The Harvest

Name: The Harvest
ISBN: 9781625670847

Meyer Levin

The family saga that began in The Settlers continues through WWII and the creation of Israel in a novel that "follows history's beat closely and knowingly" ( Kirkus Reviews).

When the Chaimovitch family fled the Russian pogroms at the turn of the twentieth century, they hoped their family could flourish in Eretz Yisroel, the land of their ancestors. Twenty years later, they are thriving in Palestine and sending their youngest son Mati off to attend an American college. But the difficulties of their old lives in Russia are harder to shake than they thought.

With the rumblings of World War II comes anti-Jewish violence reminiscent of the pogroms they once fled. And that violence claims the life of Mati's younger brother. When Mati returns home to help his family deal with the sudden tragedy, he brings his new Jewish American bride Dena. Bridging the generations, the Chaimovitch family will confront unimaginable horrors as they work toward the triumphs and trials that created the Jewish state of Israel.

"The culmination of a prodigiously productive and important career." —Norman Mailer

About the Author

Meyer Levin (1905-1981) was an American novelist, journalist, and filmmaker, and one of the most prolific Jewish American writers of the twentieth century. Born in Chicago to immigrant parents, he studied at the University of Chicago and began his career as a newspaper reporter. His early novels, including Reporter (1929) and Yehuda (1931), drew on both city journalism and his growing engagement with Jewish and Zionist themes.

His breakthrough came with The Old Bunch (1937), a sweeping, realistic portrait of a group of second-generation Jewish Americans coming of age in Chicago. He later reported from Europe and Palestine and documented the aftermath of the Holocaust, including a stint as a war correspondent and work on documentary films.

His best-known work, Compulsion (1956), a fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb murder case, became a bestseller and was adapted for stage and film. Levin was also a passionate early advocate for The Diary of Anne Frank in the United States. His dispute over the dramatization of the diary, and the legal battle with Otto Frank that followed, consumed much of his later life and became the subject of his memoir The Obsession (1973).

Levin settled largely in Israel from the 1950s onward, and later novels such as The Settlers (1972) and The Harvest (1978) drew on that experience. His novel The Stronghold (1965) earned the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction in 1966. Levin died in Jerusalem in 1981.