20
PARTISAN REVIEW
Brenner made his characters speak Hebrew ; he made them
pronounce in it thoughts that were , if anything, existentialist before
existentialism (probably without his knowing the very term
existen–
tialism).
His stories suggest that all of us are left alone in the world and
that it's up to us to struggle against odds, that we are bound to lose
the battle and yet we ought to fight it. Brenner made his lone heroes
say all this in Hebrew, perhaps as a kind of a metaphysical protest.
Hebrew was, after all, the language of the nonexistent God; so that
complaint which God would never listen to , let Him not hear it in
Hebrew. Brenner, it has been pointed out many times , hated Jews .
One Jew he hated in particular - himself. He called his collection of
miserable characters , those dropouts , those self-educated little refu–
gees from Eastern Europe , youths without guts or purpose - he
called them "dead souls" (there are, however, a few exceptions in his
stories). But most of them, including pioneers in Palestine, he
described as "living ghosts ." Puritans, who are endlessly talking of
sensual liberation; intellectuals chatting day and night about manual
work and about "going back to the land"; little politicians using big
words ; eternal wanderers, uprooted forever, exchanging views on
"roots"; atheists, sweating with guilt and shame whenever they dare
to dream about the shadow of a woman. World reformers who can–
not even tie their own shoelaces. Oh, he hated their guts. Yet let me
tell you something: with an enemy like Brenner, who needs friends?
Brenner's
Breakdown and Bereavement
is available in English transla–
tion ; read it and see for yourselves the desperate compassion he had
after all for his characters , of whom he sometimes wrote like the
worst of all anti-Semites . He made them look sick and phony and
pompous, or at best pathetic and hopeless. That's what Brenner did,
and that is what many other members of the Great Generation of
modem Hebrew literature did, if not as vehemently . And this is the
real context of even the most contemporary Hebrew literature: the
soul-searching, the self-hatred, mingled with compassion, the wrath,
the ironies, and a certain sense of "unrealness" about the people, the
time, the place, and the language .
What actually happened when Brenner's own characters , his
own models from real life , read his stories? Something happened
which, I believe, is almost unique in the history of world literature:
once the characters had read about themselves in the stories by
Brenner and his fellow writers, they were deeply hurt, insulted,
humiliated, and shocked; in fact they grew very angry ; not with
