On the other hand, he has not succeeded so well in the creation of the Maskilim type. The new generation, the enlightened friends of culture, are puppets without life, without personality, who speak and move only for the purpose of glorifying the "Divine Haskalah".
Mapu's conception of Jewish life can be summed up in two phrases: enlightened, hence good, just, generous; fanatic, hence wicked, hypocritical, lewd, cowardly.
If the novel on account of its treatment of the subject has some claims upon the description realistic, it has none by reason of its form. "The Hypocrite" suffers from all the defects of Mapu's historical romances, which, in the work under consideration, take on a graver aspect. The style of Isaiah and poetic flights do not comport well with a modern subject and a modern environment. Herein, again, Mapu's example became pernicious for his successors.
When the novel is in full swing, there occurs a series of letters written by one of the heroes from Palestine. The enthusiasm of the author for the Holy Land cannot deny itself, and this unexpected Zionist note, in a purely modern work, reveals his soul as it really is, the soul of a great dreamer.
It was after the appearance of Mapu's "Hypocrite", in the year 1867, that Abraham Bär Lebensohn published, at Wilna, his drama "Truth and Faith", written twenty years before, in which, also, the Tartufe of the ghetto plays a great part.
At about the same time a young writer, Solomon Jacob Abramowitsch, issued his realistic novel Ha-Abot weha-Banim ("Fathers and Sons", Zhitomir, 1868). Abramowitsch had already acquired some fame by a natural history (Toledot ha-Teba') in four volumes, in which he taxed his ingenuity to create a complete nomenclature for zoology in Hebrew. His novel is a failure. The subject is the antagonism between religious fathers and emancipated sons, and the action takes place in Hasidic surroundings. There is nothing to betray the future master, the delicate satirist, the admirable painter of manners. Abramowitsch then turned away from Hebrew for a while, and made the literary fortune of the Jewish-German jargon by writing his tales of Jewish life in it, but about ten years ago he re-entered the ranks of the writers of Hebrew, and became one of the most original authors handling the sacred language. What distinguishes Abramowitsch from his contemporaries is his style. He was among the first to introduce the diction of the Talmud and the Midrash into modern Hebrew. The result is a picturesque idiom, to which the Talmudic expressions give its peculiar charm. Though it continues essentially Biblical, the new element in it puts it into perfect accord with the spirit and the environment it is called upon to depict. It lends itself marvellously well to the description of the life and manners of the Jews of Wolhynia, the province which forms the background of his novels.
All these creators of a Hebrew realism were outstripped by the poet Gordon, who expresses the whole of his agitated epoch in his own person alone.
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