I didn’t have time to write all that I had planned this week so Orwell will have to be delayed to the upcoming weeks.
Today I would love to introduce you to an author who was also down and out in London in the beginning of the 20th century – Josef Haim Brenner. Some of his work was translated into English and Spanish but the truth of the matter is that I don’t know if his work could be understood completely outside of the Jewish Zionist background in which it was created, it has been written in the Wikipedia about his work:
“Brenner was very much an ‘experimental’ writer, both in his use of language and in literary form. With modern Hebrew still in its infancy, Brenner improvised with an intriguing mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish, English and Arabic. In his attempt to portray life realistically, his work is full of emotive punctuation and ellipses.”
Brenner is truly phenomenal in Hebrew, but some say that his life, that ended tragically is far more important than his creation. Therefore, it’s important for me to begin this week that focuses on realism with several sentences that he wrote, especially because S. Y. Agnon, the Nobel Prize winner wrote about him after his death that he was a writer with no imagination. In a very well known article, ‘The Israeli Genre’, that he wrote after he immigrated to Palestine, he asks fundamental questions about how we characterize a place that has no history. He says that he as a writer has no problems describing the characters from Russia but the Israeli characters come across as caricatures and the whole idea that there is an ‘Israeli Genre’ is pathetic. Later on he touches the problem in describing such a small place. Every story you tell is bound to be connected to someone you know, people do not believe that you can imagine something that might have been; they wish to be remembered in the novelist’s writing and once published they are offended by his writings.
This is the theme we are going to deal with this week: what is fiction what is non-fiction? Do we really have protection in the declaration that this is a ‘work of fiction, any resemblance to real people and events are purely coincidental.’