hose days--, and their hearts
expanded with rapture over the enchanting idyls of the time of King
Hezekiah, the portrayal of tumultuous Jerusalem and peaceful Beth-lehem.
They sighed over the fate of the lovers Amnon and Tamar, and in their
flight of imagination were carried far away from painful reality. The
naive literary construction of the plot was of no consequence to the
reader who tasted a novel for the first time in his life. The _naivete_
of the plot was in keeping with the naive, artificially reproduced
language of the prophet Isaiah and the biblical annals, which
intensified the illusion of antiquity.

[Footnote 1: See on this expression above, p. 148 et seq.]

Several years after the publication of his "Love of Zion," when social
currents had begun to stir Russian Jewry, Mapu began his five volume
novel of contemporary life, under the title _'Ayit Tzabua'_, "The
Speckled Bird," or "The Hypocrite" (1857-1869). In his naive diction,
which is curiously out of harmony with the complex plot in sensational
French style, the author pictures the life of an obscure Lithuanian
townlet: the Kahal bosses who hide their misdeeds beneath the cloak of
piety; the fanatical rabbis, the Tartuffes of the Pale of Settlement,
who persecute the champions of enlightenment. As an offset against these
shadows of the past, Mapu lovingly paints the barely visible shoots of
the new life, the _Maskil_, who strives to reconcile religion and
science, the misty figure of the Jewish youth who goes to the Russian
school in the hope of serving his people, the profiles of the Russian
Jewish intellectuals, and the captains of industry from among the rising
Jewish plutocracy.

Toward the end of his life Mapu returned to the historical novel, and in
the "Transgression of Samaria" (_Ashmat Shomron_, 1865) he attempted to
draw a picture of ancient Hebrew life during the declining years of the
Northern Kingdom. But this novel, appearing as it did at the height of
the cultural movement, failed to produce the powerful effect of his
_Ahabat Zion_, although its charming biblical diction enraptured the
lovers of _Melitzah_. [1]

[Footnote 1: An imitation of the biblical Hebrew diction. Compare p.
225.]

The noise of the new Jewish life, with its constantly growing
problems, invaded the precincts of literature, and even the poets were
impelled to take sides in the burning questions of the day. The most
important poet of that era, Judah Leib Gordon (