Whither?

Born in Novograd-Volynsk, Russian Empire (today Novohrad Volyns’kyi, Ukraine), Mordekhai Ze’ev Feierberg received a robust traditional education, but his attraction to Haskalah ideas provoked a painful and conflict-ridden break. Unable to marry because of his tuberculosis, Feierberg sought out treatment in Warsaw, where he turned to Hebrew prose fiction and wrote until his death at age twenty-five. Although his literary career was quite short, his fiction had a significant and multifaceted influence on his contemporaries in the Hebrew literary scene. He produced pioneering and formally innovative depictions of the inner world of subjects, particularly children, capturing both subtle and extreme inner states. His story “Whither” (1899) impressed many contemporaries, including Chaim Nahman Bialik, as one of the most concentrated and searing depictions of the psychic woe experienced by Jews caught between intense connection to tradition and an irrepressible but not fully expressible need for freedom from its strictures.