Josef Chaim Brenner

Josef Chaim Brenner (1910)

Josef Chaim Brenner (variants of the first names: Yosef, Joseph, Haim , pseudonym temporarily: J. Hever ; born September 11, 1881 in Novi Mlyny , Chernigov Governorate , Russian Empire ; † May 2, 1921 south of Jaffa ) was a Russian-Jewish Writer, literary critic and translator.

Life

As a boy, Brenner first studied in various yeshivot , including in Pochep , where he made friends with Uri Nissan Gnessin , the headmaster's son. From here he moved to Gomel , where he joined the covenant and published his first short story Pat Lechem ("A piece of bread"). After 1900 he lived in Białystok and Warsaw and served in the Russian army from 1901 to 1904 . When the Russo-Japanese War broke out, he fled to London with the help of a few friends, where he was active in the socialist movement Poale Zion . He worked in a printing company and in 1906 founded the magazine Ha-Meorer ("Der Erwecker"). In 1908 he moved to Lemberg in Austria-Hungary , where he worked as the editor of a magazine and wrote a Yiddish monograph on the life of the writer Abraham Mapu . In 1909 he emigrated to the Ottoman Empire in Palestine, where he first worked in Hadera and later moved to Jerusalem . During the First World War , Brenner took on Ottoman citizenship in order not to have to leave the country. In 1915 he moved to Jaffa and taught Hebrew grammar and literature at the Herzliya High School in Tel Aviv . At that time he was the editor of various magazines and in 1920 one of the founders of the Histadrut . When he returned to Jaffa from Galilee in 1921 , he was murdered during the Jaffa riots .

The largest kibbutz in Israel, Givat Brenner south of Rechowot , is named after Josef Chaim Brenner.

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Brenner's literary work reflects the experiences of his life. The motif of wandering comes up again and again, with his literary characters initially indulging in the illusion that a change of residence will also lead to a change in personal fate. The hikes lead in various directions: from the Stetl to the city, from Eastern to Western Europe , from the Diaspora to Erez Israel, and even here from the village to Jerusalem. Some of his novels are written from the perspective of the “ omniscient narrator ” but have an intimate and personal tone. He enriched the Hebrew colloquial language by including Yiddish, Russian and German words and idioms and did not shy away from using Anglicisms and Arabicisms when telling stories from the language area concerned . Its protagonists are antiheroes who are open to their "antiheroism". As losers and outsiders, they are satirically contrasted with winners who enjoy their social and sexual success. Brenner translated into Hebrew: by Gerhart Hauptmann Die Weber , Michael Kramer , Fuhrmann Henschel and Einsame Menschen , by Dostoyevsky Guilt and Atonement , by Tolstoy The Squire and His Work , by Arthur Ruppin The Jews of the Present and the diary of Joseph Trumpeldor . As a critic, Brenner dealt with well-known authors of contemporary Hebrew and Yiddish literature, including Peretz Smolenskin , Jehuda Leib Gordon , Micha Josef Berdyczewski , Mendele Moicher Sforim , Chaim Nachman Bialik , Saul Tschernichowski , Isaak Leib Perez and Schalom Alechem . Brenner dealt with the views of Achad Ha-Am in numerous articles and essays . Mainly it was about the interpretation of the term Galut ( Diaspora ). For Brenner, life in the Jewish diaspora meant idleness, and the salvation of such a life lay in work. In his view, productive work for the Jewish people was a matter of life. Judaism is not an ideology, but an individual experience that can only become a collective experience through changes in the social and economic area.

His own work was judged differently by contemporary critics. Some, like Joseph Gedalja Klausner , criticized the lack of distance between the author and the aesthetic object. Bialik described him as an important author whose style was characterized by carelessness, while for Berdyczewski the outstanding honesty of his writing overshadowed his stylistic shortcomings. Colleagues and friends saw him as "a worldly saint, trapped in a world that was not worthy of him" ( Hillel Zeitlin ).

The Brenner affair

On November 24, 1910, Joseph Chaim Brenner published an article in the workers' newspaper HaPoel Hazair about the conversion of numerous European Jews to Christianity, sparking a great dispute that went down in the annals as the Brenner affair , culminating in 1911 and publicly until 1913 Opinion in Eretz Israel and the entire Jewish world, but especially in Eastern Europe, occupied the mind: Brenner explained that there was no need to fear these conversions, the existence of the people of Israel was not threatened by them; In addition, the Bible is neither the “Book of Books” nor the “Holy Scriptures” - a storm of indignation ensued, the newspaper's subsidies were canceled, and heated debates between those who rejected and supporters ensued. The reaction of the Odessa Committee of Chovevei Zion, which stopped the funds, was largely rejected as inadmissible interference and as an encroachment on freedom of expression. HaPoel Hazair finally emerged stronger from the "affair" and developed into one of the country's respected newspapers.

Literature / sources (selection)

• Encyclopedia Judaica . Vol. 4, pp. 1347-1351.
• John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 117.
• Gershon Shaked: History of Modern Hebrew Literature. Prose from 1880 to 1980. Translated from the Hebrew. by Anne Birkenhauer . Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 978-3-633-54112-6 .

See also

• Israeli literature

Web links

Commons : Josef Chaim Brenner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Portrait of Joseph Chaim Brenners at the Jewish Agency ( Memento from January 14, 2005 in the Internet Archive )