Aharon Reuveni

Aharon Reuveni was born in 1886 in Poltava

Aharon Reuveni was born in 1886 in Poltava, in the Russian Empire, to Zvi Shimshelevich, a Zionist activist and writer. His siblings included Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and the poet Shulamit Kalugai. He left formal schooling young and went to the United States at 17, where he lived in poverty.

During the 1905 revolution he returned to Russia and joined his brother in Jewish self-defense in Poltava. Police found hidden weapons at the family home, and the family was held in jail and then exiled to Siberia. He escaped with forged papers and traveled through China, Hawaii and Asia.

He reached Jaffa in 1910 and settled in Jerusalem, writing for the Poale Zion newspaper Ha-Achdut. He was a close friend of Yosef Haim Brenner. In 1916 he married Esther Sarah Yermens, and after the 1920 riots he joined a Jerusalem delegation to London.

In 1929 he left Poale Zion and attacked the labor federation, which isolated him politically and in literature. In the 1940s his trilogy about Jerusalem in World War I gained positive reviews. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1955 and the Bialik Prize in 1969, and he died in 1971.