“Childhood in Exile,” the opening volume of Dr. Shmarya Levin’s autobiography, recently issued in New York by Harcourt, Brace and Company, in an English translation by Maurice Samuel, is already being compared by some critics to the monumental autobiographies of Tolstoy and Gorky, one critic declaring that “Dr. Levin’s account deserves a place beside them for vividness of portrayal and literary charm.”
In a letter to Dr. Levin, Blanche Dugdale, niece of Lord Balfour, writes:
“It has been to me a marvelous experience to read it-in fact I have read it twice and for days could think of little else-I feel now as if I could see the home of your childhood-the rivers-the fields beyond-the forests beyond them-and all the people you knew-and the inside of your father’s house, and you yourself as a little child.
“I daresay my picture is not like the reality-indeed how could it be, for that world is so very very different from anything I have even seen with my bodily eyes. But perhaps I have understood a little of the spirit of the life of Jews in such towns-and if that is a fact I owe you great gratitude, for is it not a great thing to have a new door opened to any real experience, especially if it is a door into the inner life of a great people to whom one is already drawn by deep sympathy?
“If one cared for Zionism before reading your book-now it seems a so much greater thing. I see now that it is not only a release from terrible things, but it is a release of greater powers in the human spirit than I ever knew before.
The translation is quite first-rate. The book might have been written in English-I can hardly believe it was not!”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
