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Three Cities
A great panorama of the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. The novel focuses on St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow, and how various people deal with these earth shaking events.
899 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1931
4 people are currently reading
68 people want to read
About the author
Sholem Asch
259 books36 followersPolish-American writer Sholem Asch (also written Shalom Ash, Yiddish: שלום אַש, Polish: Szalom Asz) sought to reconcile Judaism and Christianity in his controversial novels, such as
The Nazarene
(1939).
Sholem Asch composed dramas and essays in the language.
Frajda Malka bore Asch and nine other children to Moszek Asz, a cattle-dealer and innkeeper. Asch received tradition and as a young man followed, obtained a more liberal education at Włocławek, and supported with letters for the illiterate townspeople. He moved to Warsaw and met and married Mathilde Shapiro, the daughter of Menahem Mendel Shapiro. The Haskalah or Hebrew enlightenment initially influenced Asch, but Isaac Leib Peretz convinced him to switch.
Plot of God of Vengeance , his drama of 1907 features a lesbian relationship in a brothel.
He traveled to Palestine in 1908 and to the United States in 1910.
His Kiddush ha-Shem in 1919 in the earliest historical modern literature concerns the anti-Semitic uprising of Khmelnytsky in mid-17th century Ukraine.
He sat out World War I in the United States and a naturalized as a citizen in 1920. He returned.
People celebrated a 12-volume set of his collected works, published in his own lifetime in the early 1920s.
When people performed God of Vengeance , the highly esteemed play, on Broadway in 1923, authorities arrested and successfully prosecuted the entire cast on obscenity charges despite the fact that people in Europe already translated it into German, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Czech, and Norwegian.
Farn Mabul ( Before the Flood , translated as Three Cities ), his trilogy of 1929 to 1931, describes early 20th century life in Saint Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow.
In 1932, the republic awarded the decoration of Polonia Restituta, and the club of poets, essayists, and novelists (PEN) elected him honorary president.
He later moved to France and visited Palestine again in 1936. Dos Gezang fun Tol ( The Song of the Valley ) about the halutzim or Zionist pioneers in Palestine reflects his visit of 1936 to that region.
He set his Bayrn Opgrunt (1937), translated as The Precipice , in Germany during the hyperinflation of the 1920s.
He settled in the United States in 1938.
He, however, later offended sensibilities with The Apostle , and Mary , parts of his trilogy, which in 1939 to 1949 dealt with subjects of New Testament. The Forward , leading language newspaper of New York, dropped him and openly attacked him for promotion.
Asch spent most his last two years in Bat Yam near Tel Aviv, Israel but died in London. His house in Bat Yam now houses his namesake museum. Yale University holds the bulk of his library, which contains rare books and manuscripts, including some of his own works.
Sholem Asch composed dramas and essays in the language.
Frajda Malka bore Asch and nine other children to Moszek Asz, a cattle-dealer and innkeeper. Asch received tradition and as a young man followed, obtained a more liberal education at Włocławek, and supported with letters for the illiterate townspeople. He moved to Warsaw and met and married Mathilde Shapiro, the daughter of Menahem Mendel Shapiro. The Haskalah or Hebrew enlightenment initially influenced Asch, but Isaac Leib Peretz convinced him to switch.
Plot of God of Vengeance , his drama of 1907 features a lesbian relationship in a brothel.
He traveled to Palestine in 1908 and to the United States in 1910.
His Kiddush ha-Shem in 1919 in the earliest historical modern literature concerns the anti-Semitic uprising of Khmelnytsky in mid-17th century Ukraine.
He sat out World War I in the United States and a naturalized as a citizen in 1920. He returned.
People celebrated a 12-volume set of his collected works, published in his own lifetime in the early 1920s.
When people performed God of Vengeance , the highly esteemed play, on Broadway in 1923, authorities arrested and successfully prosecuted the entire cast on obscenity charges despite the fact that people in Europe already translated it into German, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Czech, and Norwegian.
Farn Mabul ( Before the Flood , translated as Three Cities ), his trilogy of 1929 to 1931, describes early 20th century life in Saint Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow.
In 1932, the republic awarded the decoration of Polonia Restituta, and the club of poets, essayists, and novelists (PEN) elected him honorary president.
He later moved to France and visited Palestine again in 1936. Dos Gezang fun Tol ( The Song of the Valley ) about the halutzim or Zionist pioneers in Palestine reflects his visit of 1936 to that region.
He set his Bayrn Opgrunt (1937), translated as The Precipice , in Germany during the hyperinflation of the 1920s.
He settled in the United States in 1938.
He, however, later offended sensibilities with The Apostle , and Mary , parts of his trilogy, which in 1939 to 1949 dealt with subjects of New Testament. The Forward , leading language newspaper of New York, dropped him and openly attacked him for promotion.
Asch spent most his last two years in Bat Yam near Tel Aviv, Israel but died in London. His house in Bat Yam now houses his namesake museum. Yale University holds the bulk of his library, which contains rare books and manuscripts, including some of his own works.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 6, 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️
This big paperback book, Three Cities, has languished on various bookshelves in my house for years. My copy was printed in 1983 and time spent on a dusty shelf has taken its toll; it literally fell apart as I was reading it.
The author was born in 1880 in Poland. He was raised in a Hasidic family. He was the “designated scholar” of his family. His parents sent him to the best religious school in their town and had high hopes he would become a rabbi. He spent most of his childhood studying the Talmud, but he also studied the Bible and the Haggadah on his own time. I read on Wikipedia that he grew up in a predominantly Jewish town, and he grew up believing that Jews were the majority in the rest of the world, too.
He and his family came to America in 1914 (where they settled in Staten Island) to escape the violence and antisemitism in Europe. He began writing for a Yiddish daily paper. He also wrote plays, and his newspaper printed them.
He became a celebrated writer in his time. The list of his publications is about a mile long on Wikipedia. He wrote primarily in Yiddish. Three Cities was translated in 1933, but was published individually in Yiddish from 1929 through 1931. The three cities are St. Petersburg, Warsaw and Moscow and the time line runs from late 1800’s until a year or so after the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The main character is Zachary Mirkin, a young boy when the story begins who is at least in his thirties when the story ends. He was born to a wealthy bourgeois Russian family who didn’t even practice their cultural religion. As you can imagine, Zachary found out he was Jewish and adopted his new (old) religion with a passion.
This was not an easy read. Lots of characters, all with long Russian names and often go by two or three different names. Russian history always intrigues me, and the last section in particular, was written from both the Red (Bolshevik) and the White (Tsarist officers, capitalists, the rich bourgeois) points of view. I’m glad I learned a bit more Russian history.
And on a side note, there is no credit given in my copy of the book to whoever translated it from Yiddish to English.
The ATY Goodreads Challenge - 2025
Prompt #19 - a book with a cover that has a building or cityscape
This big paperback book, Three Cities, has languished on various bookshelves in my house for years. My copy was printed in 1983 and time spent on a dusty shelf has taken its toll; it literally fell apart as I was reading it.
The author was born in 1880 in Poland. He was raised in a Hasidic family. He was the “designated scholar” of his family. His parents sent him to the best religious school in their town and had high hopes he would become a rabbi. He spent most of his childhood studying the Talmud, but he also studied the Bible and the Haggadah on his own time. I read on Wikipedia that he grew up in a predominantly Jewish town, and he grew up believing that Jews were the majority in the rest of the world, too.
He and his family came to America in 1914 (where they settled in Staten Island) to escape the violence and antisemitism in Europe. He began writing for a Yiddish daily paper. He also wrote plays, and his newspaper printed them.
He became a celebrated writer in his time. The list of his publications is about a mile long on Wikipedia. He wrote primarily in Yiddish. Three Cities was translated in 1933, but was published individually in Yiddish from 1929 through 1931. The three cities are St. Petersburg, Warsaw and Moscow and the time line runs from late 1800’s until a year or so after the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The main character is Zachary Mirkin, a young boy when the story begins who is at least in his thirties when the story ends. He was born to a wealthy bourgeois Russian family who didn’t even practice their cultural religion. As you can imagine, Zachary found out he was Jewish and adopted his new (old) religion with a passion.
This was not an easy read. Lots of characters, all with long Russian names and often go by two or three different names. Russian history always intrigues me, and the last section in particular, was written from both the Red (Bolshevik) and the White (Tsarist officers, capitalists, the rich bourgeois) points of view. I’m glad I learned a bit more Russian history.
And on a side note, there is no credit given in my copy of the book to whoever translated it from Yiddish to English.
The ATY Goodreads Challenge - 2025
Prompt #19 - a book with a cover that has a building or cityscape
July 23, 2011
Well... I sit here, debating whether one or two stars should be given to this book. But since there were so many problems with the book, and only a few glittering moments where I actually liked it, I think I must go with one. (Now that I've started to write the review, I realize this is most assuredly a one. It's amazing what you forget until you start writing... Excuse the rant below, but it feels good to get out my frustrations after two months of reading this)
First, it should be mentioned that this book was not written to be a pleasure read. (Or at least, it wasn't by the end he got done...) and it was supposed to be one that makes you think... more on that later.
There are a million things wrong that I could say about this book. For one, there was absolutely nothing to draw me in. The beginning was painfully slow (Starting with Mirkin's childhood and background story {uneventful and uninteresting}) Mirkin himself was terribly flat and childish and never grows up. Actually, all the characters were unrealistic
Also, it should be noted that Mirkin has a terrible obsession with women, and there were some detailed descriptions of his thoughts on them.
The writing style! Ugh! I have told people that it's like a first draft. There are characters introduced, forgotten about, and then quickly taken care of later, like an afterthought. There are repetitive descriptions... And now that I think of it, there was mention of a mysterious picture in a locket his mother wore, and it was never explained! Terrible! The setting was never explained, and it took me until past the middle of the book to figure it out.
Nothing moved smoothly
The author hit all the wrong notes.
As I said, this book is made for thought... unfortunately, I didn't get much thought out of it. Everyone had some form of socialistic thinking, and all you really saw were the variances in it. For all the Jews in the book, I really wanted someone who had a real faith in it to come forward, but they didn't. Instead you had a bunch of theological discussion that went on and on and on.
The one thing I liked was that the book didn't show one side in the war right or wrong. Both sides were shown, with their faults. You saw the full horrors of the revolution.
So many things could be changed to make it better. If perhaps you could actually like Mirkin, and therefore take interest in his life, it would help. But maybe, if you think changing him would change the book too much, if you had it from the views of someone else, someone you could like observing all that happened, it might help…
In the end, I would say, DON’T READ THE BOOK. It’s utterly terrible, dull, uninteresting, terrible characters, rambling talks, lots of Ughs… But that’s enough ranting for the day.
First, it should be mentioned that this book was not written to be a pleasure read. (Or at least, it wasn't by the end he got done...) and it was supposed to be one that makes you think... more on that later.
There are a million things wrong that I could say about this book. For one, there was absolutely nothing to draw me in. The beginning was painfully slow (Starting with Mirkin's childhood and background story {uneventful and uninteresting}) Mirkin himself was terribly flat and childish and never grows up. Actually, all the characters were unrealistic
Also, it should be noted that Mirkin has a terrible obsession with women, and there were some detailed descriptions of his thoughts on them.
The writing style! Ugh! I have told people that it's like a first draft. There are characters introduced, forgotten about, and then quickly taken care of later, like an afterthought. There are repetitive descriptions... And now that I think of it, there was mention of a mysterious picture in a locket his mother wore, and it was never explained! Terrible! The setting was never explained, and it took me until past the middle of the book to figure it out.
Nothing moved smoothly
The author hit all the wrong notes.
As I said, this book is made for thought... unfortunately, I didn't get much thought out of it. Everyone had some form of socialistic thinking, and all you really saw were the variances in it. For all the Jews in the book, I really wanted someone who had a real faith in it to come forward, but they didn't. Instead you had a bunch of theological discussion that went on and on and on.
The one thing I liked was that the book didn't show one side in the war right or wrong. Both sides were shown, with their faults. You saw the full horrors of the revolution.
So many things could be changed to make it better. If perhaps you could actually like Mirkin, and therefore take interest in his life, it would help. But maybe, if you think changing him would change the book too much, if you had it from the views of someone else, someone you could like observing all that happened, it might help…
In the end, I would say, DON’T READ THE BOOK. It’s utterly terrible, dull, uninteresting, terrible characters, rambling talks, lots of Ughs… But that’s enough ranting for the day.
January 3, 2020
A majestic sprawling novel - in the best traditions of classic big novel - like War and Peace, Middlemarch, Fathers and Sons etc. The characters are very rich, the background is fascinating and historically accurate . The spiritual journey of the Jewish intellectual who has so much trouble finding an ideological home amongst the opposing political forces while trying to be a good honest and ethical person is the main thread here. Also a very objective but empathetic description of the struggle to replace Tsarist Russian regime with a better government and political structure , which heartbreakingly results in more suffering than ever before.
November 7, 2021
This major Yiddish language author knew how to write and here he has a magnificent subject: Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Warsaw. When I started the book I thought it might be something Tolstoy might have written, but, alas, as I went on I thought it might be more something Leon Uris or James Michener might have penned.
March 12, 2020
Love it - brings an era to life. I've read it several times - the first when I was about 12.
September 15, 2025
An undervalued classic.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews