Under a Bloodred Sky

Peter Appelbaum is a retired microbiologist who is spending his retirement years writing and translating books about Jewish history during World War I and the immediate post-war period. He is the recipient of the 2019 Rise Domb Porjes prize for his translation of Avigdor Hameiri’s Hell on Earth.Dan Hecht is a doctoral student at the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University who wrote an extensive Masters thesis on the writings of Avigdor Hameiri, focusing on his dual national loyalty to his Hungarian heritage and his Hebrew homeland. He is currently writing his PhD on the essayistic prose of Eliezer Steinmann.

“With a deeply unsettling narrative voice, Hameiri entangles the real and the fantastic, blurring boundaries between sense and madness in the absurdity of war. Many of the stories seek to understand how the conditions of war not only command killing, but also annihilate compassion and human feeling. Hameiri’s use of word play, repetition, and disturbing metaphors sketch the horrors of war, both the physical and mental traumas. Chilling and unforgettable, Hameiri’s fiction and poetry is deserving of a much wider audience—those interested in war writing, Jewish literature, and international modernisms.”— Constance Ruzich, Robert Morris University, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies

• Introduction by Editors and TranslatorsIntroduction1. Under a Bloodred Sky (Poem)2. Christians (or, How My Hair Turned White Overnight)3. Silence (Poem)4. Revenge5. Satan’s Idyll (Poem)6. On the Verge7. Kill the Lights (Poem)8. The Spider9. On Guard (Poem)10. A Blessed Fall Dawn11. Question and Answer (Poem)12. Hanale13. Matrimony (Poem)14. A Night of Vigil15. By Hands of Man (Poem)16. The Storm17. The Filth King (Poem)18. Sarah Bänger19. The Bereaved Mothers (Poem)20. Gift21. On Fascism and Its Goal (Speech at the ceremonial opening of the Second National “Antifa” Conference in Tel Aviv, April 12, 1935 at Mugrabi Theater)