Under a Bloodred Sky - by Avigdor Hameiri (Paperback)

About the Book

This book represents an anthology of Avigdor Hameiri's ten most compelling war stories and poetry. They are unique in mixing the supernatural and macabre with war, pogroms, and antisemitism, and reflect the unique complexity of the Jewish soldier's experience of the most vicious war the world had yet witnessed to date.

Book Synopsis

This book represents an anthology of Avigdor Hameiri's ten most compelling war stories and poetry. They are unique in mixing the supernatural and macabre with war, pogroms, and antisemitism, and reflect the unique complexity of the Jewish soldier's experience of the most vicious war the world had yet witnessed to date.

Review Quotes

"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."

-- Constance Ruzich, Robert Morris University, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies

About the Author

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.