Aharon Reuveni (1886-1972) was a Hebrew writer - and "an important talent," according to Yosef Haim Brenner, one of the most prominent literary figures in the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine. Reuveni was sharp-tongued and highly opinionated, and the literary-political establishment of the early 1930s imposed a "boycott of silence" on him. In 1935, Reuveni stopped writing fiction and focused his efforts on nonfiction. In the 1960s, he won new acclaim from the likes of critics such as Dan Meron and Gershon Shaked, as well as poet Natan Zach. Literary editor and scholar Yigal Schwartz wrote his doctoral thesis on Reuveni. In the wake of the republication of Reuveni's trilogy "To Jerusalem," in 1987, he was described by novelist Ronit Matalon as having been "a very wonderful - and very overlooked - writer."
Reuveni was also the younger brother of Israel's second president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who often extricated him from scrapes that he got into with publishers. He was an acerbic commentator who sometimes espoused intolerable opinions, opinions that frequently underwent radical changes. But of one thing Reuveni was certain: It was he who, in December 1947, proposed the name of the embryonic Jewish state. In order to ensure his place in history, he deposited a letter to that effect in the Israel State Archives in 1965. Following is a translation of that document.
Read Full Article »