The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn-of-the-Century Odessa by Vladimir Jabotinsky

Vladimir Jabotinsky

The book at Amazon and on Kindle.

One staple of the classic, often hagiographic, biographies of Vladimir Jabotinsky is the idea that his life was split into two while his transformation from a Russian journalist and aesthete into a Zionist was decisive and irrevocable. Yet more recent portrayals of Jabotinsky, in Russian and in English, paint him in a more nuanced light. As Hillel Halkin puts it in his new biography of Jabotinsky, regarding this transformation, “Whether his politics were ultimately coherent—whether his life had a deep inner consistency or was at bottom a tragic contradiction—depends on whether this paradox makes sense to us or whether, like … historian Michael Stanislawski … we regard it as rationalization, ‘at best a non sequitur, at worst nonsensical.’ The deeper debate about Jabotinsky starts here.” Halkin ultimately seems to conclude that Jabotinsky “was a man of contradictions.”

Read Marat Grinberg’s article in full at Tablet Magazine

Vladimir Jabotinsky

You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.