The Greatest Need : The Creative Life and Troubled Times of Lily Tobias, a Welsh Jew in Palestine (Paperback)

The first full biography of Lily Tobias (1887-1984) a Jewish writer from Wales: a courageous, idealistic woman who wrote compellingly about Jewish life and experience in the 20th century. Daughter of Polish immigrant parents, Lily Tobias grew up in the Swansea valley. The family spoke Yiddish at home, English in class and Welsh in the playground, and Lily was always aware of her mixed identity. She was passionate about her rights as a woman in a time of suffrage, as a Jewish woman in a religion that kept men and women separate, as a socialist in a time of industrial change and as a pacifist in the face of the Great War. She worked as a journalist from the age of 14 and slowly began to gain a profile as a speaker on Zionism and as a novelist. She was adamant that a Jewish state was necessary, but also that it should and could only be won peacefully. Lily Tobias wrote four novels, and a collection of short stories and the first dramatization for the stage of Daniel Deronda.