Reuven Brainin

Born in Liady in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus) to a traditional working-class Hasidic family, Reuven Brainin attended heder and yeshiva. After being exposed to Haskalah literature, he taught himself Russian and cofounded a secular library with Alexander Ziskind Rabinovitz (Azar) and other maskilim. Brainin moved to Vienna in 1880 intending to study agronomy; instead, he was motivated by the Hebrew author and Hebraist-nationalist activist Peretz Smolenskin and others to become a journalist. He produced his own Hebrew monthly, Mi-mizraḥ u-mi-maʻarav (From the East and West, 1895), which served as an essential platform for young Hebrew writers keen to render the new Hebrew-language culture more open to new trends in European thought and literature, more universal in its themes, and more open to the individual authorial voice; he was one of the first Hebrew critics to recognize the significance of the young Shaul Tshernikhovski. Through the 1890s and beyond, Brainin published a large body of literary criticism, feuilletons, literary translations, and popular scientific writing in the Hebrew newspapers and the Hebraist journals of the time, such as Ha-Shaḥar, Ha-Tsefirah, Ha-Magid, Ha-Shiloaḥ, and Luaḥ Aḥi’asaf. By 1905, his work began to seem superannuated, although he continued to be noted as a stylist and for his translations into Hebrew. Brainin left Berlin for North America in 1910; there, he pursued Hebraist ideals for a while but also came to play an important role as a Yiddish journalist and editor, particularly in Montreal; he was a cofounder of the Montreal Jewish Public Library and the Canadian Jewish Congress.