Period Cloth. 8vo. 99 pages. 23 cm. First complete edition. In Hebrew. Old Songs. The “biographical novel Shirim Attikim ('Old Songs') , the finished version of which appeared posthumously in Cracow in 1903.” - EJ 2008. Selections first appeared in Ru'ah ha-Zeman: “From 1891 to 1893 Braudes resided in Cracow, editing a weekly which appeared under the names Ha-Zeman and Ru'ah ha-Zeman in alternate weeks, to avoid paying the duty levied on a weekly. ” - EJ 2008. Reuben Asher Braudes (1850–1902) , “Hebrew author. Active in various East European cities, including Vilna (his place of birth) , Lvov, Kraków, Bucharest, and Odessa, and ultimately (after 1896) in Vienna, Re’uven Braudes edited Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals and wrote essays and articles, but is best known as the author of short stories and novels that earned him a reputation as one of the outstanding maskilic Hebrew writers of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. … Shirim ‘atikim (Old Songs; 1890–1891) raises [the] dilemma: Palestine or America? The book’s heroes, Naftali and Shim‘on, have opposing answers to this question. Naftali, a maskil of the old school, fears that 'religion' will control 'life' in the Holy Land and prefers America, which he considers the symbol of freedom and tolerance. However, the American Dream fails him; in the end he chooses to live in Palestine, but it is too late. ” - Yivo Encyclopedia. Contains the library stamps of the 'Montreal Zionist Society' and the 'Baron de Hirsch Library of Montreal'. Subjects: Hebrew Literature. OCLC lists 13 copies. Light soiling to cloth, institutional stamps on endpages and title page, otherwise clean. Very good condition. (ZION-6-2)