SOURCE: "Hebrew Fiction in Search of a Hero," in Major Trends in Modern Hebrew Fiction, University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 1-42.

In the following excerpt, Rabinovich discusses Pereti 's use of modernist literary techniques.

After the collapse of the 1905 Russian revolution and the growing reactionism of the government prior to the First World War and the 1917 revolution, the Jewish township went into decline. Jewish emigration, both to the larger cities of central Europe and to those of the United States, reached its peak, marking an upheaval within the Jewish community that was to produce enormous changes. One such change was the conversion of the majority of the community into city dwellers, with all that such urbanization implies. The Jewish village and township, with its rich religious and cultural traditions and its specific way of life, was allowed to die in isolation. No realistic writer arose to rescue it...