Overview

The first translation of this radical novel set at the heart of 1930s Israel/Palestine. In late 1920s Palestine, Zalmen has just arrived at Jaffa port on his way to a small northern kibbutz. Young and idealistic, he hopes to put down roots and help create a model society. But he soon realizes that the power dynamics between British colonists and Jewish and Arab workers have reached a breaking point. Zalmen, caught in the web of ideological conflicts, violence, and revolution, must decide with whom his loyalties lie. With frank depictions of political and ethnic tension, sexual freedom on the kibbutz, Labor Zionist politics, and rising Communist influences, Boom and Chains offers a rare glimpse of the Jewish left before the State of Israel and vividly illustrates the physical and mental toll of making a life in Mandatory Palestine. Author Hanan Ayalti's own journey resembles that of Zalmen and reflects his disillusionment with early Labor Zionism. The novel raises important questions around the development of discourse about Israel/Palestine, socialist Zionism and anti-Zionism, sexuality and sexualization, and Jewish left history over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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9780814351802

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Hanan Ayalti (pen name of Khonen Klenbort, 1910–92) published many works in Yiddish and Hebrew, including Boom and Chains, originally published in Yiddish in 1936. Other works translated to English include No Escape from Brooklyn (1966) and Yiddish Proverbs (1963). He was born in a small town in the Russian Empire (now Belarus) and immigrated to Palestine in 1929. After four years, he fled to Paris due to his activism and published this novel in Yiddish a few years later. He came to the United States in 1946. Adi Mahalel teaches Yiddish studies and modern Jewish culture at the University of Maryland, College Park, and at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is the author of The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism. His work focuses on modern Jewish literature and film with an emphasis on comparative approaches across linguistic and cultural-political contexts.

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