Breakdown and Bereavement

The Hebrew novelist, editor, and literary critic Yosef Haim Brenner was born into a pious but impoverished family in Ukraine. He became alienated from religious tradition while still in his youth and turned to Bundism and then Zionism. He was drafted into the tsar’s army, and in 1904, at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, he fled to England and lived in London’s East End until 1908, working as a typesetter. He emigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1909 and remained there until he was brutally murdered by Arab rioters in 1921. His novels and short stories mirror the deprivations and travails of his own life and of the primitive conditions he encountered in early twentieth-century Palestine. The protagonists in his fiction are uprooted, self-conscious intellectual antiheroes, unable to make their way in the world, battered and besieged, tossed to and fro by powerful historical forces and events.