‘A ridiculous miracle hanging over our heads’

Summary

Brenner was ostensibly a miserable Jew straight from the squalor of the ghetto. One of those bent and broken characters who, having lost God in their youth and set out in search of something else, never reached any promised land: a woman, or love, or ‘national revival’, or ‘success’, or any kind of happy ending. On the contrary, they sank from bad to worse until they died pointlessly just as they had lived pointlessly. Brenner was apparently one of those Jewish outcasts of a former generation, whom the land – every land – vomited up.

What is even worse, Brenner and his heroes had ostensibly stepped straight out of the crudest sort of antisemitic caricature: always the ghetto man, always feverish and loud, always complicated, wrestling with all sorts of physical desires with sweaty remorse, not steeped in sin and yet steeped in miserable self-recriminations, always careless, confused and clumsy and tormented by self-hatred, repulsively inquisitive, extremely ignoble, and all in all – the man of the ghetto who wanders from ghetto to ghetto and finds no redress and no way out. That is apparently all there is to Brenner or to all his heroes. Such an archetypal ghetto Jew. Such a mass of dry bones. A bundle of Jewish sorrows full of sighs and unaesthetic pains.

(Since I have mentioned Jewish sorrows I ought to add in parentheses that, despite everything, we have had and we still have some liberated Hebrew writers, who are not terribly interested in our sorrows. Who says that we all have to write about Jewish sorrows? We've had enough of that. We can also write about this. And about that.