Out of the Depths & Other Stories

by Y. H. Brenner, David Patterson (Translator), Ezra Spicehandler (Translator)

This volume includes a large selection of Brenner's shorter fiction, including Out of the Depths, One Year, From A to M, Impressions of a Journey, Nerves, (translated by Hillel Halkin) and the fascinating Memories of Brenner, by the hebrew poet David Shimoni. It was translated in the main by the late David Patterson, former President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and by Ezra Spicehandler, who also contributed to the introduction.

This is the second volume in the Toby series of Brenner's works in English.

450 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1909

Reviews

[K C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book my mistake. I thought I was getting Brenner's novel Breakdown and Bereavement but instead got this book containing some of his short stories along with a short biography. The biography was interesting and helped put the stories in perspective, but I am not a great fan of short stories. They always seem to leave me hanging, as if they are incomplete, and these were no different. The subject matter was so Russian, I had to keep reminding myself, reading an English translation, that the original was in Hebrew, not Russian. The style was incredibly Dosteoveskian. I did not like the translator's style of most of the stories which translated all words into English, but italicized those words that were in Russian or Yiddish in the original, and not in Hebrew. As a result it looked as if odd words were being emphasized that weren't being emphasized at all, just written in another language. Using the original language in those cases with a footnote to English would have been much less jarring. All being said, I definitely want to read the novel, Breakdown and Bereavement, which is translated by a translator with whom I am very familiar and whose translations are generally excellent.