In The Course Of Life

At the end of his earlier memoir, My Childhood Years, Peretz Hirshbein left behind his rural upbringing and sought out the energy of the big city. That’ s where we find him at the start of In the Course of Life: barely keeping body and soul together as a Hebrew tutor in Vilna while writing his first plays. In the Course of Life spans the first decade of the twentieth century, a period of tremendous political and social upheaval and the decade when Hirshbein finds his voice as a writer. To do that, though, he will need to grapple with questions not just of craft but also which language to write in and which milieu— Vilna? Warsaw? Berlin? Odessa?— will offer the most fruitful soil for his work.Hirshbein paints an emotionally honest, journalistically rich portrait in these pages of not just his own path toward a literary life but by extension the unpredictable journey of a generation of Jewish writers at the dawn of a new era.