The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn-of-the-Century Odessa
*Starred Review*  This autobiographical novel was first published in Russian in Paris in 1936. Set in the Odessa of the author's youth and narrated by a character much like himself, it recounts the fortunes of a Jewish family, the Milgroms, through whom we witness the rise and fall of Jewish Odessa from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Russian Revolution. It also offers a fervent account of the temporary success and ultimate failure of Jewish assimilation in the Russian empire. (Jabotinsky was born into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Odessa in 1880; he left in 1898 to become a foreign correspondent for a Russian newspaper in Italy and later in Switzerland.)The Fiveportrays the lost world of Odessa's Jews in all its color and vitality, its historical vulnerability and perennial optimism; now appearing in English, it is bound to become indispensable for American literary fiction readers and students of Jewish-Russian literature.George CohenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.