Customer Reviews

Gates of Bronze (Hebrew Classics)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.