Alan D. Crown - The World of Israel Weissbrem: Between the Times and The Lottery and the Inheritance

Israel Weissbrem, whose complex themes were taken from the lives of educated and wealthy Jews of Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, and whose writings all but disappeared in the twentieth, wrote in a vein of melodrama and fantasy, with an ironic and frequently savage wit. His cast of characters is extraordinarily diverse and appears to reflect attitudes - toward the religious, the poor, the wealthy; toward Christians and anti-Semites - of which the author himself was uncertain and which appear to change, in the world of the novels, in subtle ways. In his later novels, Weissbrem is concerned with the cause of Jewish nationalism and the lot of the Jewish people in Poland, which is to say, in part, with the invidious horrors of anti-Semitism. Weissbrem was both a Jew and a Polish patriot; he uses the novel as a forum for discussing the nature of Polish anti-Semitism, for defending his fellows against charges of usury and lack of interest in Polish national life. He does this by throwing the characters, both Polish and Jewish, into difficult and sometimes fantastic situations. Resolutions of these dense plots are not always satisfactory or clear, but the roles the characters play, the interchanges amongst them, exhibit to us this time and place with an unmatchable vividness and acuity. Weissbrem is another example of a writer who will appear frequently in this series - one who is experimenting with Hebrew at a time, for this language, of renaissance and transformation, in an effort to mold a recalcitrant Eastern language to a Western literary vehicle, the novel. Israel Weissbrem was born of a merchant family in Grodno in 1840 and died in Warsaw in 1915 or 1917. His many writings include three novels. Two appear in this volume: Between the Times (Warsaw:1888), and The Lottery and the Inheritance (Warsaw:1892). His massive, two-volume tale, Eighteen Coins (Warsaw, 1888) will appear in 1993 in a second book devoted to his work. Professor Alan D. Crown, head of the Department of Semitic Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, also administers the Qumran project at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies.