Agata Jaworska

In 1904, Yitskhok-Dov Berkovitz published the short story “Talush.” This term came to describe the literary portrayal of a man torn from his natural environment—a theme prevalent in Hebrew prose during that era. Talush evolved into a metaphor for Jews from the diaspora navigating the delicate balance between tradition and the progressive secularization of their world. Scholars, including Gershon Shaked and Avraham Holtz, categorize Berkovitz’s protagonists as “uprooted.” This article aims to compare the destinies of protagonists from previously unexamined stories: “Moshkeli-Hazir,” “Mi-Merhakim,” and “Koah ha-dimyon.” The objective of the author is to assess the extent of their rootlessness and alienation, demonstrating that these character types differ. The analysis of the stories proves that not all of them can be classified as talush.

The uprooted hero is one of the leading themes in Hebrew prose at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also occupies a central place in the stories of Isaac Dov Berkowitz. The uproot metaphor reflects the hero’s alienation in many aspects of life. In a broader sense, it is a reaction to the sense of suspension between the traditions of their ancestors and the progressive secularization of their world. The exceptions are stories whose protagonist is an uprooted female figure. This is a unique phenomenon considering the lower hierarchical position of women in Judaism and the limited access to religious and secular literaturęat the time. The female uprooting results from other factors. Women do not follow science or ideology, they want to free themselves from the norms of Jewish customs, escape loneliness and experience individualism. The objective of the paper is to present the image of Berkowitz’s heroines and compare them from the perspective of alienation. The starting point for consideration is the classification of the uprooted and the division of Berkowitz’s heroes according to Nurit Govrin and variants of the uprooting by Simon Halkin.

New Hebrew prose at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries is characterized by the presence of a specific type of literary character called the “uprooted hero”(Hebr. talush). The article aims to present his image from the perspective of the diaspora reality. Regardless of the conditions that determine the fate of the protagonists of the stories discussed, they are accompanied by a common motive of alienation pertaining to many different spheres of life. In Micha Josef Berdyczewski’s prose, the protagonist is usually presented as a young man rebelling against the religious mentality of the Jewish diaspora, but at the same time unable to adapt to the secular world. Selected source texts have been translated, thoroughly analyzed and compared in terms of the aforementioned literary topos. The starting point of the research are the stages of uprooting described by Simon Halkin. The article is a contribution to further research on “the uprooted” appearing in the Hebrew fiction by other writers, such as Mordecai Ze’ev Feierberg or Uri Nissan Gnessin.