World of Israel Weissbrem/between the Times/the Lottery and the Inheritance (Modern Hebrew Classics)

Israel Weissbrem, whose complex themes were taken from the lives of educated and wealthy Jews in Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and whose writings all but disappeared in the twentieth century, wrote in a vein of melodrama and fantasy, with an ironic and frequently savage wit. His cast of characters is extraordinarily diverse and appears to reflect societal attitudes - sometimes sympathetic, sometimes bitterly satirical - toward the religious, the poor, and the wealthy; toward Christians and anti-Semites. The viewpoint of the author himself appears to change as the drama of the novels unfolds.
In his later stories, Weissbrem is concerned with the cause of Jewish nationalism and the lot of the Jewish people in Poland, which is to say, in part, with the invidious horrors of anti-Semitism. Weissbrem was both a Jew and a Polish patriot, and he often uses the novel as a rhetorical forum for discussing the nature of Polish anti-Semitism and for defending his fellows against charges of usury and lack of interest in Polish national life.
Frequently these rhetorical devices lead plot and structure: There is an unabashed resort to sentimentality and melodrama and to Coincidence on a grand scale. But Weissbrem's stories, despite these weaknesses that are sometimes fatal to tension and drama, still shed an intense and sympathetic light on Jewish social conditions in Eastern Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Sacred and secular conflict throughout this pair of novels by late-19th-century Polish-Jewish writer Weissbrem. In Between the Times , Nahum Tobiah, rabbi of a small Lithuanian town, is learned in Hebrew, the sacred language of scripture. His daughter, Tamar, smuggles Yiddish books into the house because she "craves to learn the vernacular." A confrontation follows, and Tamar elopes with her lover Gershon, who has also flouted his father's injunction against worldly knowledge. Here, as in the accompanying novel The Lottery and the Inheritance, Weissbrem explores the tensions of--and the discrimination against--the emerging Jewish middle class in 19th-century eastern Europe. Weissbrem's characterizations can be both witty and prescient. A Polish count explains his anti-Semitism as a "fashionable" hatred of this new class of Jews with "their long, trailing coats" and their motley Yiddish language. Such insights, as well as Weissbrem's style--which reflects Hebrew's transition from a purely sacred language to a literary one--give his work historical significance. But due to Weissbrem's limited abilities as a storyteller, these novels provide few pleasures for the general reader.
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