Yehuda Burla was born in Jerusalem in 1886 to a highly educated Sephardi family, originally from Izmir, that had been rooted in Palestine for three hundred years. Educated in yeshivot and at a teachers college in Jerusalem, he worked from 1908 as a teacher and educational administrator, including five years as the director of Hebrew schools in Damascus after the First World War, during which he was drafted into the Turkish army as a translator. Subsequently he held high posts in the civil service and was the chairman of the Hebrew Writers Association. Burla's first published story, "Luna" (…