Gates of Bronze

This epic novel (of 132 chapters), published in 1968, grew out of a short novel published in 1956 and had its earliest origins in a series of short fictional accounts of the Russian Revolution published in 1924. Set in a fictional Ukrainian village, it focuses on the experience of the village's Jewish community in the aftermath of the October Revolution. The central characters are Sorokeh, a young Anarchist, Polyishuk, the ambitious Bolshevik, and Leahtche, a young woman who symbolically divides her romantic affiliation between Sorokeh and Polyishuk:
“Leahtche’s thoughts raced from Sorokeh to Polyishuk and back again. She was torn, filled with doubts, unable to make up her mind how she really felt.”

The author, Haim Hazaz (born 16 September 1898) grew up in a small Ukrainian village with a mixed population of Slavs and Jews. At the age of 16, he left the village to pursue an education in  Kharkiv (the second city of Ukraine) and was working as a journalist in Moscow during the revolutions of 1917. His first literary work to be published appeared in 1918. He emigrated in 1921, moving from Istanbul to Paris, where he spent nine years. There he wrote the short stories on the Revolution that were the kernel of this novel. His first novel, published in 1930, was set during the Russo-Japanese War. In 1931 he moved to Jerusalem and settled there. He wrote several further novels and numerous works of short fiction as well as The End of Days, a major play of the modern Hebrew canon.

Having experienced pogroms, war, revolution and confiscation of assets, many in the Jewish community were considering a Zionist alternative to their suffering but it wasn't a clear-cut decision:
“When the Revolution came, at the same time that people heard about the Balfour Declaration, they began to think that maybe some good would come out of the war and its attendant suffering. After all, they said, the Land of Israel is desolate and the people of Israel is in ruins. They make a good pair. But when Sorokeh suggested that now was a good time to think about going to Palestine, they looked at him as though he had gone out of his mind. ‘Now,’ they said. ‘Now, just when the law of the Pale has been abolished and we’re allowed to live in Kiev, Moscow, Petrograd?’ "