Narrative
The Time Before
בטרם
Uri Nissan Gnessin · 1909
Synopsis
Uriel Efrat, a rather tall, pale young man, his lower lip always slightly bitten, lives in Kiev; his father writes to him to rest. Sheets of paper fallen from a neighbouring window scatter in the street before his eyes. Then he returns to the house of his childhood, in Homel, and finds there Merka, a little girl grown up, who runs out of the garden, her black braids against her pale complexion. He collapses on his bed, his face in the pillow. Around him, friends talk of leaving for the land of Israel; he ends up conversing with his own double.
Context
Gnessin left four novellas, Ha-Tsida, Beinatayim, Be-terem and Etsel, which critics read as the stages of a single descent: the hero of this one, according to Yeshurun Keshet, has already withdrawn almost entirely into himself, and his doubling borders on madness. Keshet sees in him the author, his break with the world of his rabbi father and his fidelity to Hebrew. Neglected in his lifetime, Gnessin was reread from the 1950s onwards; Dan Miron regards his work as one of the major texts of Hebrew literature, and S. Yizhar said he owed him his language.
Who it is for
About a hundred pages, with no French edition. It helps to accept that the plot is almost nonexistent and that everything depends on the way a sentence follows a thought that is coming undone.
Prizes and reception
One of the four novellas on which Gnessin's work rests; the critic Fishel Lachower saw in him one of the greatest stylists of modern Hebrew.