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

“The literary works of Avigdor Hameiri—novels, short stories and poems—are the most important contribution of Hebrew literature to the world pacifist literature that flourished after the First World War. Under a Bloodred Sky is a fine selection of ten stories and ten poems, superbly translated and annotated  by Peter Applebaum and Dan Hecht. They are a genuine reflection of the storm that carried  Hameiri  through his years of service as an officer in the Austrian army and as a prisoner of war in Russia. Here we find revelations of tensions and conflicts between the Jewish world and the Christian world, intense expressions of horrific battlefields, bold mixtures of reality and fantasy, a multitude of supernatural motifs, and miraculous Jewish heroes who perform heroic deeds in response to anti-Semitic events. The juxtaposition of anti-war protest with admiration for Jewish military heroism is just one of the paradoxes characteristic of the war works of Avigdor Hameiri.”

— Professor Avner Holtzman, Department of Literature, Tel-Aviv University

“During the First World War, Avigdor Hameiri served as a Jewish officer in the Austro Hungarian army, first on the eastern front, facing the Russian army, and after he was captured, as a prisoner of war during the last days of the Czarist regime. This collection of short prose and poems, based on his harrowing experience during that time, is among the most poignant writing on war, any war. Hameiri did not write an ode to war, and yet his stories about the atrocities of war and the depravity of man are still eloquent and resonate with the clear and defiant voice of morality and humanism. Because Hameiri wrote in Hebrew, he is not very well known outside of Israel. This is a real shame as his war prose is uniquely compelling, a testament to a forgotten literary genius.”

— Yaron Peleg, Kennedy-Leigh Professor in Modern Hebrew Studies, University of Cambridge

“In his award-winning translations of Avigdor Hameiri’s searing documentary novels of the Great War and its aftermath, Peter C Appelbaum has introduced readers in English to a neglected giant of modern Hebrew writing. Hameiri, a Hungarian Jewish writer who became an army officer and prisoner-of-war before settling in Tel Aviv in 1921, was not only a clear-eyed witness to the chaos and carnage that had engulfed Europe. A prophetic visionary, he grasped that the pain and despair left by the conflict had the power to shadow and spoil the high social ideals of the coming generations. 

With co-translator Dan Hecht, Appelbaum now explores another side of Hameiri’s imagination. The stories and poems of Under a Bloodred Sky join realistic glimpses of wartime horror and cruelty with uncanny, supernatural and fantastic elements. Writing in modern Hebrew, a language developed to express and realise hopes for a new, sunlit Jewish future, Hameiri revisits the Gothic nightmares of old Europe in these chilling, bizarre and memorable tales. The First World War, as he imagines it, had united the myths and monsters of the European mind with destructive new technologies and ideologies, to catastrophic effect. Though mostly composed in the 1920s, these strange, savage and haunted pieces reveal Hameiri’s understanding that Europe’s long night of terror and hatred had not ended yet. And the final impassioned speech in which, from the Tel Aviv of 1935, Hameiri warns against the enduring temptations of war-mongering, fascism and ethnic nationalism speaks to today’s headlines with an undimmed force.”

— Boyd Tonkin, winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal for outstanding service to literature over the course of a career