"Paris in 1923" writes Robert Alter in the introduction, "hardly seems a likely place for the gestation of a novel written in Hebrew that would offer a searching panoramic vision of the shtetl's disintegration in the historical maelstrom of the Russian Revolution." Gates of Bronze is a prize-winning landmark of Hebrew fiction. In Hazaz's fictional village of Mokry-Kut, a dot on the vast landscape of Russia, the most portentous currents converge. It is a place where ideologies clash; where a way of life is painfully disintegrating. Translated by S. Gershon Levi and with an introduction by Robert Alter, Gates of Bronze assaults the contradictions of Jewish revolutionary universalism, still so instructive today.