Yosef Haim Brenner

Yosef Haim Brenner, alternately Yosef Chaim Brenner, (1881 - 1921) was a Ukrainian-born Hebrew-language author, one of the pioneers of modern Hebrew literature.

Born to a poor family, Brenner grew up in grinding poverty.

In 1902 he was drafted into the Russian army. Two years later, when the Russo-Japanese War broke out, he deserted and was caught, but escaped to London with the help of the General Jewish Labor Union, which he had joined as a youth. He lived in an apartment in Whitechapel which doubled as an office for Hame'orer, a Hebrew periodical that he edited and published in 1906-1907. In 1922, Asher Beilin wrote a memoir, Brenner in London, about this period in Brenner's life.

Brenner immigrated to Palestine (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in 1909. He worked as a farmer, eager to put his Zionist ideology into practice. Unlike A.D. Gordon, however, he could not take the strain of manual labor, and soon left to devote himself to literature and teaching at the Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv.

Brenner was murdered in southern Tel Aviv in May 1921 in the course of the anti-Jewish Arab riots known as the "massacres of 1921". The site of his murder is now marked by Brenner House, a center for the youth organization of the Histadrut, Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed.

Kibbutz Giv'at Brenner was also named for him.

Brenner was very much an "experimental" writer, both in his use of language and in literary form. With Modern Hebrew still in its infancy, Brenner improvised with an intriguing mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish, English and Arabic. In his attempt to portray life realistically, his work is full of emotive punctuation and ellipses.

Bibliography

In Winter (novel), Hashiloah, 1904 [Ba-Horef]
Around the Point (novel), Hashiloah, 1904 [Misaviv La-Nekudah]
Min Hametzar (novel), 1908
Nerves (novella), Shalekhet, 1910 [Atzabim]
**English: In Eight Great Hebrew Short Novels, New York, New American Library, 1983
**Spanish: In Ocho Obras Maestras de la Narrativa Hebrea, Barcelona, Riopiedras, 1989
**French: Paris, Intertextes, 1989; Paris, Noel Blandin, 1991
From Here and There (novel), Sifrut, 1911 [Mi-Kan U-Mi-Kan]
Breakdown and Bereavement (novel), Shtiebel, 1920 [Shchol Ve-Kishalon]
**English: London, Cornell Univ. Press, 1971; Philadelphia, JPS, 1971; London, The Toby Press, 2004
**Chinese: Hefei, Anhui Literature and Art Publishing House, 1998
Collected Works (four volumes), Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1978-1985 [Ketavim]
Out of the Depths
** English: Colorado, Westview Press, 1992
Around the Point
** Yiddish: Berlin, Yiddisher Literarisher Ferlag, 1923
In the Winter
**Yiddish: Warsaw, Literarisher Bleter, 1936

References

*This article draws on "יוסף חיים ברנר" (Yosef Haim Brenner) in the Hebrew-language Wikipedia. Retrieved May 29, 2005.
* Entry on the site of the Institute for Translation of Hebrew Literature