Madrid, once again being the first American ever called upon to conduct in these world-famous opera houses. In 1924 he was music director of the Philadelphia Civic Opera Company, and in 1934 he conducted the opera season launched by the Philadelphia Orchestra. From 1934 on he conducted all the opera performances held at the Lewisohn Stadium, as well as numerous operatic and orchestral performances throughout the country. Smallens was responsible for many important American and world premières, including Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Prokofieff's The Love of Three Oranges, and Richard Strauss' Feuersnot and Ariadne auf Naxos.

Lit.: Ewen, David, Living Musicians (1940). SMILANSKY, MOSHE (MOSES; pseudonym, Havagah Musa), Hebrew novelist, editor, and Zionist leader, b. Talpino, a village in the province of Kiev, Russia, 1874. He was the son of Shemaiah Smilansky and the brother of Meir Smilansky.

Moshe Smilansky received the usual traditional Jewish education in the Heder. In 1890 he emigrated to Palestine, becoming a farm laborer first at Rishon Le Zion and then at Hedera. Thereafter he devoted his entire life and energy to the Zionist cause, becoming one of the foremost Zionist leaders of the 20th cent., residing continuously in the Holy Land except for a period (1909-11) when he returned to Russia. In 1893 Smilansky became an owner of vineyards and orange groves at Rehovoth, where he still resided in 1943. He was one of the builders of that colony. In 1900 he helped to organize the Histadruth Hamoshaboth (federation of Palestinian colonies), and during the entire period of the first World War was one of its directors. In 1900 he was a member of the delegation sent by the Histadruth to the Odessa conference and to Baron Edmond de Rothschild, in Paris. He was sent as the Palestinian delegate to the Seventh Zionist Congress held at Basel, Switzerland, in 1905.

Smilansky wrote his first publicistic and literary articles for the Hatzefirah in 1898, and several years thereafter contributed also to the noted Hebrew periodical Hashiloah. Thereafter he wrote regularly for Hebrew periodicals in Palestine and other lands. In 1906 he wrote his first stories, dealing with the life of the Arab and Jewish settlers in the Holy Land; they were read eagerly because of their freshness of content and diction. In 1907 he was co-founder of the magazine Haomer. He was the first modern Hebrew writer to give expression to the life of the new Jewish settlers in Palestine and to depict the way in which the Arabs lived. His Arab stories are for the most part romantic and exotic in nature, but he wrote also realistic stories and novels. The style of his stories is both Biblical and popular.

In 1918 Smilansky was a member of the committee formed to organize the Jewish Legion in Palestine, and he himself became a legionnaire. After the first World War he was active in the redemption of Palestinian soil, and founded the Hebrath Noteim Anglo-Palestina (Anglo-Palestine planters' organization) and the Hebrath Yehudah Lekinyan (Jewish organization for the acquisition [of land in Palestine]). In 1929 he became co-founder and co-editor of Bustenai, Hebrew weekly published by the Hithahduth

a

Haikkarim (Palestine Farmers' Federation), whose president Smilansky later became; in 1943 he held the position of co-editor of the weekly and president of the federation, having been reelected to the latter post in 1940 with the title of president of the New Central Committee of the Palestine Farmers' Federation.

As a publicist from 1898 on, Smilansky dealt mainly with problems of settlement in Palestine, being regarded as one of the greatest authorities on the land problem in the Holy Land. In April, 1940, at a conference of Zionist leaders, Smilansky declared that, despite the recent land-purchasing restrictions issued by the Palestine government, there still remained in Palestine an area of approximately 1,500,000 dunams (345,000 acres) of land upon which some 60,000 families could be settled, and that with adequate financial resources Palestine could absorb about 1.500.000 persons. From March to May, 1940, he was in the United States, on a lecture tour under the auspices of the Jewish National Fund of America. In 1934, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, the Jewish colonists of Benyamina founded a colony, Kefar Mosheh, in his honor, and the British government conferred upon him the honorary M.B.E. degree.

Smilansky's works include: Toledoth Ahabah Ahath (A Love Story; 1911); Bene Arab (Children of Arabia; 1911 and 1927); Hederah (1930; English trans., Lotta Levensohn); Kithebe M. Smilansky; Zichronoth (Memoirs; 3 parts); Kithebe M. Smilansky (Works of M. Smilansky; a jubilee edition in 12 vols., published by the Palestine Farmers' Federation on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, 1934 et seq.; vols. 11 and 12, Tel-Aviv, 1937); Al Hof Hayarkon (Tel-Aviv, 1936); Perakim Betholedoth Hayishub, on the history of Jewish settlement in Palestine from 1878 to 1902 (2 vols., Tel-Aviv, 1938-39; it contains reminiscences of the author). His Palestine Caravan was translated into English by I. M. Lask (London, 1935).

ABRAHAM I. SHINEDLING. Lit.: Waxman, Meyer, A History of Jewish Literature. vol. 4 (1941) 195-96.

SMITH, SIR ARCHIBALD LEVIN, jurist, b. Salt-Hill near Chichester, England, 1836; d. Aberlour, Morayshire, Scotland, 1901. He was the son of Francis Smith, and grandson of Zadik Levin. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1858). He was called to the Bar in 1860 and named attorneygeneral (1879). Smith was generally esteemed for his force of character, solid and sure judgment, and courage. In 1881 he was appointed special commissioner to probe allegations published by the London Times affecting C. S. Parnell and other Irish nationalists.

In 1883 Smith became judge of the Queens Bench Division, and was knighted. In 1897 he was promoted to the Court of Appeals, and became Master of the Rolls (1900). He resigned in 1901, three months after his wife was drowned, and a few days before he died.

Previously Smith was devoted to sports. He was fond of shooting and fishing, and in his youth (1857-1859) he rowed on the university eight in the Oxford and Cambridge boat races. Smith was the most popular English judge of his time. There was general public approval whenever the government promoted Smith to a higher post.

SMITH, ISRAEL (ISSY), first Jew to win the Victoria Cross in the first World War, b. London, 1886; d. Melbourne, Australia, 1940. In April, 1915, while serving as acting corporal in the 1st Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, on the battlefield near Ypres, Smith voluntarily moved a considerable distance toward the enemy lines and succeeded in bringing back a severely wounded man, through 250 yards of heavy fire. Later he aided in bringing other wounded men back to the British lines. Smith was subsequently made

[graphic]

a sergeant and awarded the Victoria Cross, being one of the five Jews to win this honor during the first World War. In 1928 he went to Melbourne, Australia, as representative of British Imperial Pictures, and lived there until his death.

SMITH, JACOB GETLAR, painter, b. New York city, 1898. He studied at the National Academy of Design (1919-21) and abroad, held a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting (1929), and received the Frank G. Logan Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago (1930). His works were shown at Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Art Institute, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York city (which owns his Approaching Storm and Self Portrait), and at several international exhibitions. He painted the murals for the United States Post Offices at Nyack, New York (1937), and Salisbury, Maryland. The Snow Shovelers, owned by the United States government, was placed in the Department of the Interior, Washington, D. C.

SMITH, MOSES, music critic and executive, b. Chelsea, Mass., 1901. He was graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. In 1924, he became the music critic of the Boston American, and in 1934 he left this position to become the critic on the Boston Transcript. From 1934 to 1938 he served also as a member of the faculty of the Malkin Conservatory of Music. In 1939, he resigned from newspaper work to become the art director of Columbia Recordings.

SMITH, SARA B., writer, b. Hungary, 1888. She was taken to Budapest when a child, and brought to the United States at the age of fifteen. In 1908 she made her debut as a Yiddish writer, with short stories published in the Forward. The same year she became a reporter for the Morning Journal, the first woman to engage in Yiddish journalism in New York city. Mrs. Smith joined the staff of the Day at the establishment of the paper in 1918 and was a member of its staff in 1943. Her reportorial work, covering scenes in various courts and other human interest problems, made her a pioneer in that field of journalism. Later she published numerous fiction serials.

Some of Mrs. Smith's newspaper stories were reprinted in Yiddish newspapers in other countries, and she wrote also in English. Among her books were a collection of court room scenes and a novel, Di Froi in Kaiten (1919).

Lit.: Reisen, Z., Lexikon fun der Yiddisher Literatur, Presse un Filologie, vol. 2 (1929), cols. 661-62.

SMOLAR, BER (BORIS), editor-in-chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, b. Rovno, the Ukraine, Russia, 1897. He came to the United States in 1919. A graduate of the Haven School, Chicago (1920), he studied journalism at Northwestern University, Chicago, and worked on the editorial staff of the Chicago Daily Forward until 1924, when he joined the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA). Subsequently he became chief European correspondent for the JTA, covering developments in every country of Europe. His dispatches to the JTA from the various capitals of Europe were for many years featured in the general press as well as in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish newspapers. His Moscow reports in 1930 led directly to the amelioration of the position of the declassed Jews in Soviet Russia, and resulted in the dissolution of the Yevsekzia, the Jewish section of the Communist Party. In 1930, when he was assigned to cover the pogroms in Roumania, his dispatches resulted in the resignation of the notorious anti-Semite Alexander Voyda-Voivod as minister of the interior.

Peretz Smolenskin

Assigned to Berlin in 1932, just before the Nazis came to power, Smolar was among the first correspondents to predict Hitler's accession and to warn of its grave menace to the German Jews. Throughout the early days of the Nazi regime he remained at his post at great personal risk, constantly harried by the Gestapo, fearlessly reporting all the news affecting Germany's persecuted Jews. During his Berlin assignment he brought solace and active aid to the German Jewish leaders, who knew him as the sole remaining link between German Jewry and the rest of the world. The effectiveness of his work in Germany was eloquently attested to by the fact that the Nazis found it necessary to expel him in March, 1937, for "endangering the interests of the Reich" with his comprehensive reports on the disintegrating Jewish position.

Smolar was author of several books published in Yiddish and Hebrew, including: Drei Prinzen (Odessa); The Witch (Warsaw); Die Lebedige Arithmetic (Warsaw); Jewish Mother Goose (Berlin); The Kiddies' Corner (New York).

SMOLENSKIN, PERETZ, Hebrew novelist and journalist, b. Monastyrstchina, province of Mohilev, Russia, 1842; d. Meran, Austria, 1885. His life was a succession of privation, misfortune, homelessness, hardship and sickness.

As a child he saw his mother burdened with the care of the family while his father was away from home struggling for a livelihood or fleeing false accusers. He witnessed the "snatching" of his oldest brother for military service, in accordance with the Cantonist system, never to be heard from again. He lost his father at the age of ten, and the next year he went to study at the Yeshiva of Shklov, where he lived on the daily rations of local residents, according to the custom of the time.

Under his brother's influence he became interested in enlightenment (Haskalah), and began studying Russian and reading secular books. Because of his persecution by fanatical students he fled to Liubavich, where he stayed for some time among the Hasidim, and thence moved to Vitebsk and later to Mohilev. During this time he supported himself by singing in choirs and preaching in various synagogues, and continued to increase his general knowledge of literature. At the age of twenty he wandered to Odessa, where he spent five years studying music and languages and teaching Hebrew for a living. During his stay in Odessa he began his literary career by publishing articles in Alexander Zederbaum's Hamelitz, and later published his first

novel, Hagemul (The Reward; Odessa, 1867; an adaptation of Leo Herzberg Frankel's Polnische Juden, on the life of the Jews of Warsaw during the Polish rebellion of 1863).

In 1867 Smolenskin left Odessa and traveled for a year in Bohemia and Germany. He finally settled in Vienna, where he intended to enter the university. He secured a position as proofreader in a printing house, gave up the hope of a formal education, and with the aid of Solomon Rubin founded the monthly Hashahar (The Dawn), which became the most militant platform of the late Haskalah and early nationalist periods of Hebrew literature. It attracted the leading poets, novelists, thinkers and publicists of the age, and wielded a powerful influence upon Jewish youth of Eastern and Western Europe alike. For over fifteen years (1868-85, with short interruptions) Smolenskin published, edited, managed and wrote for Hashahar, which activity established him as one of the foremost literary figures of his day. When he was married in 1875 he accepted the management of the printing house in order to meet his added obligations. His literary activities never brought him any financial profit, and he was compelled to undertake two campaign journeys to Russia and elsewhere to secure funds for the publication of the magazine which he maintained until shortly before his death. In 1878 he published the weekly magazine Hamabbit (The Spectator), which lasted for only nine months.

In addition to his labors in the print shop and his literary activities as author and editor, he devoted much effort to public affairs. In 1874 he was sent by the Alliance Israélite Universelle to Roumania to make a study of the conditions of the pogromed Jewry of that country. With the rise of the Zionist Movement in the 1880's he became one of its leaders, organized several Zionist youth societies in Vienna, and negotiated with Sir Laurence Oliphant to intercede with European governments on behalf of Jewish settlement in Palestine. His health finally gave way under the strain. In 1883 he was stricken with pulmonary tuberculosis, but continued with his daily tasks until he was ordered by his physician to go for a rest to Meran. After four months of pain, which did not deter him from his work, he died at his desk at the age of fortythree.

His first original novel, written during his stay in Odessa, was Simhath Hanef (The Joy of the Wicked; Vienna, 1872). It is the story of a young son of a rabbi who deserts his wife and escapes to another city, where he tries to marry the sweetheart of his friend and benefactor, but his intent is foiled by the appearance on the scene of his deserted wife. He commits suicide and his friend marries the girl. The book abounds in lengthy discussions among the characters concerning love and passion, literature, philosophy and life. This is a common feature in all of Smolenskin's novels. Aside from its obvious moral, that the joy of the wicked is short-lived, another of the author's recurrent themes is developed in this novel-that it is not sufficient for the Jew to acquire general culture; he must also possess the knowledge and love of his own heritage.

In Odessa he also began writing his magnum opus, Hatoeh Bedareche Hahayim (The Wanderer in Life's Ways; 4 vols., Vienna, 1876). This is the story of the adventures and observations of an orphan, who from early childhood is left to his fate in a hostile world, wanders through all the Jewish habitations and comes into contact with all classes, sects and types of East and West European Jewry, until he meets his end defending his people in a Russian pogrom. This book,

whose autobiographical character is quite apparent, is a comprehensive panorama of Jewish life in the 19th cent., an exposé particularly of its seamy side: the atrophied world of the small-town communities of the Russian Pale, the niggardliness and uninspiring at mosphere of the Heder and the synagogue, the demoralized existence of the beggar bands, the wicked cunning of the Hasidim and the blind fanaticism of their opponents, the Mithnaggedim, the humiliating life of the Yeshiva students and their single-track learn. ing, the inhumanity of the Cantonist system, the barrenness and disloyalty of the emancipated West European Jewry, the disgrace of Jewish missionaries in England, and the horror of the pogroms in Russia. It is a dreary account of all the sins of the age, written "for the purpose of warning the wayfarers in life's paths of the traps which are strewn about their course, that they may guard their feet from stumbling."

This motif-of the adventurous and searching individual at odds with his environment-is another predominant motif in Smolenskin's works. It is the central theme of his shorter and more realistic novel Keburath Hamor (A Donkey's Burial; Vienna, 1874). This is the story of a talented and light-hearted young man whose love of life and adventurous spirit get him into constant conflict with the rigid conventions of the Russian Pale, and bring down upon him the wrath of its ruthlessly fanatical leaders who do not shrink from conspiring to murder him. Here is the familiar protest of the Haskalah against the benighted, tradition-bound Judaism of the ghetto. His later novels deal with the emancipated Jews of Western Europe who had emerged from the confines of their religious environment but have not found their way in the European world. Gaon Vasheber (Pride and Fall; Vienna, 1875) has as its background the collapse of the Viennese stock exchange of 1873. It is actually a loosely connected series of stories about various types of detached and estranged Jews who are tossed about the trackless sea of European capitalism.

Gemul Yesharim (The Reward of the Righteous; 3 vols., Vienna, 1876) is an elaboration on the theme of his first effort, Hagemul. It depicts the spiritual confusion of the Jewish intellectual who devotes himself to the interests of the non-Jewish world and is rewarded with derision, persecution and hate. This mental conflict of the enlightened Jews is also the theme of his last long novel, Hayerushah (The Heritage; 3 vols., Vienna, 1878-84). It is a parallel to Hatoch, laid chiefly among the emancipated communities, and designed to show the ineffectiveness of enlightenment in bringing happiness to the Jew. His last novel, Nekam Berith (The Revenge of the Covenant; Vienna, 1884), was written in the wake of the pogroms of the 1880's, and describes the inner conflict of the assimilated Jewish youth in the face of the atrocities and the psychological process which led many of them to Zionism. It is thus a fitting epilogue to all his novels-the emancipated Jew returns to his people. Smolenskin wrote also many short stories, most of which appeared in Hamabbit.

While his works of fiction reflect on the whole the views of the Haskalah, his critical and analytical writings are devoted chiefly to a critique of that movement which led to assimilation. Espousing from the outset the national concept of Judaism, he decried the glorification of cosmopolitanism on the part of Jewish intellectuals, and advocated an intensification of Jewish consciousness. He preached auto-emancipation many years before Pinsker published his famous manifesto. In his first extensive article, Eben Yisrael (The Stone

« iepriekšējāTurpināt »