Streit opens with the epithet that had clung to AZR some twenty years before he turned 80, and makes clear that it does not testify to old age:
"This attendant word 'yashish' [elder] comes to teach not of old age, but to mark a quality in him: in the aged is wisdom. A spirit of grace and a measure of kindness, flowing from his religious nature… yet deep within him the fire of youth burns always." Shalom Streit, "A. Z. Rabinovitz" (5694/1934), Ben-Yehuda read/31321.
Streit formulates, in his own terms, that same figure who "spans from one extreme to the other":
"God-fearing and scrupulous in the lightest commandment as in the gravest, on the one hand; and on the other, a faithful socialist from his youth to old age and hoary years. On one side his companion was Rav A. I. Kook, and on the other he was a devoted friend, closer than a brother, to Y. H. Brenner." Ibid. (Compare "Spanning from One Extreme to the Other," Bograshov.)
He recalls how AZR, the God-fearing man, "spread his wings over the 'heretic' Brenner" during the onslaught against him (the "biblical hypnosis" affair; see "AZR and Brenner"); and his multiplicity of occupations, translating Dostoevsky and, alongside it, Bacher's "Legends of the Tannaim," publishing a "Kitzur Shulchan Aruch" and a commentary on Job, and translating "The Memoirs of Vera Figner," "seeming opposites? Yet in AZR's soul these contradictions settle together, as though they were of one skin." And also the traditional Passover Seder he conducted for his comrades at Ein Harod.
Streit values AZR as an honest realist, and credits "The Rich Man's Daughter" with a pioneering title:
"It is the first social novel in our literature… its value lies precisely in the artistic side. Despite his sympathy declared in advance… he is not drawn into prettifying things. Life unfolds according to the cruelty of reality." Ibid. (On "In the Shadow of Money" as "the first social sketch," see "Torah and Labor.")
And his chief virtue, a simplicity without falsity: while his contemporaries (even Frischmann) wrote ornate rhetoric ("melitzah"), AZR "expressed only himself… his soul never knew a speck of falsehood in all its days."
At the jubilee ceremony, Streit recounts, the "Liov" choir sang the verses of Psalm 24 ("Who shall ascend the mountain of the Lord… he who has clean hands and a pure heart"), and Streit remarks: "These verses encompass the essence of his character like nothing else." And he preserves Bialik's words about AZR:
"Bialik was right when he said, at the jubilee celebration, that AZR's very existence among us to this day is what awakens love for him in our hearts. For in this we behold the victory of the living over oblivion." H. N. Bialik at the jubilee celebration, as reported by Streit. Quoted testimony
And Streit closes with testimony to his standing: AZR was crowned "the first honorary citizen among the sons of the first Hebrew city" (Tel Aviv), "who was privileged to be among its first builders."
Alongside the literary essay, AZR received an entry in David Tidhar's biographical encyclopedia, "Encyclopedia of the Pioneers and Builders of the Yishuv" (vol. 1, 1947, p. 253), a documented auxiliary source that corroborates and adds details:
AZR, son of Tsvi-Hirsh, was born on 24 Shevat 5614 in Lyady (Mogilev Governorate); his father, a poor peddler, "strove to give his children a good education… hiring… the finest 'melamdim' [teachers]." At age 5 he entered the heder; at 9 he "could already read a page of Gemara on his own." His inclination to writing was "like second nature": in his youth he composed a book on "the laws of ritual slaughter and terefot," a commentary on the Haggadah, and novellae on the Talmud; and to acquire mastery he read "eighteen chapters of the Bible every day, without commentary." His first Russian article, "In Defense of the Melamdim," was signed "Lyadier"; and in 1889 he published his first Hebrew article in "HaMelitz" (20 Tevet, issue 286), "and from then on he became a Hebrew writer." He taught at the Poltava Talmud Torah for 17 years (among his pupils, Dov Ber [Borochov]).
Tidhar, "Encyclopedia of the Pioneers and Builders of the Yishuv," vol. 1 (1947), p. 253