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Updated: May 22, 2025
Once he had his own organ, Ha-Shahar, Smolenskin wrote and published novel after novel in it, beginning with his Ha-To'eh be-Darke ha-Hayyim. In Ha-Shahar it appeared in three parts. Later it came out in book form, in four volumes. It is the first work of the Hebrew realistic school worthy of being classed as such.
The Yiddish weekly Kol Mebasser, which was published during 1862-1871 as a supplement to ha-Melitz and spoke directly to the masses in their own language, attacked the dark sides of the old order of things in publicistic essays and humoristic stories. Another step forward was the publication of the Hebrew monthly ha-Shahar, "The Dawn," which was founded by Perez Smolenskin in 1869.
In this sudden blossoming of patriotic ideas, excesses were inevitable. A chauvinistic reaction was not long in setting in. The religious reformers were attacked, they were accused of hindering a fusion of diverse parties in Judaism whose cordial agreement was indispensable to the success of the new movement. Smolenskin alone was irreproachable.
It is evident that his heart is torn by contradictory emotions pity, compassion, scorn, anger, and love, all at once. In point of style also the novel is a realistic piece of work. Smolenskin does not resort to Talmudisms, like Gordon and Abramowitsch, but, also, he takes care not to indulge in too many Biblical metaphors.
For Smolenskin Jews never ceased to be a nation, and to him the Jew who sought refuge in assimilation was nothing less than a traitor. He was thus the forerunner of Pinsker, and of Herzl a decade later. Indeed, in the resurrection of the national hope he was the first to remove the shroud. According to him, "the eternal people" have every characteristic that goes to make a nation.
Smolenskin possessed the art of stimulating well-tried powers, and discovering new talent and bringing it forward. The school of Ha-Shahar may almost be looked upon as the creation of his strong hand.
Smolenskin permitted himself to be thwarted by nothing in the execution of his bold designs, neither by the meagreness of his material resources nor by the animosities which his fearless course did not fail to arouse among literary men. He is full of love for his people, and his faith in its future knows no limits.
And, again, S. A. Salkindson, a convert from Judaism, the author of admirable translations of "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet" , both published through the endeavors of Smolenskin, brought out the Hebrew translation of an epic wholly Christian in character, Milton's "Paradise Lost". It was a sign of the times that this work of art was enjoyed and appreciated by the educated Hebrew public in due accordance with its literary merits.
He returned to Vienna, encouraged to pursue the task he had assumed, and full of hope for the future. It was the eve of the cataclysm foretold by the editor of Ha- Shahar. Smolenskin owed his vast popularity and his influence on his contemporaries only in part to his work as a journalist.
In a word, the life of the Russian ghetto, its misery and its passions, the positive and the negative types of that vanishing world, have been set down in the writings of Smolenskin with such power of realism and such profound knowledge of conditions that it is impossible to form a just idea of Russo-Polish Judaism without having read what he has written.
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