Talia Lavin. Talia Lavin, Awake, My People: Yiddish and Hebrew in Pre-World-War I Ukraine, Tempus, 12.2 (2011),

Transcription

1 Talia Lavin, Awake, My People: Yiddish and Hebrew in Pre-World-War I Ukraine, Tempus, 12.2 (2011), Awake, My People: Yiddish and Hebrew in Pre-World-War I Ukraine Talia Lavin Throughout the hundreds of years of their settlement in Ukraine, beginning with the colonization of the steppe lands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Jews were precariously situated on the margins of Ukrainian society. 1 In the time of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, Jews acted as mediators between Polish landlords and the Ukrainian peasant population a position that made them perpetually vulnerable to popular recriminations. 2 Within the Russian Empire, Ukrainian Jews acted as merchants, artisans, and tax collectors. They were largely confined by repressive tsarist policy to the Pale of Settlement, an area that consisted of 4 percent of the lands of Imperial Russia, including contemporary Ukraine. Within the Pale, Jews were prohibited from leasing land, running taverns or receiving higher education. These limitations remained in place until the Russian Revolution of Within the constraints of the Pale, however, the Jewish populace multiplied from 1.6 million in 1820 to 5.6 million in 1910, and an independent Jewish culture emerged and thrived. One remarkable feature of this Jewish culture was its multilingualism a unique, private semiotic system that literary historian Benjamin Harshav has dubbed a linguistic polysystem or system of systems. 4 Within the dense confines of the Jewish communities of prewar Ukraine, Jewish discourse took place in the overlapping and coextensive circles of Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian. Over the course of millennia of Jewish history, Hebrew had served as a liturgical and theological language in the Jewish milieu. Serving many of 1 Shmuel Ettinger, Jewish Participation in the Settlement of Ukraine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, in Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, ed. Howard Aster and Peter J. Potichnyj (Edmonton, AB: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1990), Jewish Virtual Library, s.v. The Pale of Settlement, by Alden Oreck, org/jsource/history/pale.html. 3 Ibid. 4 Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 34.

2 24 Lavin the international functions of Latin in the Medieval Christian environment, it was also used as a vehicle for devotional poetry and, on occasion, personal correspondence. However, during the culturally fertile period from the 1860s to World War I, an emergent secular Hebrew literature began to express a new Jewish self-understanding, influenced by the ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) 5 and European nationalism. At the same time, Yiddish began to evolve into a fully viable national language. Yiddish literature had existed in the European Jewish context since 1272, but was confined to a secondary role in Jewish society. Although, as of the 1897 census, 98 percent of the Jewish populace of the Pale of Settlement claimed Yiddish as their primary spoken tongue (rodnoy yazik), Yiddish writings were consistently viewed as socially subordinate to their counterparts in Hebrew. 6 Yiddish literature was a vehicle for crude, populist belletristics, rabbinic homily, and moralistic works, confined to those sectors of the populace who could not understand religious texts in the original Hebrew or Aramaic. 7 However, in the culturally fecund halfcentury preceding the First World War, Yiddish began tentatively to break the bonds of subordination and produce a new, more elevated literature. As Hebrew reached out to the masses and Yiddish, in turn, began its appeal to the intelligentsia, the two Jewish literatures expressed conflicting sociocultural trends in the radicalized Jewish politics of the finde-siècle Pale. While Yiddish was the language of choice for the Diaspora Nationalists, who advocated for Jewish autonomy in the Russian Empire, and the Socialist Bund party, Hebrew was the parlance of choice for bourgeois integrationism and Zionism. 8 Close study of the warring language movements in late-nineteenth and early-twentiethcentury Ukraine reveals that Yiddishism 9 was largely conflated with an embrace of Jewish particularism in the Russian context, while Hebrew writers expressed a desire to become a European nation to wit, either to integrate fully into general society or to attain independent statehood. The Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, emerged in Germany at the very end of the eighteenth century. Its primary ideologue, Moses Mendelssohn ( ), born in 5 The Jewish Enlightenment, known as the Haskalah, was a movement within Jewish communities throughout Europe beginning in the seventeenth century. Originating in Germany, it sought to transpose Enlightenment values into a Jewish context, usually operating in Jewish languages (Hebrew and Yiddish) and issuing both journalistic and belletristic writings. Cf. below for a more complete historical context. 6 Benjamin Harshav, Language in the Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), David E. Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 3. 8 Fishman, The nineteenth-century Jewish language wars, a highly public and multi-decade struggle between Yiddishists (those who advocated Yiddish as the primary language of Jewish expression) and Hebraists (those who, contrarily, advocated for Hebrew).

3 Yiddish and Hebrew in Ukraine 25 Dessau, Germany, preached the total integration of Jews into European society, including the Europeanization of Jewish religious tradition and full adoption of the language of their country of residence. Part and parcel of German Haskalah ideology was a general sentiment of deep scorn and revulsion towards Yiddish, to which maskilim (Haskalah intellectuals) 10 referred as zhargon, jargon. 11 Yiddish, in the German maskilic conception, was a deformed symptom of exile, a language of stammerers. 12 This attitude, along with the other fundamental principles of the Enlightenment, permeated the Jewish stronghold of the Pale of Settlement more slowly. While Haskalah writers in the Pale of Settlement were occasionally forced to write in Yiddish in order to attain greater popular support, they did so with the utmost reluctance, and with the accompaniment of standard apologetics and ponderous deliberation. 13 Ahad Ha am ( One of the People, the pen name of famed Haskalah intellectual Asher Ginzberg), founder of the Odessa school of maskilim, denounced his Yiddish mother tongue as an alien language to us in By contrast, Hebrew was viewed with almost theological devotion; until the 1860s, Haskalah writers were preoccupied with the attempt to sift through many generations of European Hebrew usage in order to arrive at the purest possible biblical idiom. This highly aestheticized style of writing was called melitzah, flowery phrase, and consisted of didactic prose with mannered biblical diction, emphasizing harmonious phrases and hapax legomena. 15 Eventually, however, more nuanced modern Hebrew narratives emerged, freed from the constraints of melitzah literature, like the fiction of the Medzhybizh-born Nietzschean thinker Micah Yosef Berdichevski. However, Hebrew retained the aesthetic mystique of purity, a connection to the sovereign, Canaanite past of the Jewish people. 16 In addition to its perceived aesthetic value, Hebrew writing was imbued with the politics of the Haskalah. The Haskalah acted as a secularizing force in the shtetls of Ukraine and Galicia, which at the turn of the twentieth century were still up to eighty percent Hasidic. 17 Emphasizing assimilation in dress, manner, and political loyalty, engagement in productive occupations, and the traditional Enlightenment values of reason and science, 10 A contemporaneous term for members of the German Haskalah. 11 Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century, reprint ed. (1973; repr., Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), Ibid., Ibid., Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Miron, Ibid., Lucille W. Brown and Stephen M. Berk, Fathers and Sons: Hasidim, Orthodoxy and Haskalah: A View from Eastern Europe, Oral History Review 5 (1977): 18.

4 26 Lavin Hebrew writers often engaged in harsh criticism of the backwards manners of the Jewish community. One of the most influential Hebrew poems of the Haskalah, Russian-Jewish intellectual Y.L. Gordon s Awake, My People! was a rousing call for the Jews to be A brother to your countryman and a citizen to your king, and, famously, a man in the streets and a Jew at home. 18 In accord with the general sentiment of contemporary Russian literature, Haskalah writers held the biblical figure of prophet-cum-social-reformer as the ideal type. Ahad Ha am in particular upheld the conflation of poetry and prophecy, stressing the necessity for artists and philosophers to have a moral impact on the history of culture. Hayyim-Nahman Bialik, widely regarded as the greatest Hebrew poet of the nineteenth century, modeled his long poems after biblical and Talmudic prophesies and epics, castigating Jews for their failure to defend themselves during pogroms and their general indifference to progress. 19 In addition to the quasi-prophetic incitement of social reform, the other goal of Ahad Ha am and the Odessa maskilim was to produce a Europeanized Jewish literature, on par with the emergent literatures of Russia, England, France, and Germany. 20 Hebrew, the aesthetically exalted language of Jewish intellectualism, was viewed as the perfect indeed, the only vehicle for this enlightened discourse. The pursuit of a Europeanized literature was furthered by poets like Shaul Tschernichovsky, born in 1875 in Mikhailovka, Ukraine. Tschernichovsky was an agile wordsmith and prolific translator. In the interest of furthering Hebrew s ideological and semantic lexicon, he translated works from French, Italian, Latin, Greek, German, and Russian into Hebrew, in addition to pioneering the use of such classically European forms as the sonnet, the ballad, and the idyll. 21 This entailed considerable linguistic innovation, as the lexicon of Biblical Hebrew was limited to a mere few hundred words. Maskilic writers like Tschernichovsky coined neologisms, calqued from European languages, and quoted adeptly from Hebrew and Aramaic sources in order to adapt the language of ancient Israel to a modern European context. 22 Many maskilim were former yeshiva students and Torah scholars, inspired by the Haskalah s secular Hebrew journals, such as Ha-Melitz (Odessa and St. Petersburg, ) and Ha-Maggid ( ), to abandon their former piety. 23 A number of these maskilim migrated from the shtetls of their birth to Odessa, forming a nucleus around the scholar and journalist Ahad Ha am. These were later to assemble into the secret society 18 Michael Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Reflections on Hebrew Literature in the Russian Context, Prooftexts 16 (1996): Zipperstein, Eisig Silberschlag, Saul Tschernichowsky: Poet of Revolt (Bristol: Western Printing Services, 1968), Harshav, Language, Stanislawski, 42.

5 Yiddish and Hebrew in Ukraine 27 Bnei Moshe (The Sons of Moses), among the first Zionist entities in the Russian Empire and a highly influential subgroup within the Hovevei Zion (Love of Zion) Zionist political movement. 24 Ahad Ha am and the Hebrew-language magazine he controlled, Ha-Shiloach (The Dispatch), advocated a rationalist-zionist agenda predicated upon the assumptions of nineteenth-century European nationalism. Palestine was to serve as the cultural-spiritual nerve center of the Jewish nation, the sine qua non of Jewish survival; however, the Palestinian endeavor had to be accompanied by cultural revival and internal reform of the Jewish community in order for it to succeed. 25 The need for Jewish cultural rejuvenation was the major point of contention between Ahad Ha am and Thedor Herzl, the most famous political Zionist demagogue of the nineteenth century. Herzl sought immediate political solutions for the establishment of a state in Palestine, without giving credence to the notion of modernizing social renewal. 26 Crucial to the Odessan Hebraist agenda was the notion that the Jewish people must awaken in the Gordonian sense, i.e., incorporate European Enlightenment ideals in their social behavior, before a Jewish state could truly become the spiritual center of the nation; as such, Ahad Ha am published a series of dismal essays deploring the state of the Palestinian settlement upon his visitation there. 27 Nevertheless, among the most important concrete activities of the Bnei Moshe was the funding of a large number of Hebrew-language schools in Palestine, as well as advocating Hebrew-language curricular reform in Odessa s Jewish schools. They also helped to found the robust agricultural colony of Rehovot. 28 Hebrew-language literature and scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century was marked by cosmopolitanism, Russification, and Zionist aspiration. The language of Jewish historical sovereignty had acquired a new, secular embodiment in the academic and belletristic prose of the maskilim; still writing to an audience of the scholarly elite, the Hebraist maskilim hoped to instill a sense of national pride and reformist fervor in the Russian-Jewish populace. But the revolutionary environment and unstable politics of the late nineteenth century would soon lead to the establishment of a rival literature in the much-derided jargon of the people Yiddish. By the time the Bnei Moshe had founded its Hebrew-language school in Jaffa in 1893, Yiddish literature was at the dawn of a new ascendancy. In 1862, the first modern Yiddish newspaper, Kol Hamevaser (The Heralding Voice), was founded 24 Zipperstein, Ibid., Joshua Shanes, Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora Nationalism, Monatschefte 90, no. 2 (1998): Zipperstein, Ibid.,

6 28 Lavin in Odessa by maskilic intellectual Alexander Zederbaum. 29 In the pages of Kol Hamevaser, Yiddish stories and serialized novels found access to a wide readership. Perhaps the most famous of those published was S.Y. Abramovitsch, known by his pseudonym, Mendele Moykher Sforim (Mendele the Bookseller) and later by the epithet the grandfather of Yiddish literature. The Yiddish song and dance troupes of Velvl Zbarzher and Berl Broder performed across Bessarabia and Galicia and in the dance halls of Odessa in the 1870s; meanwhile, classical Yiddish theater saw its beginnings in the writings and performances of the dramaturge Abraham Goldfaden, who toured in Odessa, Minsk, and Warsaw in the 1870s. Perhaps most significantly, a Yiddish literary almanac, Di Yiddishe Folksbiobliotek (The Yiddish People s Library) was published in Kiev in 1888 under the oversight of the Yiddish novelist Sholem Aleichem, née Solomon Rabinovich a turning point in the history of Yiddish literature and its perceived cultural import. 30 For the first time, literature produced in the people s tongue was received with praise rather than denigration. After the wave of pogroms that swept over Ukraine and Poland in after the assassination of Alexander II, and the advent of the anti-semitic May Laws, the strident Hebraist calls for Russification and acculturation seemed grotesque and unsuitable. 31 While the Yiddish writings of Mendele Moykher Sforim, Yitschok Yoyvel Linetski and Sholem Aleichem contained much of the Haskalah in their unflinching portrayal of shetl life, their embrace of folk archetypes and idioms afforded new possibilities for readership among the Jewish masses. Yiddish literature was inherently populist, the only possible vehicle for capturing the idiom of the Jewish street. Like the compact, tightly-knit Jewish villages it depicted, Yiddish literature was a world rich in talking and free-associating...relating any small event to a universe of collective wisdom and texts. 32 And although many of the leading lights of Yiddish literature still felt compelled to conceal their true identities under pseudonyms, fearing the impact of the language s tarnished reputation on their careers, the dawn of a new era of mass politics would soon tilt the scales in favor of the jargon of the people. In the wake of the 1905 revolution, state censorship decreased, and Yiddish literature experienced an explosion in popularity. In 1888, there were 78 Yiddish titles printed in the entire Russian empire; by 1912, that number had increased five-fold. 33 In 1912, the combined circulation of the two most popular Yiddish dailies in Warsaw was 175,000. Yiddish had suffered terribly not only from Hebraist and Russianist denigration, 29 Fishman, Ibid., Ibid. 32 Harshav, Meaning, Fishman, 12.

7 Yiddish and Hebrew in Ukraine 29 but also from severe tsarist repression; analogous tsarist policies towards Ukrainian and Polish reveal the Imperial government s fear of mass political mobilization, galvanized by revolutionary texts in their native tongues. 34 But in 1908, a landmark conference in Czernovitz (Chernivtsi), Ukraine, declared Yiddish a national language of the Jewish people and for the first time demanded for it political, social, and cultural equal rights. 35 The struggle for equal cultural rights was conducted on dual levels: not only against tsarist repression, but also against denigration and suppression by the Jewish elite. As the spoken language of the people, Yiddish was the principal vehicle of communication with the Jewish masses yet it was kept firmly out of the curriculum of schools sponsored by the integrationist St. Petersburg Jewish elite. 36 As such, Yiddish-language advocacy became the cause célèbre of a broad range of Jewish populists, among them Bundist Party of Jewish Socialists. Founded in 1897 in Vilnius, the Workers Bund was a mass labor movement that used Yiddish as its principal tool in spreading its economic and political gospel. The Bund s underground newspapers, Di Arbeter-Shtime and Der Yidisher Arbeter (The Jewish Worker) were published in Yiddish. Under the aegis of the Bund, Yiddish literary circles were established in Minsk and Bialystok, featuring the works of Mendele Moykher Sforim, I.L. Peretz and others in order to cultivate an interest in modern Yiddish literature among the people. Bundist Yiddishism was radically Marxist, antireligious and also staunchly anti-hebrew. 37 The Bundists viewed Hebrew as the language of bourgeois reactionism, an elitist language whose emphasis had alienated the intellectual Jewish elite from the masses, and whose ritual role was anathema to their orthodox Marxism. By contrast, Yiddish was enshrined as the language of Jewish proletarian struggle, the progenitor of an authentic working-man s culture; in the repressive environment of pre-revolutionary Russia, the Bund was largely confined to Yiddish-cultural activities 38 Radical socialism, populism, and Yiddishism were deeply intertwined. S. An-sky, author of perhaps the most famous Yiddish-language work, 1914 s The Dybbuk, was a disciple of Russian populist Petr Lavrov and a founder of the Agrarian-Socialist League. In 1911, Ansky conducted ethnographic expeditions throughout the provinces of Volhynia, 34 Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Fishman, Shanes, 181.

8 30 Lavin Kiev and Podolia to gather and collate Jewish folklore. 39 The Jewish Socialist Worker s Party (the SERP, or Sejmists ) advocated for Jewish national autonomy on a federative basis, with an autonomous, nationally recognized Jewish parliament (Sejm); Yiddish would be the lingua franca of the new entity. 40 Jewish Socialism was not the only breed of politics that emphasized the importance of Yiddish. The Diaspora Nationalism (Yiddish: Golus-natsionalizm) movement, founded by Odessan-Jewish intellectual Simon Dubnow, advocated Jewish national self-government through regional governments (kehiles) and a Jewish National Agency. Kehiles, or Jewish community governments, Dubnow argued in his Letters on Old and New Jewry, had formed the basis for Jewish national survival in the Diaspora over the course of millennia. Paradoxically, the long-awaited Jewish emancipation and incorporation into the centralized state was the cause of their contemporary penury, dissolution and vulnerability; the kehile, in a modernized and secular form, needed to be revived to ensure the endurance of the Jewish nation. 41 Dubnow advocated a trilingual system that allowed for Jewish expression in Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian, with religion as the determining factor in membership in the kehile. 42 However, the idea of religion as a determining factor accounted neither for those Jews who had converted away from Judaism in the fact of state anti-semitism, nor those of Jewish ethnicity who considered themselves atheist or simply without religion. 43 Chaim Zhitlowsky, a radical socialist and spiritual founder of SERP, made an alternative proposal: that the Yiddish language and culture be the determining factors for membership in the Jewish nationality. 44 Another central figure in Yiddishist Diaspora Nationalism was the Vienna-born Nathan Birnbaum. After an abortive fling with Herzlian Zionism, Birnbaum became a fully-fledged Golus-natzionalist, leading a mass protest in Galician Ukraine after Austrian authorities refused to recognize Yiddish speakers in the 1910 census. 45 Birnbaum viewed Yiddish as the key to a pan-judaist (German: Alljudentum) revival in the Diaspora, celebrating the language as a uniquely exterritorial phenomenon. Birnbaum went on 39 Yohanan Petrovsky-Stern, We are Too Late : An-sky and the Paradigm of No Return, in The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, ed. Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), Harshav, Yiddish, 125; Fishman, Fishman, Shanes, Fishman, Shanes, Ibid., 184.

9 Yiddish and Hebrew in Ukraine 31 to organize the 1908 Czernowitz conference, in which Yiddish was declared a national language of the Jews. 46 While a few isolated Yiddishist Zionists existed, as a rule Yiddish was the language of Jewish particularism in the Diaspora, rejected by the lovers of Palestine. From the derided zhargon of the early Maskilic era, Yiddish had come into its own, in an unprecedented cultural flowering, in the second half of the nineteenth century. It would go on to be enshrined as the national language of the Jews in Ukraine s brief period of independence during the First World War. Networks of state-sponsored Yiddish-language schools were briefly established under the auspices of the radical Central Rada government and the rightist Hetmanate. 47 Unfortunately, the flowering of Yiddish in the Russian Empire would be brief, cut short by the bloody realities of the twentieth century. Interwar Soviet manifestations of Yiddish were largely confined to Communist programmatic texts and propaganda, inciting Jews to linguistic and cultural Russification; the vibrant, multiideational texture of Yiddish discourse was largely silenced in this period. 48 Yiddish fiction and poetry continued to be written for much of the twentieth century in the immigrant communities of New York, but the heady heyday of Yiddish cultural inventiveness in the Eastern European Diaspora of its birth had come to an end. Secular literature in Hebrew dwindled in Ukraine in the prewar period, increasingly moving to the new center of Hebrew-language politics in Eretz-Israel (the traditional Hebrew name for Palestine). After Soviet authorities banned the Hebrew press entirely in 1921, citing Hebrew as the language of Jewish clericalism and Zionism, the Hebrew voice in Ukraine was silenced entirely. 49 However, Hebrew became the overarching linguistic framework of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, successfully revived as a spoken language through the medium of Hebrew-language schooling as conceived of by Ahad Ha am and the Odessan Cultural Zionists. Many of the major figures of the Odessa school, including Bialik, Tschernichovsky, and Ahad Ha am himself, went on to settle in Palestine, shaping the culture of the young country they had helped to conceive. The emergence of the Yiddish and Hebrew literatures in fin-de-siècle Ukraine is a remarkable testament to the unique position of Jews in the Russian Empire. The cramped confines of the Pale of Settlement served as a kind of cauldron, bringing linguistic, political, and cultural tensions to the boiling point in the revolutionary environment of the 46 Ibid., Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), Fishman, Ibid.

10 32 Lavin late nineteenth century. Hebrew, the ancient language of the Scriptures, gained a renewed vitality under the reverent pens of the maskilim, bringing a new, enlightened humanism to the Jewish sensibility. And Yiddish cast off the stigma it had borne since the early days of the Haskalah; its literature vividly captured the unique cultural landscape of the Jewish volk. Although the two languages remained in conflict for the majority of their flowerings in exile, their dual literatures were both integral to the fecund poly-linguistic framework of prewar Jewish Ukraine.

11 Yiddish and Hebrew in Ukraine 33 Bibliography Bar-Yosef, Hamutal. Reflections on Hebrew Literature in the Russian Context. Prooftexts 16 (1996): Brown, Lucille W., and Stephen M. Berk. Fathers and Sons: Hasidim, Orthodoxy and Haskalah: A View from Eastern Europe. Oral History Review 5 (1977): Ettinger, Shmuel. Jewish Participation in the Settlement of Ukraine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. In Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, edited by Howard Aster and Peter J. Potichnyj, Edmonton, AB: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, Fishman, David E. The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, Harshav, Benjamin. Language in the Time of Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, The Meaning of Yiddish. Berkeley: University of California Press, Magocsi, Paul Robert. A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Miron, Dan. A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century. reprint ed Reprint, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, Petrovsky-Stern, Yohanan. We are Too Late : An-sky and the Paradigm of No Return. In The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, edited by Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, Shanes, Joshua. Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora Nationalism. Monatschefte 90, no. 2 (1998): Silberschlag, Eisig. Saul Tschernichowsky: Poet of Revolt. Bristol: Western Printing Services, Stanislawski, Michael. For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry. New York: Oxford University Press, Zipperstein, Steven J. Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha am and the Origins of Zionism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.