“I Am So Weak and My Desire Is So Strong”

Abstract

This chapter discusses the ways in which modernist Hebrew writers deal with the widespread European crisis of masculinity. While Yosef Chaim Brenner and David Fogel focused their writing on “emasculated” male protagonists, Chaim Nachman Bialik attempts to create a virile masculine Jew in his work, Aryeh ba-'al guf (“Brawny Aryeh,”1899). The chapter also discusses the works of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, an important transnational figure who portrayed sexuality, the problem of masculine desire, and the crisis of Jewish masculinity in his fictional texts.