Gates of Bronze (Hebrew Classics) [Paperback]

Haim Hazaz (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Hebrew (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 518 pages
• Publisher: Toby Pr; 2nd edition (October 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592641342
• ISBN-13: 978-1592641345
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,430,103 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Literary Fossil, August 15, 2007

By 

Eric Maroney (Trumansburg, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gates of Bronze (Hebrew Classics) (Paperback)

Gates of Bronze is about the position of Jews in a small village during the Russian Revolution. So, the novel has what we would come to expect in such a collision of dramatically different world-views. There are traditional religious Jews, befuddled by the atheistic Communists. There are young Jews who rush to endorse the new regime and its ideology, creating a generation gap. There are competing ideologies within the framework of the revolution, particularly between Anarchists, Communists and Zionists. Hazaz's novel does suffer from an odd flatness, perhaps a result of translation. According to Robert Alter's excellent introduction the novel was written not in the colloquial Hebrew of the early Yishuv or the later State of Israel, but in the kind a scholastic Hebrew of the Mishnah and the Midrash. So in the original Hebrew this tale no doubt had a layer of irony that would have enriched the text. But in this English translation, that irony is not always deftly conveyed, and this contributes to making the book less of an accomplishment than it should have been. But it is still an accomplishment of some note: Gates of Bronze was a novel written at a time when Hebrew was NOT the vernacular of most of the Jews in Palestine; the characters speak Hebrew, but in the real world would have been conversing in Yiddish and sometimes Russian or Ukrainian. The novel was written in Paris before Hazaz left for Palestine (and then underwent life-long revisions) so it is an artifact of an intriguing time in the revival of a language. Before it was the language of the kitchen and the street, men and women like Hazaz were writing naturalistic novels in a dead or slumbering tongue. It's a feat which boggles the mind and illustrates the one of the strengths of traditional, religious Jewish pedagogy.