Aaron Abraham Kabak

1880 - 1944

Hebrew novelist.

Born near Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania), Aaron Abraham Kabak studied at universities in Berlin and Switzerland and settled in Palestine in 1911. He left in 1914 but returned in 1921. As a teacher at Jerusalem's Rehaviah Gymnasium (secondary school), he had great influence on the literary and educational dynamics of the city.

In 1905 Kabak wrote the first Zionist novel in Hebrew, Levaddah (By herself). His Shelomo Molkho (1928 - 1929), a three-volume work about the sixteenth century pseudo-messiah, was the first historical novel in Hebrew. Ba-Mishʿol Ha-Zar (In the narrow path), written in 1937 after his return to Orthodox Judaism, describes the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Jew. Although he retained its Jewish content, Kabak modernized the Hebrew novel by ridding it of its hitherto conventional protagonists, motifs, and settings.

— ANN KAHN