The Building of Modern Israel

...A competent Hebraist imbued with the life and traditions of Israel, he is also a qualified editor, and, despite his life-long devotion to the cause of Zionism, Sound the Great Trumpet is remarkably objective...

...In a series of brilliant "pen-portraits," Moshe Smilansky, himself an early pioneer in Palestine and probably the most articulate representative of the "First Aliyah," sketches vividly not only the life of Stampfer but also the hopes, frustrations and tragedies of men like Moshe Yoel Solomon, David Gutman, the saintly A. D. Gordon, theoretician of the "Religion of Labor," and the rest of that precious band of dreamers, pioneers and heroes who blazed the trail for their better known and more publicized successors...

...This, in itself, is a great feat in a hook on Israel...

...In his frenzied preoccupation with the present and, above all, with Israel's future, he, too, like most Israelis, had little lime for those other "stout-hearted Jews whose daring and fortitude," to (quote a passage in Sound the Great Trumpet, "made it possible for those who were to follow them to achieve the miracle of a homeland...

...The material is on the whole well selected and well edited and the contributors to the volume include Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, brilliant orator, linguist, poet, novelist and enfant terrible of political Zionism, and Samuel Joseph Agnon, Israel's greatest living novelist and short-story writer...

...The chief purpose of the book is to give a series of pictures (most of them contributed by the participants themselves) of life in Israel during the decades in which it evolved from a wilderness into a modern state, and the years immediately following the creation of the state...

...Indeed, without being shrill--without indulging in glorification or special pleading--Sound the Great Trumpet is primarily the story of Israel's fantastic conglomeration of Yemenite Jews and Moroccan Jews, Jews from Eastern Europe and America, cabbalists, mystics, atheists and orthodox Jews who jointly fought (and are still fighting) nature, mortal enemies and "civilized" indifference to carve out for themselves a new life in what they believe to he their ancestral home...

...Frank's massive compilation of memoirs, short stories and abridged novels by some 40 Israeli leaders and men of letters...

...Frank explains in his introduction, does not pretend to be either a literary anthology or a history of Jewish colonization in Palestine...

...So it was that I had only a brief moment in Petah-Tikvah, oldest Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine, to listen to the gray-bearded patriarch who apparently knew Stampfer "in the flesh" and bitterly regretted the fact that Joshua, though dead almost a half a century, did not live to see his dream of a Jewish medinah come true...

...I suspect that my guide, a young stout-hearted Jew from South Africa who fought heroically in Israel's "war of liberation," was himself not too familiar with the folk heroes of the First Aliyah, the earliest pioneers, who preceded him...

...Sound the Great Trumpet, as Mr...

...It might have been better to omit some of them altogether...

...Reviewed by Leon Dennen Roving correspondent, Newspaper Enterprise Association It was on a recent tour of Israel that I first heard the amazing story of Joshua Stampfer, a founder of Petah-Tikvah and, according to M. Z. Frank, "one of the most remarkable men in modern Jewish history...

...Not all the stories, especially those dealing with the survivors of Hitler's gas chambers, are either representative or of equal value...

...Frank who undertook the monumental task...

...Under the "persuasive" guidance of my official escort, I was soon speeding toward the Negev, where another strip of the desert is being reclaimed--often with tears and blood and always with sweat...

...Frank's selections...

...Since the publication of such a book, sooner or later, was inevitable, it is indeed fortunate that it was Mr...

...To my knowledge, Sound the Great Trumpet is the first attempt to present in the English language the dramatic story of Israel from the 1870s to the present...

...But win indulge in hair-splitting...

...Some of the condensations of the novels are so drastic as to deprive them of much of their literary value...

...to my mind, one of the best books on Israel to date...

...To be sure, one can quarrel with some of Mr...

...1 finally encountered Joshua Stampfer again on the pages of Sound the Great Trumpet, Mr...

...Unfortunately, Israelis of today--pressed by enemies on all sides and racing against time to build and strengthen their little state--have but little time for history--unless, of course, it is Biblical history...

...It thus fills the wide gap in our knowledge of the origin of the first Jewish state in some two thousand years and throws new light on the "miracle" that occurred in 1948...

...The fact remains that Sound the Great Trumpet is a very human and warm document about a vital phase of contemporary history and...