Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri's War Stories and Poetry

"[A] gripping mix of stories and poems... interwoven with moments of quiet, affecting beauty... This remarkable work rescues an important 20th-century Israeli voice from obscurity." - Publishers Weekly

This book represents an anthology of Avigdor Hameiri's ten most compelling war stories and poetry. His war stories are unique, and different from his Hebrew writer contemporaries in that they mix the supernatural and macabre with war, pogroms, and antisemitism. These stories and poems reflect like no other the unique complexity of the Jewish soldier's experience of the most vicious and shocking war the world had witnessed to date - the battles, the agony, the dilemmas faced by the Jewish soldier, bravery versus cowardice, the notion of imminent death, breaking the sixth commandment (Thou Shalt Not Murder), elements of pacifism (particularly involving camaraderie between the common soldiers on both sides of the battlefield and their shared hatred for rank), and more.

Introduction by Editors and Translators

Introduction

1. Under a Bloodred Sky (Poem)
2. Christians (or, How My Hair Turned White Overnight)
3. Silence (Poem)
4. Revenge
5. Satan’s Idyll (Poem)
6. On the Verge
7. Kill the Lights (Poem)
8. The Spider
9. On Guard (Poem)
10. A Blessed Fall Dawn
11. Question and Answer (Poem)
12. Hanale
13. Matrimony (Poem)
14. A Night of Vigil
15. By Hands of Man (Poem)
16. The Storm
17. The Filth King (Poem)
18. Sarah Bänger
19. The Bereaved Mothers (Poem)
20. Gift
21. On Fascism and Its Goal (Speech at the ceremonial opening of the Second National “Antifa” Conference in Tel Aviv, April 12, 1935 at Mugrabi Theater)

Peter Appelbaum is a retired microbiologist who is spending his retirement years writing and translating books about Jewish history during World War I and the immediate post-war period. He is the recipient of the 2019 Rise Domb Porjes prize for his translation of Avigdor Hameiri's Hell on Earth.

Dan Hecht is a doctoral student at the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University who wrote an extensive Masters thesis on the writings of Avigdor Hameiri, focusing on his dual national loyalty to his Hungarian heritage and his Hebrew homeland. He is currently writing his PhD on the essayistic prose of Eliezer Steinmann.

“With a deeply unsettling narrative voice, Hameiri entangles the real and the fantastic, blurring boundaries between sense and madness in the absurdity of war. Many of the stories seek to understand how the conditions of war not only command killing, but also annihilate compassion and human feeling. Hameiri’s use of word play, repetition, and disturbing metaphors sketch the horrors of war, both the physical and mental traumas. Chilling and unforgettable, Hameiri’s fiction and poetry is deserving of a much wider audience—those interested in war writing, Jewish literature, and international modernisms.”