Alleyways

The first full-length Hebrew novel written by a woman in Eretz Israel, available for the first time in English. This remarkable novel, the first modern Hebrew novel by a woman who was moreover not Jewish and never converted. It is set in the bohemian Moscow of 1922-1923 during Lenin’s NEP (New Economic Policy), a short-lived period of freedom before Stalin’s mass collectivization. It describes the lives and loves of a group of Jewish and non-Jewish men and women in the poor, threadbare, bohemian Moscow of the immediate post-revolutionary period. There is great poverty, accommodation is scarce and cramped, and the same clothes are worn for weeks. But the characters aspire to life, love, poetry, literature, and music.