Customer Reviews

Breakdown & Bereavement

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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.

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.