Between Realism and Modernism: Brenner's Poetics of Fragmentation

Abstract

This article first explains the fact that because of modern Hebrew literature's belated emergence as a national literature, numerous typically distinct periods or modes of fiction (in particular realism and modernism) were simultaneously available to Hebrew writers. After locating the ideological, nationalist underpinnings of realism's appeal for Hebrew writers from the Haskalah up through the turn of the twentieth century, the article turns its attention to Y. H. Brenner. Due to his fictional and non-fictional writings, Brenner is widely considered a central and foundational figure in early twentieth century Hebrew literature. His influential but elusive and often misunderstood narrative poetics are teased out of two texts which first appeared in 1911: the novel מכאן ומכאן ( Mi-kan umi-kan , From here and there), and an essay, הז-נר הארץ ישראלי ואביזר-הו (The land of Israel genre and its accouterments). Brenner's vision of Hebrew prose in Palestine points to a unique quality of this emerging national literature, as it, perhaps paradoxically, seems equally at home in realist and modernist modes of fiction. Moreover, throughout his forays into modernist modes of fiction, Brenner maintains the deep-seated beliefs that first pointed him toward realism, namely, that literature can play a role in rehabilitating Jewish society by addressing the problems that plague it.