Of Human Carnage

$19.95

Odessa 1918-1920

 


“Avigdor Hameiri, a restlessly original pioneer of modern Hebrew literature, came to revolutionary Odessa after his ordeals as a Russian prisoner during the First World War. What he found there, however, was not a new dawn of hope but a nightmare of factional violence in which Red and White forces both reserved a special malice for the city’s Jews. Shocking in its content, bracing in its form, Of Human Carnage is a ‘movie novel’ composed of brief scenes of horror, absurdity and occasional nobility.

Hameiri, who would go on to write two classic autobiographical novels of his wartime experience after he emigrated to 1920s Palestine, mixes snapshot realism with grotesque fables and a pitch-dark humour suited to the ‘city of eternal jokes’ that kept jesting even in the jaws of hell. His cinematic tales have a visceral impact and savage irony that sometimes recall the great Russian-language witness of Odessa in tumult, Isaac Babel. Peter Appelbaum’s vivid and robust translation finds a compelling English voice for these dispatches from a time and place where terrifying chaos inspired stories filled with ‘Jewish laughter… basted with tears.’”

Boyd Tonkin
Former Literary Editor of The Independent,
Author of The 100 Best Novels in Translation


“‘Odessa tells stories,’ writes Avigdor Hameiri, and he has collected them in this book, a savage, surreal exploration of the cruelties of the Russian Civil War in Ukraine. Each story is a snapshot of the war of all against all, the descent into violence, that made the Great War of 1914–18 appear civilized in comparison.”

Jay Winter
Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus
Yale University

“Peter Appelbaum’s vivid and robust translation finds a compelling English voice for these dispatches from a time and place where terrifying chaos inspired stories filled with ‘Jewish laughter… basted with tears.'”

Boyd Tonkin, Former Literary Editor of The independent – Author of The 100 Best Novels in Translation


In forty-four vignettes or scenes as if from a documentary film, Avigdor Hameiri provides a vivid account of the pogroms that occurred in Ukraine and Russia between 1918 and 1921, drawing from his experiences during the Civil War in Odessa after the Russian Revolution and the end of the First World War. As a Jewish soldier he faced endemic antisemitism from the Austro-Hungarian officers. The Eastern Front was relatively fluid and even civilians were caught up in the fighting. Ironically, the Russian abuse of the Jewish populations was so brutal that they looked upon the Austro-Hungarians as saviors. Hameiri writes of the violence against Jews at this time that easily surpassed the earlier pogroms of the 1880s and 1903-1906. Caught in the cross-fire of civil war, Jews in Ukraine suffered organized slaughter and carnage from soldiers and civilians of multiple factions.

About the author:

AVIGDOR HAMEIRI (Feuerstein, 1980-1970) was a Hebrew poet (the first Poet Laureate of Israel), novelist, editor and translator. Hameiri was born in Davidhaza, Carpatho-Ruthenia (then Hungary but present-day Ukraine). In 1916 he was captured by the Russians while serving as an Austro-Hungarian officer on the Russian Front, imprisoned in Siberia, and released in 1917 after the October Revolution. In 1921 he immigrated to Palestine, joined the staff of the daily Haaretz, and edited several journals. Hameiri published a number of novels, short stories, and poetry collections that gave literary expression to his war experiences, the Third Aliyah, and later the Holocaust. His other works of fiction include the important war novel Ha-Shiga’on ha-Godel (The Great Madness – a new translation by Peter C. Appelbaum, forthcoming 2021).

 

Peter C. Appelbaum, MD, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Pathology, Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine. After more than four decades in infectious disease research, Dr. Appelbaum is spending his retirement years writing and translating books on modern-day Jewish military history. He is the author of Loyalty Betrayed and Loyal Sons (Vallentine-Mitchell, 2014) and, together with James Scott, has translated an anthology of war essays and poems by Kurt Tucholsky (Prayer after the Slaughter, Berlinica, 2015).

Weight 17.6 oz
Dimensions 9 × 6 × 1 in
Pages

152

Format

Soft Cover