Breakdown and Bereavement is set in Palestine in the years before WWI, when the tragic pattern of Arab-Jewish relations was taking shape. The hero, Hefetz, is a wanderer in search of a spiritual homeland. Translated with an introduction by Hillel Halkin.
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Text: English, Hebrew (translation)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Brenner (1881-1921) escaped from the Russian army to London where he worked as a typesetter and Editor. Immigrating to Palestine in 1909, he was killed by Arab rioters in 1921. Brenner was the most prominent literary figure in pre-State Israel in his day, and shifted the center of Hebrew literary activities away from Europe.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An early classic of Hebrew Literature,
By
This review is from: Breakdown & Bereavement (Paperback)
Brenner was the most prominent literary figure of the First Aliyah. He was a man- of - letters , a critic, commentator, essayist, translator , poet and above all, novelist.
The publisher of this book, Toby Press describes it as follows: "Brenner's Hefetz is a wanderer in search of a spiritual homeland. His desperate attempt to build a new life in Palestine has been taken to symbolize the entire Zionist enterprise. Far more than an absorbing period piece, Breakdown and Bereavement is the universal story of individual loneliness integral to the human condition. Brenner's writing comes alive in a fluent and sensitive rendering by Hillel Halkin, the distinguished translator of Agnon, Berdichevsky, Amos Oz and Haim Sabato.(266 Pages) Brenner may not attempt the linguistic complexity and symbolic depth of his great compeer, S.Y. Agnon but his fiction is nonetheless of great value and historical importance.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A snapshot into a lost world,
By Eric Maroney (Trumansburg, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Breakdown & Bereavement (Paperback)
Breakdown and Bereavement is novel marked literary by high-highs and low-lows, and in the middle, gives an excellent snapshot of the world which existed in Palestine in the waning days of Ottoman rule before the coming of the British and their mandate, and the rising nationalistic aspirations of the Jewish settlers and the Arab inhabitants. In Breakdown and Bereavement Jerusalem is a sleepy backwater; an Asian town, the Jews living untouched by Zionism, and still reliant of international charity for their living. The novel presents a stark picture of Jewish life in early 20th century Palestine: poverty, uncouth living, and the smallness of life, are all on display, giving this novel a veracity which other accounts of the early days of Zionism do not possess. The shtetl lives on in the capital of Judaism. With all that, this is still a flawed novel, going on a bit long in places where it should be short, and treating weighty subjects in too short a span.
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