Jabotinsky published prolifically, mostly in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, and wrote many thousands of letters, some in English, French, German, and Italian as well. I have been able to read him in all of these languages apart from Russian—alas, the most important. Yet all his major Russian work, as well as the Russian correspondence in the twelve volumes of his letters that have appeared in Israel to date, has been translated into Hebrew.
The situation in English is different. Although nearly the entirety of Jabotinsky’s prose fiction–Samson, The Five, and the short stories in his collection A Pocket Edition of Several Stories, Mostly Reactionary–exists in English translation, this is true of little else that he wrote. A great deal written about him is not available in English, either. For this reason, I have not annotated my sources in this book, though I have generally tried to indicate what they were. To fill numerous pages with footnotes referring English readers to texts that few could read would have been pointless.
Still, readers seeking to broaden their knowledge of Jabotinsky beyond the confines of this book are not without recourse. Two excellent comprehensive biographies are at their disposal: Joseph Schechtman’s three-volume The Life and Times of Vladimir Jabotinsky: Rebel and Statesman (1956) and Shmuel Katz’s two-volume Lone Wolf: A Biography of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky (1993). I have made extensive use of both works, especially Schechtman’s, while often discussing matters unmentioned in them and arriving at different interpretations and conclusions.
In addition, a one-volume selection from Jabotinsky’s writings can be found in The Political and Social Philosophy of Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1999), and his younger years are the subject of several thoughtful chapters in Michael Stanislawski’s Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (2001). Writing after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Stanislawski had access to archival materials, such as Jabotinsky’s first two plays and much of his early journalism, that Schechtman and Katz lacked.
I, too, was able to read a good deal of this material, in addition to Jabotinsky’s World War I reporting, the Russian letters in his still unpublished correspondence from the years 1939–40, and some of Ania’s letters to him, with the help of two Israeli assistants, David Kriksinov and Andrei Pshenitsky, whom I wish to take this opportunity to thank. They reviewed, summarized, and translated into Hebrew or English many pages, which I then retranslated or revised when quoting from them.
Secondary translation is never an ideal method, but when the translators are competent—and Jabotinsky has been fortunate in his Hebrew ones—it need not yield unsatisfactory results. I have also resorted to it in quoting from many of Jabotinsky’s articles, essays, and speeches; from parts of his memoirs; from Samson (citations from The Five, on the other hand, are from Michael R. Katz’s English version of the novel); from his play “A Strange Land”; from his poetry; and from much of his correspondence. His poem “There Is a Sea That Men Call Black” was translated directly by me from its original Italian, and “The Song of the Prisoners of Acre,” from its original Hebrew.
My thanks go also to the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv and its two archivists, Ira Berean and Olga Gekhman-Prosmushkin, for their always gracious assistance; to the Avi Chai Foundation and David Rozenson, its former director in Russia, for their kindness in sponsoring a trip to Odessa; to Anya Misyuk for being an attentive and knowledgeable guide there; to the two editors of this series, Anita Shapira and Steven Zipperstein, for their patience and support, and for reading my manuscript and making useful observations and suggestions; and to Yale’s manuscript editor Phillip King for painstakingly doing the same. All contributed to this book and I am grateful to each of them.