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Vladmir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky 1880-1940) was a Zionist leader, author, orator, soldier, and founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa. He also helped form the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I, and was a founder and leader of the clandestine Jewish armed organization Irgun. Although his Zionist activities are well known, less well known are his achievements as a writer and poet. Taryag Millim is an introduction into spoken Hebrew in Latin letters. It is taryag (613) words because it has been affirmed that everyday speech is based on a skeleton of about 600 basic words. Latin transcription is used to make acces to spoken Hebrew easier for the reader. The text is in four parts sub-divided into ninety-three chapters.
Jabotinsky took the idea of the renaissance of Hebrew as the living language of the Jewish people very seriously. Intensive study quickly made him an outstanding Hebraist. In 1910 he translated The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe into Hebrew and delivered his first Hebrew address in public. Before World War I he toured the Jewish communities of Russia lecturing on "The Language of Our Culture" and advocating the establishment of Hebrew day schools with Hebrew as the language of instruction in all subjects. This idea met with opposition not only in assimilationist and Yiddishist circles, but also among some Zionists, who considered it utopian. Jabotinsky's contribution to Hebrew language and literature was manifold. His translation of ten cantos of Dante's Inferno is a masterpiece. In 1924 he published Targumim, a collection of translations of French, English, and Italian poetry based on Sephardi prosody. He was the first Hebrew poet to write in Sephardi prosody. The literary "Establishment" whose poetry was conceived in Ashkenazi pronunciation finally accepted the change. Jabotinsky moreover is credited with influencing the whole gamut of modern Hebrew poetry. He collaborated with S. Perlman to edit the first Hebrew geographical atlas (1925). Ha-Mivta ha-Ivri, an essay on the phonetics of Hebrew, appeared in Tel Aviv in 1930. An advocate of writing modern Hebrew in Latin characters, Jabotinsky prepared a textbook of "latinized" Hebrew (Taryag Millim), which was published in South Africa in 1949 and in Israel in 1950. He also wrote several patriotic songs that became an inspiration for Zionist youth, particularly of the Betar movement. "Shir Asirei Akko" ("The Song of the Prisoners of Acre"), "Minni Dan," "Kullah Shelli," "Shir Betar," and "Semol ha-Yarden." His fragmentary autobiography Sippur Yamai ("The Story of My Life") is written in elegant Hebrew prose. But his main contributions to belles lettres were in Russian. Two verse plays, "Krov" ("Blood") and "Ladno" ("All Right"), were staged in 1901 and 1902 in the Odessa Municipal Theater; "Bednaya Sharlotta" ("Poor Charlotte": a poem about Charlotte Corday) and a masterly Russian translation of Bialik's "Massa Nemirov" appeared in 1904; a satirical play on Jewish life in Russia "Chuzhbina" ("On Foreign Soil"), written in 1908, was suppressed by Czarist censorship and published in Berlin only in 1922. Bialik's "Songs and Poems" in Jabotinsky's Russian translation (1910) was a best-seller (seven printings within two years), becoming a classic in its own right and making a deep impression not only on Jewish youth but on Russian intellectual circles as well. A collection of his short stories, translated from Russian into English (A Pocket Edition of Several Stories Mostly Reactionary) appeared in Paris in 1925.
Jabotinsky's major literary achievement, the biblical novel Samson the Nazarite, written and first published in Russian (1926) and later translated into Hebrew, English, and German, reflects much of his philosophy of Jewish history and life in general. Chaim Nachman Bialik described it as the only Jewish "national myth." In 1930, on his 50th birthday, his friends published a limited edition of three volumes of his poems, short stories, and essays in Russian. The novel "Pyatero" ("The Five"), which appeared in Russian in 1936, is a largely autobiographical picture of assimilating Jewish circles in Odessa. From the late 1920s until his death, he published articles in Yiddish almost weekly in the Warsaw Jewish press (first in Haynt and later in Der Moment) and in the New York Jewish Morning Journal. For years this was his only stable source of income and the chief vehicle for the propagation of his thoughts. Jabotinsky was an unusually gifted linguist, amassing a knowledge of some 20 languages. He had an intense interest in languages and a precious ability to grasp their spirit. A comprehensive, annotated collection of his writings, including speeches and letters, was published in 18 volumes in Hebrew (Tel Aviv, 1947–59) by his son Eri. In the 1990s the Israeli Bureau of Statistics revealed that Jabotinsky was, after Herzl, the most frequently used name given to streets in Israel.
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