Yosef Haim Brenner: A Life

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

English translation © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

This book was originally published in Hebrew in 2008 under the title Brenner: Sippur hayim © 2008, Am Oved, Tel Aviv.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shapira, Anita, author.

[Brener. English]

Yosef Haim Brenner : a life / Anita Shapira ; translated by Anthony Berris.

   pages cm — (Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture)

Originally published in Hebrew in 2008 under the title Brenner: Sippur hayim.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-8527-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Brenner, Joseph Hayyim, 1881–1921.   2. Authors, Hebrew—Biography.   3. Zionists—Biography.   I. Title.   II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

PJ5053.B7Z83413 2014

892.43'5—dc23

2014029030

ISBN 978-0-8047-9313-1 (electronic)

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard

Yosef Haim Brenner

A Life

Anita Shapira

TRANSLATED BY ANTHONY BERRIS

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

EDITED BY Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1. The Emergence of a Writer, 1881–1901

2. In the Imperial Russian Army, 1901–1904

3. London, 1904–1906

4. London, 1906–1908

5. Lvov, 1908–1909

6. In Palestine, 1909–1911

7. The Jerusalem Years, 1911–1914

8. Wartime, 1914–1918

9. Under British Rule, 1918–1921

10. Days in May, 1921

11. De Mortuis

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

It seems that with the exception of Agnon and Bialik, no Hebrew writer has captivated literary scholars as Brenner has. Dan Meron, Gershon Shaked, Menachem Brinker, Avner Holtzman, Nurit Govrin, Boaz Arpali, Ada Zemach, Dov Sadan, Hamutal Bar-Yosef, and Michael Gluzman have all written about Brenner’s work. All of them are scholars whose works I read and learned from in the course of writing this biography, and although I have not had occasion to quote from them, they all have my gratitude. I beg forgiveness from the many other scholars whose names are also not mentioned.

Every biographer of Brenner owes a debt of gratitude to Yitzhak Bakon. Bakon strove to collect all the material relevant to Brenner and publish his biography of the writer. He did not complete the work and mainly focused on the periods before Brenner’s immigration to Palestine. His was the first attempt to deal with the historical material pertaining to Brenner, and for that I am indebted to him. I availed myself of Haim Be’er’s works touching on the history of both the London and Palestine periods. He reached new sources that shed light on some obscure aspects of Brenner’s life. To understand Brenner’s complex personality, I felt I needed the help of psychiatrists’ insights. Avner Elitsur taught me about the manifestations of depression. Samuel Klagsbrun revealed the uniqueness of Brenner’s condition to me. Amos Oz directed my attention to the yurodivy phenomenon and its significance in understanding the mystical element in Brenner’s character. This book could not have been written without their advice.

Nurit Cohen-Levinovsky was my research assistant in this project, and her wisdom, industriousness, and resourcefulness were vital in locating the material that shaped the book. Shulamit Gera placed at my disposal the photographs collected by her late husband, Gershon Gera, and Michal Sela-Brenner sent me photographs that she had collected. The staff at the Lavon Institute Archive, at Genazim (Archive of the Hebrew Writers Association), the Israel State Archives, the Central Zionist Archives, the Herzliya Gymnasium Archives, the Aviezer Yellin Archives of Jewish Education in Israel, and the Yad Tabenkin Archives, as well as private individuals, all came to my assistance.

A sabbatical spent at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Judaic Studies, headed by David Ruderman, accorded me both the time and peace of mind I needed to write the book. Special thanks are due to my research group colleagues, from whom I learned so much, and to the Center’s library staff, who helped me find bibliographical items. I finished the book while at Columbia University, New York, where I drew on important material for the book’s final chapter.

Having the book published in English by Stanford University Press was the brainchild of my friend Steven Zipperstein. Anthony Berris produced a wonderful translation of my Hebrew text. I am greatly indebted to both of them.

And last but not least, thanks are due to everyone at Stanford University Press involved in the publication of this book.

Prologue

Yosef Haim Brenner’s life story encapsulates the drama of twentieth-century Jewish life: the transition from faith to atheism, from tradition to crisis; the wandering and migration from country to country; the transition from a profound connection with Russian culture to the discovery of Western culture; vacillation between Yiddish and Hebrew, between the first buds of the Zionist enterprise and an attraction to the big world. Brenner’s murder in an Arab-owned orange grove near Jaffa during the 1921 riots, when he was only forty, made him the great martyr of the Jewish rejuvenation project in Palestine and, subsequently, an icon of Hebrew culture. Each decade, he is rediscovered by young writers seeking not only a literary model but also an exemplary figure, a guide and mentor for the afflictions of the time. Brenner is not easy to read, but in his writing his young admirers discover an abrasiveness and authenticity and the striving for truth that they seek. He delves into the soul’s deepest recesses; he favors no one; he shouts the pain of the hopeless, uprooted Jewish individual and of the Jewish people who have yet to find solace. Brenner’s wailing was later interpreted as predicting the great calamity that was to befall the Jewish people in the twentieth century. In addition to being revered as a man of God and a guide to truth in literature and life, he was also hailed as a prophet. In the new Jewish Yishuv (community) in Palestine, Brenner—with his Hasidic rabbi image of a miracle worker possessing moral authority and capable of speaking the unvarnished truth to anyone—met the needs of the young secularists. His charisma shone through his shabby clothes and the heavy coat he wore even in the scorching summer heat. There was something mysterious and inscrutable about him that attracted and repelled, that aroused admiration and awe. He was thought of as a great rebel who challenged petit bourgeois conventions and sought a reformed world, a just and egalitarian society. Every few years since his death, Brenner has been rediscovered and espoused by perplexed young people trying to find their way first in the twentieth-century and now in the twenty-first-century world. He is admired as a writer and cultural leader by religious and secular people alike—and even more so as a person who laid down norms for a society that had lost its moral compass. He was a man of contrasts: skeptical of Zionism and loyal to the Land of Israel, the country where he wanted to raise his son and where he was killed; he possessed the boundless pessimism of a realist who unblinkingly observes reality and also the latent optimism of a man who irrationally claims that despite everything the Jews’ will to live will prevail; he epitomized the love of man, the willingness to help anyone in need, and also the terrible awareness of the shortcomings of the human race in general and those of his people in particular. Since his death, idealists have held on to Brenner as the righteous man, the secular saint of Israeli society. In these times of social turmoil and seeking the right path, young people in quest of social reform are turning wistfully to Brenner as a symbol, a beacon for all seasons.

One

The Emergence of a Writer, 1881–1901

Brenner was born in 1881 in Novi Mlini (new flour mills) in the province of Chernigov, northern Ukraine, on the Russia-Byelorussia border. The town is situated on the banks of the River Siem, not far from where it joins the Desna. Its population numbered approximately three thousand, ten percent of which were Jews, some seventy families. Shlomo Brenner, Yosef Haim’s father, was the town’s melamed (teacher). His mother, Chaya-Raisa, the daughter of Yosef Haim Mintz, owned a tavern like her mother before her. Another version has it that Grandmother Hinda was a midwife. She was a good storyteller with a fertile imagination. She also knew how to read cards and tell fortunes, and Jews and Gentiles alike came to consult her. Shlomo’s original family name was not Brenner but Lubanov. Grandfather Shmuel Lubanov had three sons: Haim, the eldest, kept his name and later became head of the yeshiva in Konotop. His other two sons changed their names so that they would be considered only sons and thus obtain exemption from service in the tsar’s army. David changed his name to Narodsky and became a Torah scribe in Bialystok, whereas Shlomo adopted the identity of a young man who had died, whose surname was Brenner.¹ In his story Shana ahat (One year), Brenner expands on the ploys and stratagems invented by the Jews to avoid military service.² The protagonist’s father changes his name, as Brenner’s father had done, complicating life for his son, Hanina Mintz.

The origins of the Lubanov family are unknown. It may be assumed that Shlomo Brenner moved to Novi Mlini because the name of the town (or one of the neighboring towns) was listed in his papers. The mother’s family was apparently local. Bahoref (In winter), Brenner’s first novel, has strong autobiographical elements. The description of Shalom Getzil—the fictional father who came to the town from the north, from Lithuania—has its roots in the Brenner family’s history. Getzil is the son of a family of Mitnagdim (Jews who opposed the rise and spread of Hasidic Judaism and placed emphasis on Talmud study), whereas the mother comes from a Hasidic family in the Ukraine, where Hasidism was widespread. According to one account, Shlomo Brenner was indeed a Mitnaged, but he still sent his son to study with the local rabbi, a Chabad Hasid.³ Novi Mlini was situated in an area abounding with rivers, streams, and lakes, which were interspersed with forests, cornfields, meadows, and various other beauty spots that by their very nature were well suited to children’s play.⁴ But the pranks and joyfulness of childhood were unacceptable to Jews in the Pale of Settlement. At age three, every boy attended the heder, where he sat all day reciting his lessons. Poor Jewish families such as the Brenners were particularly observant of this custom. Learning accorded prestige, which enabled the crossing of class lines. The scholar was given a seat by the synagogue’s Eastern Wall, mingled with the town’s who’s who, and was even invited to dine at the local rich man’s table. A true prodigy could marry a rich woman, and this was Shalom Getzil Feuerman’s dream for his son in the novel.

In the memoirs of a young man from Novi Mlini, Shlomo Brenner is described as a tall, open-faced, smiling man. He earned three rubles a week from his work as a melamed, and his family lived in poverty. His wife is described as a refined woman from a distinguished family.⁵ Yet in his recollections, Brenner writes of his parents: Both are poor, simple people, workers, adding a comment that he later crossed out, especially my mother.⁶ In the novel In Winter, the division of labor between mother and father is emphasized: the mother does the hard physical work, cleaning geese and selling the meat and fat. The father works as a melamed, a profession requiring no physical effort that might justify his being called a worker. In many cases the traditional Jewish family living in the Pale of Settlement was matriarchal in all matters pertaining to livelihood, and patriarchal in everything relating to prestige and authority. According to this division of labor, raising the children, keeping house, and ensuring the family’s subsistence fell to the woman. In lower-class families—those of artisans, such as cobblers, carters, and dairymen—the division of labor was fairer than in families with pretensions to the status of Torah scholars, in which the women bore the burden. It seems that this was the situation in Brenner’s family.

Very little is known about Brenner’s mother. Family tradition has it that Shlomo and Chaya-Raisa married in 1880, when both were eighteen—a relatively late age for a girl, which possibly indicates that she either had no dowry or was not particularly pretty. Yosef Haim was born a year later. Over the next twenty years, the couple had another three sons and two daughters.⁷ When his mother died in May 1914, Brenner wrote a letter to his friend Yosef Aharonowitz, editor of Hapoel Hatzair, asking him to publish a notice on her death. Do not add any condolences, he added, for I am inconsolable.⁸ Except for this request (it is uncertain whether it was sent), there is no mention of Chaya-Raisa in either Brenner’s correspondence or his contemporaries’ memoirs of his childhood and youth. In the novel In Winter, Brenner portrays her from two points of view, that of the child who sees her as a source of gentleness and love and protection against the father’s maltreatment and that of the adult who sees her as just a poor Jewess suffering anguish. The novel describes a mealtime conversation in the parents’ house. The children are discussing why it is forbidden to place a hen to brood on goose eggs: when the chicks grow and paddle in the river, the unfortunate mother will be unable to reach them or bring them back, and that is cruelty to animals. Yirmiah notes: My mother listens, raises her head, gazes at me sadly for a long time, and releases a sigh that poisons my guts, nods in something like despair, an after all is said and done nod . . . the poor hen!⁹ The son has spread his wings and flown far away, distancing himself from her both geographically and emotionally.

There is a contradiction between the gloomy, depressing description of the Feuerman home in the novel and the picture that emerges from fragmentary descriptions and hints from Brenner himself and others. A childhood friend of Brenner’s recounts that, in 1891, a Purim play was performed in the town with Brenner in the role of the hero, Mordechai. He also wrote Selihot (Penitential prayers) in which he joked about life in the town and its politics. This was possibly his first attempt at writing.¹⁰ From this point on, it seems that the spirit of impishness and jocularity did not leave Brenner. It is difficult to assume that someone whose personal life was replete with sorrow and misery, with so little light in it, such as that described by Brenner in the novel, could be capable of such mischievousness.

When he was nine-and-a-half years old, Brenner embarked on his wanderings through the towns of Ukraine to find a place of Torah. The story Shama (There) describes the torment of a child exiled from his home and forced to suffer poverty and humiliation in the homes of strangers. This is an irreversible step: attempts to return home are no less disappointing and painful than life in a strange land. Meanwhile, his brother Shmuel was born in 1887. The six years separating them gives rise to the supposition that at least one more baby was born in between them who did not survive.¹¹ The trauma of a sibling’s death might perhaps explain the adult Brenner’s anxiety over the wellbeing of infants. Brenner does not mention his brother Shmuel at all, perhaps because he was considered a prodigy and was his father’s favorite. It seems that his fall from the status of an only son and his being sent away from home were experiences that planted in him the feeling that his parents had abandoned him.

We have absolutely no knowledge about the year and a half he spent in Homel. Afterward he studied for a time (a semester) in Hlusk and, according to one account, was dubbed the diligent yeshiva student from Hlusk.¹² It was in Hlusk, in the Belarus district of Bobruysk, that the boy first became aware of a world outside the Torah and was first influenced by the winds of the secular Haskalah (enlightenment) movement blowing through the Pale of Settlement, especially in the Mitnaged north. In Winter reveals the bad name that the Lithuanian yeshivas acquired in the south of the country, where observant young men were allegedly exposed to the Haskalah and even heresy.¹³ Brenner described how, during the six months he spent in Hlusk, he started reading Avraham Mapu—the author of Ahavat Zion (The love of Zion), considered to be the first Hebrew novel—and taking an interest in secular literature and the sciences. By his own account, he soured’ somewhat.¹⁴ But his father demanded that he return home and the boy obeyed. But once Brenner was infected by the Haskalah, he was unable to rid himself of it: at night he would read bichelach, a derisory name for novels (the term books was reserved for religious works).¹⁵ Now Shlomo sent his son to study at a yeshiva headed by his brother in the nearby town of Konotop.¹⁶ Although he was a brilliant student (I had the head of a demiprodigy when I was young, he claimed¹⁷), for him Konotop was linked with a harsh experience of public humiliation and degradation.

He and his classmate Menachem Mendel Slutzker wrote articles in Hebrew in secret. This was a threefold sin: neglecting their Torah studies, engagement with secular matters, and writing melitzot (nonreligious writing) in Hebrew.¹⁸ In his articles Slutzker attacked none other than the yeshiva’s mashgiach (religious supervisor) but did not voice heretical opinions. Brenner, however, wrote an essay attacking Hasidism that was replete with barbs and jocularity, uncomplimentary descriptions, and epigrams aimed at the obscurantist Hasidim. The inhabitants of Konotop were Chabad Hasidim, and it caused a storm that their own yeshiva had spawned such a slanderer. The beadle ordered the manuscript burned. The head of the yeshiva, Brenner’s uncle, slapped Brenner publicly.¹⁹ He never forgot the public humiliation he underwent; it was as rite of passage, which the Bar Mitzvah, having not left an impression on him, was not.²⁰ His expulsion from Konotop led to his first confrontation with his father. Following that disgrace, Brenner wanted to go to Homel, the big city, to acquire an education, but on the way from Konotop to Homel he stopped off at home. There he was exposed to the influence of his father, who did not cease preaching to him and condemning education: Kenntschaft [knowledge] . . . Kenntschaft . . . What? What? What will it give you, this ‘Kenntschaft’ of yours?²¹ The youth was unable to withstand his father’s moralizing and arguments, and once more he bent to his father’s will and relinquished the notion of acquiring a secular education.²²

He was sent to study at the Pochep yeshiva, where a different wind was blowing. Rabbi Yehoshua Natan Gnessin, head of the yeshiva and the town’s rabbi, was an inspirational man who loved the Torah and his fellow men. The thirteen-year-old Brenner was one of the yeshiva’s youngest students. On his arrival, the rabbi tested him and immediately put him in the most advanced class. Brenner forged a profound spiritual closeness with him. Rabbi Gnessin was blessed not only with a fine disposition, erudition, and purity but also with tolerance and an understanding of his young students’ spirits. He allowed them to read Hebrew books and even Hebrew journals such as Hashiloah and Hamelitz were delivered to his house, and after reading them, he passed them on to his students.²³

Immediately after his arrival in the town, Brenner made friends with the rabbi’s son, Uri Nissan Gnessin. Uri Nissan was two years Brenner’s senior, but they both studied in the same group of advanced students. Their relationship was the kind of friendship made in adolescence that holds fast throughout life. Brenner’s loneliness, the distance from home, his gradual shift away from the beliefs and opinions of his father’s household, and his clear need for friendship, for human closeness, warmth, and love, all served in his forming a relationship with Gnessin. It was a friendship between opposites. Gnessin was an aristocrat in every fiber of his being: tall, distinguished-looking and graceful, restrained, cautious, and quiet. Brenner had coarse features, softened by his blue eyes, and radiated warmth. With his heavy gait, broad build, and average height, there was something plebeian in his appearance. He tended to talk volubly and loudly and to voice extreme positions. Despite their differences in appearance and temperament, they forged a friendship that played an important role in shaping their personalities and literary inclinations. They aroused in one another the desire to write, encouraged each other to try, and each was a sounding board for his friend to test his ability and talent. Their first works were published in two journals, Hakof and Haperakh, which they jointly edited and then made a fair copy. Several issues were published. They mainly engaged with yeshiva life and also literary matters. Brenner described his life at the Pochep yeshiva: There . . . there . . . gentlemen! I began to sense . . . to feel, there I began to sing . . . and feel the lack of education in a different way.²⁴

At Pochep a circle of young people formed around Brenner and Gnessin, a group of supportive friends that included Gershon Ginsburg, Shimon Bichovsky, Shimon Hillel Kruglyakov, and others, all of whom were to play a role in Brenner’s life. This group of yeshiva students had peeked into the secular world, tasted Hebrew literature, and sought to start learning Russian but without going further than that. They had taken only a very innocent peek, a first faltering step on the long road to acquiring a secular education. It was within this circle that Brenner appeared for the first time as a social leader, a literary entrepreneur, editor, and publisher.

Brenner lived in Pochep for more than two years, and during this period diligently observed the framework of yeshiva study. In spring 1897, when he was fifteen and a half, he decided to take action. In Pochep he stood no chance of acquiring a secular education, either because there was no one to help or teach him Russian or because he was caught reading bichelach by the mashgiach and came under suspicion of heresy.²⁵ Brenner wanted to learn Russian so that he could read Russian literature and speak the language of the country. He also wanted to learn Hebrew grammar and the Bible, read belles lettres in Hebrew and Yiddish, and perhaps even study history, geography, and mathematics to prepare for the matriculation examinations that enabled external students from the Pale of Settlement to enroll at a university. Uri Nissan, his older friend, remained living in his parents’ home in Pochep, while the bold, naïve Brenner went to the big city, Bialystok, hoping that he could fulfill his desires there. His Uncle Narodsky, the Torah scribe, lived in the city, and he was to provide lodging for the boy and supervise him. Brenner told his father that he was going to Bialystok there to study in its yeshiva.

Bialystok was a commercial and industrial city, and Brenner found the company he sought hard to come by. There are but very few enlightened people here, he wrote to Uri Nissan Gnessin.²⁶ A young man with no friends and acquaintances had difficulty acquiring them. Meanwhile, he tried studying by himself, employing the time-honored method of the religious school: he bought Russian-language textbooks in Yiddish. He studied the Bible. He was surprised to discover that very few people in Bialystok read Hebrew and that it was hard to find a lending library, even one that charged a fee. The letters Brenner wrote from Bialystok to his friends reveal the soul of a lonely, innocent, and honest young man facing a psychological and intellectual watershed. In contrast to the warmth and love that surrounded him in Pochep, in Bialystok he suffered loneliness. In Pochep his dear friends bolstered his self-esteem, whereas in Bialystok he did not find a single person with whom he could become close. He tried consoling himself by corresponding with his friends in Pochep and also by writing stories and articles for Haperakh. At the same time, he tried his hand at writing poetry. His uncle came to see what he was up to in the kloiz (Hasidic synagogue) where he studied and found him writing. He explained that he was writing to his friends in Pochep. The exchange with his uncle is similar to the clash in Brenner’s bildungsroman, In Winter, between Yirmiah and Shalom Getzil over Yirmiah’s seemingly purposeless writing. The uncle persists, saying, I do not understand what you have in common with your friends, and the boy reproves him: And what is a man’s life if not love and friendship? His uncle mocks him in response: Philo[sopher] . . . I detest such philosophers!²⁷ At the kloiz it became known that Brenner was writing—and studying very little. He moved to another kloiz, where he found a pupil and with his teaching fees managed to rent a room. He ate yamim (daily meals), which he hated, with Jewish families that supported yeshiva students. His efforts to learn Russian were restricted to nighttime because he was closely watched at the kloiz. His living conditions did not enable him to write.

He was in a wretched state: the loneliness, the pretense and hypocrisy, his longing for his friends and his need for their psychological support, his difficult living conditions, all combined to make him feel crushed and at his wits’ end. He became very sick, he wrote,²⁸ although it might have been psychosomatic, brought on by the stress of the constant pretense and loneliness. On his recovery he found a long letter from his father. His uncle had written to Shlomo Brenner telling him that his son was not studying but only writing. The letter caused ruination in the parents’ home. He also received chastising letters from people in his hometown and his uncle in Konotop.²⁹ The emotional entreaties did their work; he was unable to withstand the pressure.³⁰ Brenner returned to religion and for eight months became an enthusiastic Hasid. He changed from stem to stern and fled the world filled with doubts and nonbelief.³¹ He studied in a small kloiz in Bialystok, had set times for study and prayer. According to his own account, "I direct my heart to God and speak a great deal with my heavenly Father."³² His rebellion against his own father was also a denial of God, or at least a rebellion against His authority. His spiritual rediscovery constituted acceptance of the authority of both of his biological and his heavenly fathers.

His yearning for home, the cold and alienating atmosphere of Bialystok, and his father’s emotional blackmail directed Brenner toward renouncing his souring. Accepting his father’s wishes and relinquishing the frustrating day-to-day struggle eased tensions and raised his spirits. Matters reached the point at which he acceded when his father asked him to write to Rabbi Gnessin, denying the libel whereby he had ostensibly abandoned religion.³³ The very fact that he wrote the letter indicates the extent to which he was influenced by his father and, further, how easy it was to get him to change his mind, as does what happened afterward. When Uri Nissan Gnessin read his friend’s letter, he wrote back an angry missive on Brenner’s betrayal of their common ideals of aspiring to education and knowledge and their dreams of becoming Hebrew writers. Brenner’s letter in response was filled with abuse.³⁴ Gnessin replied to Brenner’s abusive letter with a long letter of his own. In it there was a blot, next to which Gnessin wrote, Here a teardrop fell. A teardrop on the loss of a life. See how it scorches the paper.³⁵ His emotional approach, his display of love for his friend, shattered Brenner’s resolve.³⁶ He recanted his repentance and begged his friend’s forgiveness.

Brenner’s plea for forgiveness was accompanied by a long confessional letter describing his internal conflict since he set on his path to knowledge and recounting the steps he had now taken to return to the road of secular education. He went back to learning Russian and began reading short stories in that language. He read Kalman Schulman’s History of the World and discovered a whole new realm.³⁷ Furthermore, for the first time in nearly a year he started writing again. He wrote several poems in the rhetorical style of the Enlightenment, naïve poetry of little literary merit. He sent one to Gnessin, along with a relatively brief letter because the cold in his room made writing difficult. He concluded the letter with a declaration of love and gratitude: My darling, my dear, my delight, my beloved, apple of my eye . . . be well! I am everlastingly grateful to you, for without you I would now be immersed in the stinking mire of Hasidism. . . . And you, only you have saved my soul.³⁸ When Shlomo Brenner heard that his son had abandoned religion once more, he wrote him a letter that Brenner found hard to withstand.³⁹ A titanic struggle for the young man’s mind ensued. He described to his friend the torment of his struggle with his father: I did not win a glorious victory easily. And my heart still bleeds.⁴⁰ The group of friends from Pochep gave Brenner the love, esteem, and self-confidence that had been undermined in the loneliness of Bialystok. Most important for Brenner was the group’s encouraging him to continue writing: The honorable gentlemen attest that I have talent.⁴¹ Just as his father had pushed him back to the shtetl, to the traditional society, his friends pulled him back up to the big, still unfamiliar world, but one he now knew existed.

In March 1898 Brenner returned to Pochep for nine months. He found himself some pupils and eked out a living teaching. He maintained the manners and appearance of a yeshiva student: he kept his sidelocks, wore a kapota (long black coat), covered his head, and diligently recited the Shema prayer every night. But at the same time, he was energetically learning Russian with the help of a local teacher and was even trying to learn German⁴²—without success, although he did evidently learn the Latin alphabet for the first time. He mainly read books published by the Tushiya publishing house, edited by Ben-Avigdor (Abraham Leib Shelkowitz), and the Hebrew journals Hashiloah, Ahiasaf, and Ha’eshkol.⁴³ He read Haim Nachman Bialik’s poems and declared: Our literature gives me great courage and strength.⁴⁴

When the autumn winds began to blow, he was assailed by self-pity and voiced it in his letters to Bichovsky in Vilna: his room is cold, he has no winter clothes, and most of his time is squandered on teaching. He can already read Russian but cannot speak a word properly. He describes himself as a lost and depressed young Jew, bent and degraded, with a painful heart and filled with a terrible bitterness, who has failed to acquire the education for which he lives a life of poverty. But at the end of this long screed of wretchedness, he adds a little self-mockery: A terrible groan. His tendency to exaggerate and lament and moan is familiar to his friends. I see a tiny smile on your lips, he writes to Bichovsky at the end of the letter. It is the laugh of a friend, the laugh of a dear brother at the ramblings of one dear to him. Along with the attack of self-pity, he also feels a sense of achievement. As far as Hebrew literature is concerned he reads and learns incessantly: My literary sense has developed to a great degree. The more he reads, however, the more aware he becomes of his need to broaden his horizons, but he also understands the character of his talent: I am certainly no poet, but I surely possess the talent of a storyteller.⁴⁵ Thus, at the age of seventeen, Brenner defined his literary vocation: he will be a writer.

At the end of 1898, Brenner went to Homel to broaden his education and train himself to be a Hebrew writer. Situated on the border between Belarus and Ukraine, Homel at the end of the nineteenth century was a district town and railway junction. It was a mediumsized town, with a population of fewer than 100,000, half of which were Jews.⁴⁶ Compared with Pochep, it was to all intents and purposes a city—a teeming, vibrant city, rich with public activities, divided among pious Jews, Zionists of all stripes, socialists, and Bundists, a sort of Jewish microcosm that gave expression to the storms that assailed the Pale of Settlement, the divergences and yearnings of the Jewish masses. One of Homel’s wealthy and distinguished families was that of Mordechai Ben Hillel Hacohen. The father was a Zionist activist who had even delivered a speech at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, the only delegate to do so in Hebrew. The news about Hachohen’s speech had appeared in the Hebrew press, and so, before his journey to Homel, Brenner thought it would be wise to seek his help as one lover of Hebrew to another. He made two requests: first, that Hacohen would read several of his short stories and give his opinion of them; second, that he would tell him whether he could earn a living wage in Homel, of the very modest sum of four rubles a month. Hacohen was not enthusiastic about the stories, and his opinion was shared by the reader at the Ahiasaf publishing house to which Brenner had already sent them, who detected some sparks of talent in them but thought that the writing was immature. With regard to the possibility of subsisting in Homel, Hacohen suggested that Brenner should come and see him. Brenner did so. Hacohen gave him the task of cataloguing his library, one that Brenner dutifully discharged. To find him additional income, Hacohen asked him to make a fair copy of a manuscript he had written. Brenner did not stop at making the copy but amended, edited, and even added to it. Hacohen—who apparently was affronted—put him in his place, and Brenner kept away from him thereafter.⁴⁷ But in Brenner’s first months in Homel, Hacohen was a real lifeline for him.

Over the next few months, Brenner devoted most of his energies to study and reading. According to Hillel Zeitlin, he worked as a librarian in the Zionist library, lending books to readers, talking to the borrowers, and preaching Zionism.⁴⁸ Although his livelihood was reduced, he was satisfied: I have bread and pickled herring and sometimes even a little butter (here, materialism!). He read a great deal of Hebrew and Russian literature, and because they bored him, he neglected his preparatory studies for the matriculation examinations but continued learning German. "I am developing insofar as I am able to understand what culture is in general, and Hebrew culture in particular, he declared. He was brimming with optimism: I am enjoying my world and am filled with ideals and aspirations to work toward the rebirth of our nation and its literature."⁴⁹ His fluency in Russian improved: he was already reading Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ivan Turgenev. He particularly liked the first two; Turgenev, less so. He read Nikolai Gogol and leveled criticism at him. He discovered the writings of the humanist critic Vissarion Belinsky and was greatly stirred by him. He incorporated Russian words and phrases into his letters, in much the same way he did with aphorisms of the Jewish sages, as if to say, Look, this is mine too!⁵⁰

It was at this time that Brenner forged a bond of friendship with a man much older than himself, the Hebrew teacher and writer Hillel Zeitlin. In his autobiographical recollections, he wrote: Of the people living who influenced me then, I should mention Hillel Zeitlin.⁵¹ Zeitlin was one of the people Brenner had intended to meet in Homel, but it seems that he was shy about initiating a meeting with a man of culture who had already gained a reputation and came from a distinguished family.⁵² The meeting between the two was eventually initiated by Zeitlin, who had heard about the yeshiva student who had come to Homel from Pochep: I was told that this young man is ‘Mars,’ a ‘seraph,’ a man of truth, a man who influences all around him, not with logical proofs, not even with beautiful and lofty speech, but with warmth, with valor, and with the kindliness of his nature. Zeitlin went to seek out Brenner at the Zionist library.⁵³ It is doubtful that at the outset of their relationship Brenner had already gained the reputation of a man of truth. Zeitlin’s description of Brenner’s appearance—as a young man wearing the garb of a yeshiva student, with coarse, strange features—is confirmed by other sources, including Brenner himself. Zeitlin describes him as possessing a melancholy mien, with a child’s blue eyes, clever and kind, and an inimitable gentle smile. His description of light and shadow intermingled in Brenner’s facial features is continued in the description of his temperament: he talks enthusiastically, courageously, joyfully, and as soon as he finishes what he has to say, his features convey sorrow and heartbreak.⁵⁴ Even then Brenner’s tendency toward extreme mood swings was clearly evident. When questioned about this by his friend Bichovsky, with whom he corresponded continuously throughout this period, he replied simply: My mood varies from letter to letter. Sometimes I am an optimist in one and a pessimist in another. And this is the source of the contrasts.⁵⁵

The Homel period exposed Brenner to intellectual poles of attraction: the world of existential-pessimistic thought and that of socialist thought. In addition to these opposing forces, he was also under the influence of the magnetic field of nationalist-Zionist thought and his own formative self-image as a writer with a mission. This generation of yeshiva graduates was not one of happy people, certainly not those who devoted themselves to writing and in Hebrew to boot. They were young people who saw themselves as detached from the tradition of their forefathers but who were still connected to it with their very being. The pain suffered by those caught in between, described by Micha Yosef Berdyczewski in his story Two Camps, was existential and psychological.⁵⁶ They knew that it was impossible to continue along the road of the old way of life, but they had neither the power nor the means—nor even the desire—to embrace Russian culture and sever their connections with Jews and Judaism. The semi-intellectual Jewish circles, circles of external students at various levels of acculturation, are the central axis of Brenner’s novels In Winter and Misaviv lanekuda (Around the point). Added to this was the perpetual poverty of the former yeshiva students, who had neither profession nor training for life and were forced to earn a living by giving private lessons or by konditzia (teaching for a year in the home of a Jewish family in a remote village). Here and there they found work on the editorial staff of one of the Hebrew language journals or translated something into Yiddish or Hebrew, managing to earn a few rubles. Here and there they published something and earned an author’s fee. It was living from hand to mouth while wandering from one Pale of Settlement town to another, with no possibility of marrying and raising a family. It is hard to be an optimist on an empty belly, in a cold room, without hope of a better future.

The existential pessimism of the former yeshiva students found an ideal forge in the Zeitgeist. The turn of the nineteenth century was the age of pessimism in European culture, with Friedrich Nietzsche as its greatest guide and mentor. His Thus Spake Zarathustra, which was widely read in Russia and translated into Hebrew by David Frishman, was highly regarded by the young people who crossed the fence from religious culture. It provided a secular explanation of the nature and purpose of life; from it blew a wind of great and lofty ideas, of a profound understanding of human nature, what it actually is and what it should be. It subverted the hypocrisy of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois society and introduced trends that swept away all the old beliefs. Its followers were exposed to a heady atmosphere—air of pure oxygen, without pretence, without the compromises of social conventions. They aspired to reach toward truth per se, beyond good and evil, to that inner nucleus where the secret of life dwells, even though its meaning is that life has no meaning. Arthur Schopenhauer, Max Nordau, Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, and Otto Weininger all belonged to the school of thought that prophesied the destruction of Western culture and saw no future for humankind. There is no significance in suffering, torment, happiness—all is vanity. Only a few, who would be able to break through and raise themselves through willpower, would cast off the shackles of the decadent society. Berdyczewski transferred these ideas to the Jewish milieu, especially in his books published by the Tze’irim publishing house.

Hillel Zeitlin exposed the young Brenner to radical pessimistic worldviews. They met frequently, and the subjects they discussed were always ‘the damned questions,’ questions on life itself, the content of life, and the purpose of life.⁵⁷ The predispositions of the two came under the almost magical—or demonic—influence of a third man, Shalom Sander Baum, immortalized as Uriel Davidovsky in both In Winter and Around the Point. According to Zeitlin, Baum was a man of secular culture who lacked both knowledge and interest in matters of Judaism. Although he was considered an erudite philosopher, Zeitlin thought that his erudition was at best mediocre. It appears that he was conversant with Russian literature of both belles lettres and revolutionary genres.⁵⁸ Baum’s influence stemmed more from the force of his personality than from his knowledge.

Baum was a tall young man with narrow, serious features and black eyes expressing great sorrow. He spoke little and made do with sarcastic half-sentences designed to dismiss what the previous speaker had said. Only when pessimistic theories came under attack would he emerge from his silence and defend them vigorously and in depth.⁵⁹ Baum behaved like a guru: in his small, monastic room he would gather a circle of friends who accepted the discipline of silence he imposed on them. It was forbidden to talk about everyday matters, such as nationalism, socialism, literature, or art. At these gatherings people always saw themselves as standing one moment away from death, so how could one come there with arguments and discussions and theories? Brenner would remain silent, admiring Baum and looking up to him. On occasion he was unable to restrain himself and would beg him: Talk . . . talk a little . . . let us hear some wise words.⁶⁰ In Winter describes a meeting between Yirmiah Feuerman and Uriel Davidovsky, with their numerous meaningful silences, until between us there begins an outpouring of half-mute confession about our moods, our impressions, our ‘strange moments.’ And this continues between us until approaching footsteps are heard. We are both unintentionally startled, somehow resembling a lover and his beloved hiding in the depths of the forest when people stumble upon them.⁶¹ Baum abhorred contemporary Jews. His opinions preceded and were far more extreme than those of Weininger, a Jew who loathed Jews and described them as feminine, lacking manly traits. And yet he would utter generalizations to the effect that in the past the Jews were a sublime historical phenomenon. As befitted a total pessimist, he rejected socialism but acknowledged socialist concepts and mingled with the socialists of his town. He kept his distance from Zionists: he did not believe that the Jews of the present were capable of creating anything.⁶²

Sander Baum had significant influence on the young Brenner’s tortured and impressionable mind. Fragments of Baum’s views adhered to Brenner and remained with him for the rest of his life. His attribute of looking at reality to its very depths, to the limits of human understanding, and not flinching from the truth, even though it might be as bitter as gall, he took from his acquaintance with Sander Baum. In 1903, when Brenner was serving in the tsar’s army, Baum took his own life. We do not know when the news reached Brenner or how he reacted to it, but Around the Point, written a year later, centers on Baum’s enigmatic figure and his death wish.

If pessimism was the pole of despair, it was countered by a pole of hope: socialist thought. Brenner was a natural candidate for becoming a socialist. The poverty of his home, of his hometown, and of his friends and acquaintances prepared him to feel the injustice in the existing society. In Homel, Brenner lived in the Valley, a poor neighborhood near the river, which would burst its banks in the spring, flooding the wretched houses of the unfortunates who lived there. The suffering of these people with whom he lived endowed him with recognition of the need to change the structure of society. The notion of equality, the right of every individual to human living conditions and dignity, were intuitive for him. He did not feel comfortable in splendid salons and among well-dressed people. The simplicity of his mien, his dwelling, and his attire reflected his extreme frugality, and even during this period it bestowed on him an almost monastic image. Zeitlin reports that one day Brenner asked him whether he could put up his Shmuelik in his house. When Zeitlin asked who this Shmuelik was, Brenner explained that he was a young yeshiva student whose father refused to support him because he had gone to Homel to acquire a secular education. Therefore, Brenner felt obliged to support him, and he ate at his table.⁶³ This story, which Zeitlin cites as an example of Brenner’s kindness, expresses his recognition that he is duty-bound to share everything he possesses, except for the minimum required for his own subsistence.

At the turn of the century, Homel was an important center of the Jewish Socialist Party, the Bund. The party appeared in 1897, at the same time as political Zionism, as part of the revolutionary agitation that rocked the Russian Empire. The Bund dreamed of a general revolution that would change the world order and raise the wretched of humanity to power. The idea of revolution was deeply rooted in the optimistic view that humankind marches forward (sometimes in revolutionary leaps) toward a bright future because people are intrinsically good and the depraved regime has distorted their goodness. According to the Bundist concept, there was no separate Jewish agenda—the fate of the Jewish workers was bound to that of their non-Jewish counterparts. It was therefore incumbent on Jews to take part in the general struggle against the regime. The Bund’s role was to work within the Jewish masses and rouse them to a class struggle against their wealthy employers.

Brenner was very much taken by the Bund’s ideas. Zeitlin reports that he discovered Brenner’s connection with the Bund quite by chance. In a conversation on pessimism with Brenner, Zeitlin voiced doubts as to whether Brenner would be capable of working for any social movement, to which Brenner replied: "Others can fight against the capitalists and their leaders. To edit Kampf [the Bund organ]—that I can do! Zeitlin goes on to quote something Brenner said during that period: The Jewish workers are not bad material. I am organizing them properly."⁶⁴ Apart from Zeitlin’s account, which was written after an interval of more than twenty years, there is also that of Bund leader Virgili Cohen, nephew of Hacohen and brother of Rosa Cohen (Yitzhak Rabin’s mother), who recounts that Brenner worked with him in Homel editing Kampf.⁶⁵ Nein und toisant mal nein (No, a thousand times no), a story attributed to Brenner, appeared in March 1901 in the third issue of Kampf.⁶⁶ It was written in Torah-scroll script, which might substantiate the assumption that it was the work of Brenner, who had learned this calligraphy. It might also indicate a divided heart: what has Torah-scroll script, which belongs in the world of religious books, to do with the anti-religious Bund? The story is written in the form of a social-democratic propaganda pamphlet, and it contains all the usual themes in this type of writing: class struggle, exploitation of the workers by the rich who bask in luxury, the bitterness of the poor, human dignity that is restored to the wretched by fraternity of the workers.⁶⁷ The story contains nothing of Brenner the author’s sophistication, irony, pain, and compassion. Yet Brenner as a Bund propagandist did his work well. The story is written in spicy, popular Yiddish as befits a propaganda piece aimed at the Jewish masses.

Brenner pored over the writings of Russian philosophers: Dmitry Ivanovich Pisarev, Nikolai Vasil’evich Shelgunov, Nikolai Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov, and Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. Dogmatic Marxism did not attract him. The mechanistic aspect of the Marxist diagnosis and prognosis did not sit well with his skepticism toward any doctrine whatsoever. Marxism lacked the degree of opacity, of uncertainty, for it to speak to him. Its moral motif was dulled by the inevitability of the future promised by determinism. Brenner tended more toward socialism in general terms than toward specific doctrines or organized political parties.

According to Zeitlin, he and Brenner, and Sander Baum too, sought to combine Nietzscheism with Tolstoyism—not as a theory but as a way of life. Because of the failure of attempts by young idealists living within bourgeois-urban society to adhere to the Tolstoyan way of life, which mandated austerity, vegetarianism, and nonexploitation of the labor of others, they sought to purchase a tract of land, possibly in America, where they could establish an exemplary agricultural community, close to nature, free of any trace of materialism. At the time, Brenner had to travel to Warsaw to deal with the publication of his first book, Me’emek akhor (Out of a gloomy valley), by the Tushiya publishing house. He and his friends had read Judah Leib Peretz’s short story Altwarg (Relics), and in light of the views expressed in it, they believed that Peretz might prove to be an ally who would assist them in obtaining the funds necessary to establish the community. Brenner went to Warsaw but evidently did not manage to have a proper talk with Peretz. A chasm separated the famed writer, who lived relatively well and had a court of literati, and the shy, strange-looking, provincial young man. The flesh-and-blood Peretz did not fit the image they had painted from his work. Brenner returned to Homel disappointed with Peretz, and from then on Peretz did not think very highly of Brenner either.⁶⁸

The world of socialist ideas constituted a counterweight to the world of pessimistic thought that Brenner had espoused. Pessimism fed his open-eyed despair, whereas socialist ideas planted in him a sense of social mission and commitment to his fellow men. Nietzscheism stimulated him into understanding the world as it is, whereas socialism nurtured his moral instincts, which obliged him not to cease searching for what might be reformed in it. At the same time, the Jewish question gave him no peace. As we have seen, Zeitlin and Brenner first met at the Zionist library, where Brenner worked as a librarian and preached Zionism. This library was part of an effort to inculcate Zionist ideas among local youth. To this end, various societies were established that were more social and cultural clubs than political organizations.⁶⁹ The society to which Brenner belonged was called Tze’irei Zion (The Young of Zion). It met every Sabbath eve for lectures, readings, and talks on Zionist and literary subjects. Its members were required to submit reports on books they had read and also on young people they had organized into Zionist cells. Another member of this group was Z. Y. Anochi (Aharonson), whom Brenner befriended.⁷⁰

The national idea—that is, the concept of a Jewish collective with needs and interests, material and spiritual alike, whose existence possesses a value of its own—was part of the set of worldviews absorbed by young people exposed to secular culture. The young Ahad Ha’am (penname of Asher Ginsberg) asserted that a person can be a good Jew without observing the 613 commandments. He thus drew a distinction between the Jewish religion and the Jewish people. The separation of the people from the religion afforded young people who followed the Haskalah an anchor of identity instead of the anchor of religion. Cold, it is cold living without God, says Yirmiah (In Winter).⁷¹ The Jewish people became the source of identity. Many young Jews were swept out of the Jewish milieu, either to the camp of the assimilationists, who sought a better life, or to that of the Russian revolutionaries, who aimed at liberating the Russian people and bringing redemption to the world. But the circles under discussion, such as that of Brenner and his friends, exchanged religion for nationalism. Berl Katznelson, Brenner’s junior by six years, wrote: I do not know whether our old people would get up in the night and hold a ‘midnight prayer’ and shed tears over the hardships of enslavement and feel the pain of the bitterness of exile as we, youngsters infused with revolution, felt the pain of the tragedy and the shame of the people.⁷² Katznelson’s comparison between the religious midnight prayer and the secular pain of the tragedy of the nation is not a random one; it is about people whose acculturation was only partial and whose secularization was still incomplete. Katznelson defined himself and his contemporaries as sons who exiled themselves from their father’s table.⁷³ Brenner was still walking around Homel in the attire of a yeshiva student and stammering in Russian, even though he read the language for pleasure.⁷⁴ His cultural world was eventually shaped by the Hebrew press, which he came to know well. The literature of the Enlightenment period, with the nationalist messages of Peretz Smolenskin, Yehuda Leib Gordon, Moshe Leib Lilienblum, and others who preceded Zionism, prepared him to absorb Zionist ideas.

Theodor Herzl’s political Zionism left no impression on Brenner’s world. Although Herzl might have fit the Nietzschean definition of the Übermensch who changes the world order, the movement he founded seemed bourgeois, focused on the corridors of power, and unsuited to the rebellious disposition of the young people. Brenner put the following sentence into the mouth of Feuerman’s friend, the socialist Haimovich: What Zionism [lacks] in risk-taking and sacrifices in relation to authority—that alone is sufficient to negate this idea as worthless.⁷⁵ Ahad Ha’am was a petit bourgeois author and his words did not give expression to the mental turmoil that beset Brenner and his friends in the course of their severance from the world of tradition. In their view, Ahad Ha’am, who called for a preparation of hearts and spoke of a spiritual center in Palestine, was detached from their material circumstances, their heated ideological debates, and was irrelevant to the torn heart they were experiencing. He radiated peace of mind and a haughty coolness in an era of volcanic eruptions. They admired his honesty, his striving to describe the truth from Palestine as it was, but it is doubtful that they were able to see him as the guide and mentor or source of inspiration they sought.

In a letter to his friend A. S. Nibilyov, Uri Nissan Gnessin wrote about Berdyczewski’s story Two Camps, published in 1899 by Tushiya. Gnessin waxed poetic: There is terrible confusion in the protagonist’s soul. But that is the wonderful point that fetters us to the story with those magical chains. For Gnessin the story’s greatness is in its revelation of the schism in the soul of the Jewish-European young people who seek to change their entire way of life but are unable to completely sever their ties with the past: They feel the noose of the world that binds them to their origins. Michael, the protagonist of Two Camps, is already outside the camp but yearns for it. Gnessin’s conclusion is that at present it is impossible to combine "our national culture with the secular one. A combination such as this would only be possible when the Jewish people are a people that shall dwell alone," built on strong social foundations. Gnessin’s interpretation of Berdyczewski is that the symbiosis between Jewish and secular culture cannot take place unless the Jews have a state of their own and change is effected in the Jewish people’s social structure. In this letter, Gnessin’s conclusion is a Zionist one.⁷⁶ Yet these were young people, whose worldview was still in its formative stages. Only a few weeks after this letter, in response to a request from his friend Bichovsky to send him an article on the nature of Zionism, Gnessin replied that he did not know what it is. I perhaps know the meaning of ‘the rebirth of the nation,’ but not of Zionism.⁷⁷ In another letter to Bichovsky from the same period he writes, "and it may well be that I am a total Zionist."

Brenner’s primary loyalty was to the Jewish people, not necessarily to one nationalist theory or another. In any event, theory was less important to him than deeds. He was therefore able to declare that until he was able to learn and feel that he was ready for it, he saw no point in going to Palestine: "On the contrary, our nation needs people like us both here in the Diaspora and there, and both here and there not to be satisfied with ‘aspiration and patience,’ but with work, to learn and teach. He concludes this letter with the words, With brotherly love, under the banner of ‘the rebirth of the Jewish people.’"⁷⁸ A short time later, he wrote a letter to Gnessin protesting against his friend’s intention of writing literature for the sake of literature and pure aesthetics:

I totally disagree with the theory in your letter regarding literature for literature’s sake, the purpose of man, and so forth. My view of life is completely different. In brief: we must sacrifice ourselves and reduce the evil in the world, the evil of hunger, slavery, dismissal, hypocrisy, and so forth. We must understand everything, understand and distance ourselves from mysticism and fantasies. We must heighten realism and sanctity in the world. We must reform the life of the Jewish people for it to be normal. And these torments of the soul are the result of