The Invention of Hebrew Modernism: Reading Y.H. Brenner’s In Winter

Abstract

This article offers an ‘economic’ reading of Y.H. Brenner’s In Winter and interprets it as a revolutionary modernist text. By describing Brenner’s articulations of the socio-psychological divide, the author suggests that Brenner’s changing perception of poverty is a hermeneutical key for understanding his literary work in the early 20th century. Material poverty permeates Brenner’s early collection of short stories Out of a Gloomy Valley (1900), which seems to underscore the social and material basis of Jewish suffering. But in 1903, when In Winter was published, Brenner’s view of poverty’s significance had changed. Poverty becomes not only a material reality, but a tenet of the textual fabric itself, signifying the disheveled style of Feuerman’s writing. Moreover, as In Winter approaches its conclusion, poverty gains yet another meaning as a key psychological concept that transcends its social foundation, elucidating the empty, inexplicable void Feuerman experiences. The figuration of poverty sheds light on Brenner’s gradual modification of the sociopsychological binary in In Winter, thereby distancing the first-person narrator from the Hebrew writer’s role as a ‘watchman unto the house of Israel’.