A 'lost' novel by Vladimir Jabotinsky has just been translated into English. Jabotinsky was in many ways a modern Jewish prophet, who spent the pre-Holocaus years traveling throughout Europe urging Jews to leave while there was still time. He was opposed on religious grounds by the gedolim (Orthodox Jewish rabbinical leaders), who for the most part commanded Jews to remain in Europe. Often thought of as right-wing idealogue, Jabotinsky was far more nuanced a character than that.
As Sandee Brawarsky of the New York Jewish Week reports:
A passing reference in Ruth Wisse’s “The Modern Jewish Canon” led to the rediscovery and translation of a remarkable novel by Vladimir Jabotinsky. “The Five” — written in 1935 and published a year later in Paris as “Pyatero” — has been reissued in its first-ever English edition, translated from the Russian by Middlebury College professor Michael Katz and published by Cornell University Press.
“The Five” is a novel set in turn-of-the century Odessa, unfolding the story of a colorful upper-middle-class Jewish family and its path of assimilation. An autobiographical tale, it’s also a romantic portrait of the cosmopolitan city Jabotinsky loved and a life that is no more.…
A master of multitasking, Jabotinsky studied law, served as a foreign correspondent for Odessa newspapers, campaigned for Zionism across Europe, helped found the Jewish Legion during World War I as well as the Haganah, Irgun and the militant youth movement Betar and also wrote a fragmentary autobiography in Russian, Yiddish and then Hebrew, “The Story of My Life.” But, according to Katz, “The Five” provides “a glimpse of his own life that is more honest (less ideological) than his autobiographical writings where he was trying to explain his own path to Zionism.” …
Jabotinsky was prolific. He translated Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” into Hebrew, as well as 10 cantos of Dante’s “Inferno,” and he also translated Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “Songs and Poems” into Russian. He wrote several plays, some staged in Odessa, and through the 1920s and 1930s he published articles in the Yiddish press in Warsaw and also in the New York Jewish Morning Journal. His novel “Samson the Nazarite” is laced with his philosophy of Jewish history. Historian and sociologist Jerome Chanes points out that Jabotinsky even gets a writing credit in the 1949 Cecil B. DeMille film, “Samson and Delilah.”