Paris in 1923 writes Robert Alter in the introduction, hardly seems a likely place for the gestation of a novel written in Hebrew that would offer a searching panoramic vision of the shtetl's disintegration in the historical maelstrom of the Russian Revolution. Gates of Bronze is a prize-winning landmark of Hebrew fiction. In Hazaz's fictional village of Mokry-Kut, a dot on the vast landscape of Russia, the most portentous currents converge. It is a place where ideologies clash; where a way of life is painfully disintegrating.