This reading is in Hebrew.
Yosef Haim Brenner (murdered by Arab terrorists in 1921 at the age of 40) presented in his book “From Here and There” a piercing, soul searching portrayal of the “second aliyah,” the dominant immigration into Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century. The following words have influenced many at the time, and are still thought to represent Brenner’s literary “will”: “Life is bad, but always secret … Death is bad. The world is conflicted, but also diverse, and sometimes beautiful. The world is miserable, but can also be wonderful. The nation of Israel, by the rules of logic, has no future. One must, nonetheless, work. So long as you have a soul,...
The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is considered Jewett’s finest work, described by Henry James as her “beautiful little quantum of achievement.” Despite James’s diminutives, the novel remains a classic. Because it is loosely structured, many critics view the book not as a novel, but a series of sketches; however, its structure is unified through both setting and theme. Jewett herself felt that her strengths as a writer lay not in plot development or dramatic tension, but in character development. Indeed, she determined early in her career to preserve a disappearing way of life, and her novel can be read as a study of the effects of isolation and hardship on the inhabitants who liv...