Under This Blazing Light by Amos Oz Read Free Book Online Page A

‘dreams’ (also in inverted commas), he even constantly mocked himself.
    Brenner ostensibly entered the ‘Zionist dream’ in the same way as a cigarette goes through a piece of paper: he almost came out on the other side as soon as he had burnt a small hole. He would have done so, had he not been murdered first by Arabs in what was almost the first organised pogrom to be perpetrated against us in Palestine. And perhaps at his death Brenner was the least amazed man in the whole of Jewish Palestine.
    ‘Your breathless brother’ - that is how Brenner signed himself in a letter to Hillel Zeitlin. Brenner, that breathless brother of ours, our ugly, miserable brother who wrote, ostensibly, mutilated stories about our ugliness and misery. And who ostensibly hated and despised us and our bloated rhetoric. Yet he himself penned hundreds of fevered pages simply to tell us that it was better for us all to say nothing. And for this paradox he hated us, and also himself.
    But, I say to you, all this is only ostensibly true. That is to say, it is true, and yet it is not true.
    But here we come to something so subtle that it can hardly be put into words. Perhaps we can try to make it plainer by means of a small illustration. Let us imagine that the charges against Brenner could be drawn up in legal form:
    1 The accused is tormented by hatred of his own origins.
    2 Moreover, he is a desperate man.
    3 Moreover, he mocks at his own words, hates himself, and hates those who are like him.
    4 Nevertheless, in some obscure way he is also proud to the point of arrogance.
    5 Moreover, he loathes ugliness, yet shows surprising compassion for ugly people.
    6 He is a strange man, who exaggerates almost everything.
    7 He is also hysterical.
    Plainly these items do not necessarily mount up so as to aggravate the indictment, but rather they seem to mitigate or extenuate each other. Or at least they complicate the indictment enormously.
    No. I have not managed to explain myself by means of this illustration. Let me try again, and say, with only slight exaggeration: with enemies like Brenner, who needs friends? Or again, with my own private exaggeration, to which I would not like to commit Brenner or any of his admirers, let me say this: happy is the people which can produce an enemy like Brenner.
    Brenner’s hatred is a molten mass of passionate love infused with loathing and suffering and savagery and compassion and inner forgiveness and mockery - mockery even of the forgiveness itself - and endless inquisitiveness and despair and something else, something marvellous which I cannot name and which Brenner himself was unable to name, and that is what lies beyond despair.
    Aaron Zeitlin calls Brenner ‘A serious soul full of truth’. And he also says, ‘He was at once broken and whole.’
    Asher Beilin in his memoirs describes Brenner in the period when he was editing Hameorer, Brenner in London, in the Whitechapel ghetto, at a time when it seemed as though the end had come. The hopes of a Jewish revival were fading. Zionism was dying. Hebrew literature was the peculiar preserve of a few hundred eccentrics scattered in eight or nine countries, and even they were growing tired. Brenner spoke and wrote at that time as though he were the ‘last of the last’. As if it was only an obscure quality of ‘sick’, masochistic obstinacy, a kind of inner compulsion, which forced him to write and print and edit and bind and distribute and put in the post to the scattered remnants of those eccentrics his beloved Hameorer. Beilin writes as follows:
    ‘One evening, I saw him in Whitechapel bent under the weight of a heavy sack. His face was grim and he could hardly drag his feet along ... He was on his way to the post office. The sack contained copies of Hameorer. I had the impression that he was bearing on his shoulders the burden of all our miseries and woes ... I followed this great brother of ours with my eyes, until he was swallowed up in the crowd.