מן המצר

by Joseph Hayyim Brenner, י. ח. ברנר (Author's Hebrew Name)

מן הנובלות העזות שנכתבו בספרות העברית, ואולי היצירה הדרמטית ביותר של ברנר, שעלילתה הסוערת מסופרת בלשון שאין דומה לה. דמויותיה הן מהגרים יהודים מרוסיה המתגוררים ברובע וייטצֶ'פל הלונדוני.

אברהם מנוחין, דמות רמת-קומה ומאירת-פנים, נערצוֹ של מוכר-העיתונים המספר את עלילותיו, הוא איש מפוכח, שלם עם עצמו, שחי בצניעות. אך התנהלותו תיפָּרֵם כשיחרוג מחיי עצמו וינסה לארגן נחמה קטנה בחייהם של אחרים.

הנובלה נכתבה בלְבוֹב ב-1908, לאחר שברנר עזב את לונדון, ונדפסה לראשונה ב'העולם', וילנה, תרס"ט (1909). בנוסח שבספר זה נעשתה עריכה מזערית ונוספו לו ביאורי-מלים.

117 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1909

About the author

Brenner was born to a poor Jewish family in Novi Mlini, Russian Empire. He studied at a yeshiva in Pochep, and published his first story, Pat Lechem ("A Loaf of Bread") in HaMelitz, a Hebrew language newspaper, in 1900, followed by a collection of short stories in 1901.

In 1902, Brenner was drafted into the Russian army. Two years later, when the Russo-Japanese War broke out, he deserted. He was initially captured, but escaped to London with the help of the General Jewish Labor Bund, which he had joined as a youth.

In 1905, he met the Yiddish writer Lamed Shapiro. Brenner lived in an apartment in Whitechapel, which doubled as an office for HaMe'orer, a Hebrew periodical that he edited and published in 1906–07. In 1922, Asher Beilin published Brenner in London about this period in Brenner's life.

Brenner married Chaya, with whom he had a son, Uri.

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. According to biographer Anita Shapira, he suffered from depression and problems of sexual identity. He was murdered in Jaffa on May 1921 during the Jaffa riots.

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.