Background
Vladimir Jabotinsky was born on 18 October 1880 in Odessa, the Jewish cultural center of southern Russia.
( "The beginning of this tale of bygone days in Odessa da...)
"The beginning of this tale of bygone days in Odessa dates to the dawn of the twentieth century. At that time we used to refer to the first years of this period as the 'springtime,' meaning a social and political awakening. For my generation, these years also coincided with our own personal springtime, in the sense that we were all in our youthful twenties. And both of these springtimes, as well as the image of our carefree Black Sea capital with acacias growing along its steep banks, are interwoven in my memory with the story of one family in which there were five children: Marusya, Marko, Lika, Serezha, and Torik."?from The Five The Five is an captivating novel of the decadent fin-de-siècle written by Vladimir Jabotinsky (18801940), a controversial leader in the Zionist movement whose literary talents, until now, have largely gone unrecognized by Western readers. The author deftly paints a picture of Russia's decay and decline?a world permeated with sexuality, mystery, and intrigue. Michael R. Katz has crafted the first English-language translation of this important novel, which was written in Russian in 1935 and published a year later in Paris under the title Pyatero. The book is Jabotinsky's elegaic paean to the Odessa of his youth, a place that no longer exists. It tells the story of an upper-middle-class Jewish family, the Milgroms, at the turn of the century. It follows five siblings as they change, mature, and come to accept their places in a rapidly evolving world. With flashes of humor, Jabotinsky captures the ferment of the time as reflected in political, social, artistic, and spiritual developments. He depicts with nostalgia the excitement of life in old Odessa and comments poignantly on the failure of the dream of Jewish assimilation within the Russian empire.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801489032/?tag=2022091-20
( Vladimir Jabotinsky is well remembered as a militant le...)
Vladimir Jabotinsky is well remembered as a militant leader and father of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement, but he was also a Russian-Jewish intellectual, talented fiction writer, journalist, playwright, and translator of poetry into Russian and Hebrew. His autobiography, Sippur yamai, Story of My Life-written in Hebrew and published in Tel Aviv in 1936-gives a more nuanced picture of Jabotinsky than his popular image, but it was never published in English. In Vladimir Jabotinsky's Story of My Life, editors Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis present this much-needed translation for the first time, based on a rough draft of an English version that was discovered in Jabotinsky's archive at the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv. Jabotinsky's volume mixes true events with myth as he offers a portrait of himself from his birth in 1880 until just after the outbreak of World War I. He describes his personal development during childhood and early adult years in Odessa, Rome, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Istanbul, during Russia's Silver Age, a period known for spiritual searching, but also political violence, radicalism, and pogroms. He tells of his escape to Rome as a youth, his return to Odessa, and his eventual adoption of Zionism. He also depicts struggles with rivals and colleagues in both politics and journalism. The editors introduce the full text of the autobiography by discussing Jabotinsky's life, legacy, and writings in depth. As Jabotinsky is gaining a reputation for the quality of his fictional and semi-fictional writing in the field of Israel studies, this autobiography will help reading groups and students of Zionism, Jewish history, and political studies to gain a more complete picture of this famous leader.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814341381/?tag=2022091-20
journalist politician statesman writer
Vladimir Jabotinsky was born on 18 October 1880 in Odessa, the Jewish cultural center of southern Russia.
Jabotinsky received his elementary and secondary education in Russian schools and showed special gifts in languages and literature. He learned Russian, English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Yiddish.
Jabotinsky started his literary career at the age of 18 as a foreign correspondent of Odessky Listok in Bern and Rome. In 1901 he returned to Russia and, after the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, became an active member of the Zionist movement. Under his influence Jewish defense groups started to organize in Russia to avoid repetition of the earlier pogroms.
In 1904 he was a delegate to the Sixth Zionist Congress, and in 1906 he was active in the conference of Russian Jewry at Helsinki. In 1909 he represented the Executive of the World Zionist Organization in Constantinople to establish contact with a new Turkish regime. With his mission completed in 1910, he returned to Russia and devoted himself to the fight against assimilation and for Hebrew as the language of instruction in Jewish schools.
When World War I started, Jabotinsky was in western Europe as a correspondent of Russkiya Vyedomosti. In opposition to the official Zionist leaders, who remained neutral, he insisted on active Jewish participation in the Allied conquest of Palestine. As a result of his agitation, the first Jewish military unit, the Zion Mule Corps, was accepted by the British and sent to the Gallipoli front. In 1917 Jabotinsky succeeded in forming three Jewish battalions, which were sent to Palestine and participated, as the Jewish Legion, in the conquest of Palestine.
With the establishment of the British administration in Palestine, in 1920 Jabotinsky directed underground Jewish activity against Arab rioters. He was sentenced by the British authorities to 15 years at hard labor; the sentence was commuted to a year, however, and he was banished from Palestine.
In 1921 Jabotinsky joined the Executive of the World Zionist Organization. In opposition to Chaim Weizmann, Jabotinsky demanded a militant Jewish stand against the British policy in Palestine and the Churchill White Paper. He resigned in 1923 from the Executive and devoted himself entirely to the organization of the Union of the Revisionist Zionists, whose goal was transformation of Palestine, by unlimited immigration, into a Jewish state. Becoming convinced that the Executive was destroying Zionism, he later left the World Zionist Organization. The majority of the Revisionists followed him and organized the New Zionist Organization in 1935. He settled in London, where he fought against the partition plan of the Peel Commission of Palestine, against compromise with the mandatory authorities, and against the policy of self-restraint of the Haganah in the face of growing Arab violence.
At the beginning of World War II, Jabotinsky went to the United States, where he was active on behalf of the Jewish communities under Hitler. He died suddenly on Aug. 3, 1940. He was buried in New York but, according to his wishes, his body was later buried in Israel.
Jabotinsky wrote several books, among them War and the Jew, in which he claimed that the only solution for the Jewish problem is the liquidation of the Jewish communities outside Palestine and mass immigration to Palestine.
( Vladimir Jabotinsky is well remembered as a militant le...)
( "The beginning of this tale of bygone days in Odessa da...)
The Order of the British Empire, the Union of the Revisionist Zionists
Jabotinsky married Yohana Galperina in October 1907. They had one child.