accordance with the demands of our own times. When the youthful writer
embodied these views in a series of articles, published in the
_ha-Melitz_ under the title _Orhot ha-Talmud_ ("The Ways of the Talmud,"
1868-1869), his orthodox townsmen were so thoroughly aroused that his
further stay in Vilkomir was not free from danger, and he was compelled
to remove to Odessa. Here he published in 1870 his rhymed satire _Kehal
refa'im_, [2] in which the dark shadows of a Jewish town, the Kahal
elders, the rabbis, the Tzaddiks, and other worthies, move weirdly about
in the gloom of the nether-world.

[Footnote 1: In the government of Kovno.]

[Footnote 2: "The Congregation of the Dead," with allusion to Prov.
21.16.]

In Odessa Lilienblum joined the ranks of the Russified college youth,
and became imbued with the radical ideas of Chernyshevski and Pisaryev,
gaining the reputation of a "nihilist." His theory of Jewish reform,
superannuated by his new materialistic world view, was thrown aside, and
a gaping void opened in the soul of the writer. This frame of mind is
reflected in Lilienblum's self-revelation, "The Sins of Youth" (_Hattot
ne'urim_, 1876), this agonizing cry of one of the many victims of the
mental cataclysm of the sixties. The book made a tremendous impression,
for the mental tortures depicted in it were typical of the whole age of
transition. However, the final note of the confession, the shriek of a
wasted soul, which, having overthrown the old idols, has failed to find
a new God, did not express the general trend of that period, which was
far from despair.

As for our author, his tempestuous soul was soon set at rest. The events
which filled the minds of progressive Jewry with agitation, the horrors
of the pogroms and the political oppression of the beginning of the
eighties, brought peace to the aching heart of Lilienblum. He found the
solution of the Jewish problems in the "Love of Zion," of which he
became the philosophic exponent. At a later stage he became an ardent
champion of political Zionism.

7. JEWISH LITERATURE IN THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

The left wing of "enlightenment" was represented during this period by
Jewish literature in the Russian language, which had several noteworthy
exponents. It is interesting to observe that, whereas all the prominent
writers in Hebrew were children of profoundly nationalistic Lithuania,
those that wrote in Russian, with the sole exception of Levanda, were
native