Opression and suffering sharpened Jewish self-consciousness and this was given expression in the first works of fiction in modern Hebrew literature. This volume studies the work of Hebrew novelists following the death of Abraham Mapu in 1867. These 20 years correspond with the last phase of the Hebrew movement of Enlightenment, the Haskalah. These works are compounded of fantasy and realism, primitive in structure and characterization, and concerned, for the most part, with conditions of contemporary Jewish life within the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Czarist Russia. The book seeks to shed light on the development of Hebrew literature and illuminate the social history of the era.