Novel
התועה בדרכי החיים
Not translated into English
Peretz Smolenskin · 1876
Synopsis
Joseph, an orphan from the small town of Madmena, tells his own life story, and opens it by saying that he has wandered not months or years, but all the days he has spent on earth. His father died when he was too young to remember him; his mother, before dying, entrusted him to an uncle, a rich merchant, who welcomes him kindly and then turns harsh. He goes through a school with a brutal teacher, then through yeshivot, Hasidic courts, bands of beggars and cantors, and observes at close quarters the two camps contending for the Jewish world of Eastern Europe.
Context
The first three parts appeared serially in Ha-Shahar in 1868-1869 and in 1871, the complete novel in 1876, and a final part came years later. The long title says what it is: or the story of Joseph the orphan of the town of Madmena. The author placed in it, most often in an unfavourable light, the figures he had met in the two camps where he had studied. The critic Reuven Brainin saw in it an indictment of the Hasidim and their tzaddikim, with a disjointed narrative, but acknowledged its immense success, attested by several editions.
Who it is for
A novel in four parts, with no French edition. It helps to know that the rigorists and the Hasidim were then two enemy camps, and that the author had studied in both.
Prizes and reception
One of the most widely read Hebrew books of its time, to believe its author; it remains a source on the types of the Jewish small town in the nineteenth century.
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