When published in 1929, Avigdor Hameiri’s The Great Madness was compared to All Quiet on the Western Front published a year earlier. Drawing on his wartime experiences, Hameiri’s work quickly became a bestseller. This new translation with annotations and extensive introduction presents an intensely personal perspective of warfare on the First world War’s Eastern Front. Within its pages Hameiri writes of the spectrum of emotions experienced by soldiers in combat. In so doing, he vividly reminds all readers of the trauma and tragedies of warriors through the ages, regardless of rank, ethnicity or nationality.
Translated and edited by Peter C. Appelbaum
Introduction by Dan Hecht
About the author:
Avigdor Hameiri (Feuerstein, 1890-1970) was a Hebrew poet (the first Poet Laureate of Israel), novelist, editor and translator. In 1916 he was captured by the Russians while serving as an Austro-Hungarian officer on the Russian Front, imprisoned in Siberia, and released after the 1917 October Revolution. He immigrated to Palestine in 1921, joined the staff of the Daily Haaretz, and edited several journals. Hameiri published many novels, short stories and poetry collections, giving literary expression to his war experiences, the Third Aliyah and the Holocaust.
About the translator & editor:
Peter C. Appelbaum, MD, PhD, is an author, editor and award-winning translator of numerous books on Jewish Military history and literature. Among them are Hell on Earth and Of Human Carnage by Avigdor Hameiri, and Broken Carousel: German Jewish Soldier Poets of the Great War.
