When the Candle Was Burning

The Hebrew short-story writer Yehudah Yaari was born into a Hasidic family in a Galician shtetl. During World War I, he moved to Tarnów and joined a Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir group that moved to Palestine in 1920. He became a leading member of the labor brigade that built the Afula–Nazareth road and in 1923 was one of the founding members of Kibbutz Bet Alfa. He left the kibbutz two years later and began working in the National Library in Jerusalem. In the late 1920s he studied library science in the United States, and in the early 1930s he taught in Canada. On his return to Jerusalem, he worked for the National Library and then later served in the civil service and the diplomatic corps.