Revealer of Secrets, first published in 1819, is an epistolary novel

Epistolary novel

An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use...

 by Joseph Perl

Joseph Perl

Joseph Perl , was an Ashkenazi Jewish educator and writer, a scion of the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment. He wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. Born and raised in the Austrian province of Galicia shortly after its annexation in the first partition of Poland, he was a follower of hasidism in...

, a proponent of Jewish emancipation and Haskalah

Haskalah

Haskalah , the Jewish Enlightenment, was a movement among European Jews in the 18th–19th centuries that advocated adopting enlightenment values, pressing for better integration into European society, and increasing education in secular studies, Hebrew language, and Jewish history...

. It is often considered the first modern novel in Hebrew. The book purports to be a collection of letters between various hasidic rabbis, but is actually a satire of their teachings.

It is an unusual book in that it satirizes the language and style of early hasidic rabbis writing in Hebrew, which was not the vernacular of the Jews of its time. To make his work available and accessible to his contemporaries, Perl translated his own work into Yiddish. It is currently in print only in an English translation, by Dov Taylor, published by Westview Press.

Sources

• Dov Taylor. Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets: The First Hebrew Novel. Westview Press. Boulder, Colorado. 1997. Translation with notes, commentary, and introductory materials. ISBN 0813332125