exclaimed:

Awake, Israel, and, Judah, arise!
Shake off the dust, open wide thine eyes!
Justice sprouteth, righteousness is here,
Thy sin is forgot, thou hast naught to fear.[7]

More impressively still Judah Loeb Gordon (1831-1892) called:

Arise, my people, 'tis time for waking!
Lo, the night is o'er, the day is breaking!
Arise and see where'er thou turn'st thy face,
How changed are both our time and place.[8]

And in Yiddish, too, an anonymous poet echoed the strain:

Arise, my people, awake from thy dreaming,
In foolishness be not immersed!
Clear is the sky, brightly the sun is beaming;
The clouds are now utterly dispersed!

Rapid growth is sometimes the cause of disease, and sudden changes the
cause of disappointment. This was true of the swift progress of Haskalah
during the reign of Alexander II. To comprehend fully the tragedies that
took place frequently at that time, the disillusionments that embittered
the lives of many of the Maskilim, the breaking up of homes and bruising
of hearts, one should read _Youthful Sins_ (_Plattot Neurim_, 1876) by
Moses Loeb Lilienblum. The author lays bare a heart ulcerated and mangled
by an obsolete education, a meaningless existence, and a forlorn hope.
The hero of this little work, masterly less by reason of its artistic
finish than the earnestness that pervades it from beginning to end, is
"one of the slain of the Babylonian Talmud, whose spiritual life is
artificially maintained by a literature itself dead." His diary and
letters grant a glimpse into his innermost being; his childhood wasted
in a methodless acquisition of futile learning; his boyhood blighted by
a union with a wife chosen for him by his parents; his manhood mortified
by the realization that in a world thrilling with life and activity he
led the existence of an Egyptian mummy. Impatient to save the few years
allotted to him on earth, and undeterred by the entreaties and the
threats of his wife, he leaves for Odessa, the Mecca of the Maskilim,
and begins to prepare himself for admission into the gymnasium. "While
there is a drop of blood in my veins," he writes to his forsaken wife,
"I shall try to finish my course of studies. Though the physicians
declare that consumption and death must be the inevitable consequence of
such application, I will not desist. I will rather die like a man than
live like a dog." And on and on he plods over his Latin, his French, his
history, geogr