Novel
עלילות עקביה
Not translated into English
Yehuda Burla · 1939
Synopsis
In Brusa, in Anatolia, Akavia is the only son of a Jewish tinsmith who travels through the mountain villages making metal utensils. A slow child, whom his teacher gives up trying to teach Torah, he follows his father on his summer rounds and awakens to the mountains, endlessly asking about the source of the waters and the work of creation. He becomes a man of nature, fervent, haunted by the sense of a prophet's mission. In the mountains of Anatolia, he falls in love with an Armenian woman, who rejects him; later, he reaches the land of Israel.
Context
Burla had published Luna, his first story, which made him the first modern Hebrew writer to portray at length the life of the Sephardim of the East, then Ishto ha-snuah in 1928, the novel of a man who does not love his wife. Alilot Akavia appeared in 1939 in Tel Aviv, with Davar-Massada, and earned its author the Bialik Prize the same year. The novel, in two parts, leads its hero from the mountains of Anatolia, among Turks and Armenians, to Palestine.
Who it is for
A long novel in Hebrew, with no French or English translation; it opens onto the Sephardic Jewish world of the Ottoman Empire.
Prizes and reception
Bialik Prize in 1939; Hebrew critics saw it as the work in which Burla reached full mastery.
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