Already "In the Shadow of Money" (BeTzel HaKesef) was, in AZR's own words, "the first social portrait in our literature" (see "Torah and Craft"). And "The Rich Man's Daughter" was crowned by the critic Shalom Streit:
"It is the first social novel in our literature… its value lies precisely on the artistic side. Despite his sympathetic attitude set from the outset… he is not drawn into beautifying things. Life unfolds according to the cruelty of reality." Shalom Streit on AZR (5694/1934), see "AZR in the Eyes of His Contemporary". Criticism
His protagonist Zuckerman is revealed in his "weaknesses", and the heroine Liza "buckles under the burden… of her life"; there is no escape from the blows of fate.
The historical novel (dedicated to S. Ben-Zion, "who took pains in editing the story") takes place during the massacres of 5408 (1648). In its opening, AZR lays out the background, the oppression of the Cossacks, the Jesuits, and the Chmielnicki revolt:
"In the year 5408 the Cossacks broke out… and shattered and smashed the old, rickety structure of the Polish kingdom; but along with this they killed, 'in passing', in Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania, some three hundred thousand of the Jews… In memory of those terrible days a 'public fast' was established… the fast of the 20th of Sivan." AZR, "In the Days of Chmielnicki" (opening), Ben-Yehuda read/19512. (The figure, about 300,000, is the traditional one; modern scholarly estimates are lower.)
But what stands out is the moral realism: AZR does not depict the Jews as saints alone. His character, the wealthy leaseholder Nachum Taran, is cruel, beating a poor guest and torturing a fleeing Cossack on the Sabbath; while the moral compass of the story is R. Yitzhak, the honest bookkeeper, who rises up against the injustice. R. Yitzhak wonders:
"The Jews always excelled in the quality of mercy, and how is it that there are now among them such cruel people with hearts of stone?… If we live among such a people… whose men have become like beasts of prey, and all around only robberies and murders… his heart too turns to stone, and he too ceases to have mercy." Ibid. (AZR's doctrine of the sanctity of life; see "Ethics, the Sanctity of Life".)
AZR wrote a novel about the massacre of Ukrainian Jewry in 1648, and years later documented as a witness the Ukrainian pogroms of 1918-1920 ("The Scroll of Ukraine"). The same land, the same catastrophe, 270 years apart, and the same moral witness. The historical fiction and the contemporary testimony are two faces of the same gaze.