Story of my life

by Vladimir Jabotinsky, Brian Horowitz (Editor), Leonid Katsis (Editor)

Vladimir Jabotinsky is well remembered as a militant leader and father of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement, but he was also a Russian-Jewish intellectual, talented fiction writer, journalist, playwright, and translator of poetry into Russian and Hebrew. His autobiography, Sippur yamai (Story of My Life) -written in Hebrew and published in Tel Aviv in 1936- gives a more nuanced picture of Jabotinsky than his popular image, but it was never published in English. In Story of my Life, editors Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis present this much-needed translation for the first time, based on a rough draft of an English version that was discovered in Jabotinsky's archive at the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv.

Jabotinsky's volume mixes true events with myth as he offers a portrait of himself from his birth in 1880 until just after the outbreak of World War I. He describes his personal development during childhood and early adult years in Odessa, Rome, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Istanbul, during Russia's Silver Age, a period known for spiritual searching, but also political violence, radicalism, and pogroms. He tells of his escape to Rome as a youth, his return to Odessa, and his eventual adoption of Zionism. He also depicts struggles with rivals and colleagues in both politics and journalism. The editors introduce the full text of the autobiography by discussing Jabotinsky's life, legacy, and writings in depth.

As Jabotinsky is gaining a reputation for the quality of his fictional and semi-fictional writing in the field of Israel studies, this autobiography will help reading groups and students of Zionism, Jewish history, and political studies to gain a more complete picture of this famous leader.

Genres: Israel, Memoir

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky (זאב ז'בוטינסקי) was born Vladimir Yevgenyevich (Yevnovich) Zhabotinsky in Odessa, Russian Empire (modern Ukraine) into an assimilated Jewish family. His father, Yevno (Yevgeniy Grigoryevich) Zhabotinsky, hailed from Nikopol, Ukraine. He was a member of the Russian Society of Sailing and Trade and was primarily involved in wheat trading. His mother, Chava (Eva Markovna) Zach (1835–1926), came from Berdychiv. Jabotinsky's older brother (Myron) died in childhood. His sister, Tereza (Tamara Yevgenyevna) Zhabotinskaya-Kopp, founded a private, female secondary school in Odessa. In 1885 the family moved to Germany due to his father's illness, returning a year later after his father's death.

Raised in a Jewish middle-class home, Jabotinsky was educated in Russian schools. Although he studied Hebrew as a child, he wrote in his autobiography that his upbringing was divorced from Jewish faith and tradition. Chava Zhabotinskaya opened a store in Odessa selling stationery, and enrolled young Vladimir in the city's gymnasium. Jabotinsky did not finish school, having become involved in journalism. In 1896 he began writing articles for a major local Russian newspaper, the Odessa Leaflet, and was sent to Italy and Switzerland as a correspondent. He also worked with the Odessa News. Jabotinsky was a childhood friend of Russian journalist and poet Korney Chukovsky, and attended Chukovsky's 1903 wedding to Maria Goldfeld.

Jabotinsky wrote under the pseudonym "Altalena" ("swing" in Italian)(also "Old Italian" in Yiddish). His dispatches from Italy earned him recognition as an up-and-coming Russian-language journalist. He was a student at the Sapienza University of Rome law school, but did not graduate. In the summer of 1901 he returned to Odessa and began working as a journalist at the newspaper Odessa's News (Russian: Одесские новости). Later he edited newspapers in Russian and Hebrew.

He married Yohana Galperina in October 1907. They had one child, Eri Jabotinsky, who later became a member of the Irgun-inspired Bergson Group. Eri Jabotinsky briefly served in the 1st Knesset of Israel; he died on June 6, 1969.

Reviews

[Agnes Kelemen · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the beginning I really enjoyed reading it, since Jabotinsky was a wonderful writer. However, since I simultaneously read "Zionism and Fin-de-siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky" by Michael Stanislawski, my enjoyment was pretty much destroyed by realizing that hardly anything is true in Jabotinsky's autobiography. I know that this genre is never about documentation, but still most autobiography authors use much less deliberate distortions. Then in the middle Jabotinsky himself notes "it seems strange to me how I could have confused (when I spoke about the anti-Semitic speech that constituted my first step in Zionism, in Bern, 1898) Nachman Syrkin with Nahum Sirkin [...] I will commit errors such as these, probably as numerous and even worse, in this second part." This part really upset me, so I continued with even less enthusiasm than what Stanislawski left for me.

[The Jewish Book Council]

Review by Annette Gendler for the Jewish Book Council.