Sideways

Uri Nisan Gnessin was a daring experimental writer whose small body of fiction, shot through with unsettling decadent themes of desire, enervation, and corruption, stands as an essential starting point of Hebrew modernism. Gnessin was born in Starodub into a family of Hasidic rabbis and raised in Potshep (both then in the Russian Empire; today in Ukraine). A precocious autodidact, he taught himself Latin, German, Russian, and French and studied philosophy while pursuing traditional studies at the Potshep yeshiva, where he befriended Yosef Haim Brenner. Leaving for Warsaw in 1900 to work as an editor for Naḥum Sokolow’s Hebrew newspaper Ha-Tsefirah, Gnessin began his literary career translating Yiddish and French prose into Hebrew and writing several early stories that addressed one of his core themes: the fraught erotic lives and differing outlooks of modernizing Jewish women and men. Thereafter, a peripatetic lifestyle would take him from Kiev (Kyiv) to Warsaw, Ekaterinoslav, Vilna, Ottoman Palestine, and back to Potshep and Warsaw, where he died in his early thirties. His literary fame and importance rest primarily on four experimental novellas he wrote between 1905 and 1913. In these novellas, which include Sideways, Gnessin pioneered the use of sustained inner monologue in Hebrew to represent the inner lives of young post-traditional men who desire intellectual and erotic fulfilment but are paralyzed by their own passivity.