Nerves

An innovative Hebrew prose modernist, editor, and critic, Yosef Haim Brenner became a culture hero of the Second Aliyah for combining searing skepticism about the Jewish future, radical freethinking, passionate social radicalism, and defiant commitment to Hebraic and Zionist revival efforts despite his deep doubts that anything would come of either. Born in the Russian Empire into a pious but impoverished family in the small town of Novy Mlini (today in Ukraine), Brenner began writing fiction in Hebrew and Yiddish after growing alienated from religious tradition. He quickly emerged as a formally innovative Hebrew novelist especially interested in the inner lives of uprooted men alienated from the traditional world and seeking fruit­lessly for some path in the modern one. Brenner was deeply influenced by contemporary Russian realism and particularly by the wrenching moral drama and proto-existentialist concerns of Dostoyevsky, whose Crime and Punishment he translated into Hebrew during World War I. He also embraced a radical political and social vision, which he expressed serially through activism in Russia’s Jewish socialist Bund, in the Russian radical populist Socialist Revolutionary Party, and in a commitment to socialist and collectivist forms of life in Palestine’s Zionist Yishuv. After three years of service in the Russian army, Brenner fled to England in 1904 and lived in London’s East End until 1908. 

Continuing to write fiction while working as a typesetter, he also founded the short-lived but essential Hebrew journal Ha-Me‘orer (the Awakener) at a time when modern Hebrew literary publishing was beset by what seemed like a fatal crisis of readership. Brenner’s writings in this tumultuous era made clear that despite his serious involvement in Jewish and Russian radi­cal politics, he saw little hope that anything could be salvaged from a diasporic Jewish life that he deemed degraded by empty traditionalism, craven assimilation­ism, raw poverty, and exposure to violence. Although he extended this acid skepticism to the prospects of the Hebrew cultural revival of which he was a part, he insisted that he would continue to produce He­brew literature af al piḥen (nevertheless). In the same vein, Brenner concluded that the only possibility for a worthwhile Jewish life lay in the Zionist effort to build a new Jewish society and culture in Palestine, even though he thought the effort unlikely to succeed. He immigrated to Palestine in 1909 as part of the Second Aliyah. The important fiction he composed about his new environment was no less searing than his writ­ings about Jewish life in Russia, but Brenner also threw himself into the practical work of cultivating an independent Hebrew literary and intellectual scene in Palestine’s still-small Jewish community. 

Throughout his literary life, Brenner’s importance as a fiction writer was paralleled by his importance as an unflinching literary and cultural critic. His criticism, like his fic­tion, took remorseless aim at everything he considered cant or escapism (like the rhetoric of Jewish literary and cultural “renaissance” he associated with Yiddish neo-Romanticism); but Brenner was also a keen judge of talent across lines of movement, party, or style—he recognized the greatness of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish “human comedy” at a moment when many Yiddish critics were prone to dismiss his work as old-fashioned. Brenner was murdered in the course of a week of anti- Jewish riots in Palestine in May 1921.