The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn-of-the-century Odessa

This autobiographical novel was first published in Russian in Paris in 1936. Set in the Odessa of the author's youth and narrated by a character much like himself, it recounts the fortunes of a Jewish family, the Milgroms, through whom we witness the rise and fall of Jewish Odessa from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Russian Revolution. It also offers a fervent account of the temporary success and ultimate failure of Jewish assimilation in the Russian empire. The Five portrays the lost world of Odessa's Jews in all its color and vitality, its historical vulnerability and perennial optimism; now appearing in English, it is bound to become indispensable for American literary fiction readers and students of Jewish-Russian literature. -Booklist (starred review), April 1, 2005

The most remarkable thing about The Five is not that it was written by a man who, the year before its publication, was occupied day and night in leading his Revisionist Party out of the World Zionist Organization and founding a rump Zionist body after a negotiated truce between him and Ben-Gurion was voted down. . . . The Five would be just as tender yet unsentimental a novel, and as technically accomplished, even were it to turn out that its author had been publicly played by a double while spending his time holed up in his Paris apartment, composing leisurely draft after draft. The most remarkable thing about this novel is how good it is. -Hillel Halkin, The New Republic, 19 December 2005

In his sympathetic depiction of the flawed Milgroms, Jabotinsky at once created a paean to the beloved city of his youth while providing Russian literature with the very type of sympathetic Jewish novel whose absence he bemoaned, and which he predicted was not likely to appear even when Soviet Russian literature matured. -Louis Gordon, Jerusalem Report, 23 January 2006

For Jabotinsky, Arab national aspirations, like those of the Zionists, were legitimate. Hence his acknowledgment of the inevitable violence of the struggle. . . . In Jabotinsky's future, Arab and Jew would not be neighbors so much as carefully differentiated groupings within the body politic of the new state. . . . In Jabotinsky's writing, Zionism both affirms and doubts itself. What would Israel look like today if the modern leaders who have claimed to take their inspiration from him-Begin, Netanyahu, Sharon, and now Olmert, who referred to Jabotinsky in his speech to the first session of the new Knesset at the beginning of May-had shown themselves capable of such radical self-questioning. -Jacqueline Rose, The Nation, 26 June 2006

Vladimir Jabotinsky is best known for his fiery, uncompromising politics but he was a supple, vivid writer of Russian non-fiction and fiction, and The Five is, undoubtedly, his greatest narrative achievement. It is a sensitive and evocative treatment of a little-remembered, but crucial slice of late imperial Russian Jewish life and, above all, a love story in which the city of Odessa itself is the prime protagonist. -Steven J. Zipperstein, Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University

With the exposure to a broad international audience afforded by this new English translation, The Five will become wonderfully important to a variety of different readers. There is nothing else quite like it; it differs both from Jabotinsky's earlier novel and from his political and other nonfictional writings. At the same time, the novel forms part of the whole of Jabotinsky's life work. It connects him, and much of the Zionist program, quite closely to Russian history, Russian culture, and Russian concerns, a fact that is often forgotten from the contemporary Israeli perspective. -Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, University of Wisconsin-Madison