Poetics, Ideology, Biography, Myth: The Scholarship on J. Ḥ. Brenner, 1971-96

82REVIEW ESSAYS 19.Ferguson, p. 65. 20.The March is a biannual "pilgrimage" to Poland and Israel in which teenage participants inscribe themselves into Zionist master commemorative narratives of "exile and redemption" while memorializing the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel. See my "Lunch at Majdanek: The March of the Living as a Contemporary Pilgrimage of Memory," Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 17, nos. 1-2 (1995): 57-66, special issue: Pilgrimage, ed. Shifra Epstein. 21.Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish Historyand Jewish Memory, with a foreword by Harold Bloom (Seattle, 1982; reprint, New York, 1989), p. 117 (page reference is to reprint edition). Italics in original. The quotation is cited as Le Monde, 2 May 1987, p. 9. 22.Claudia Braude, "The Archbishop, the Private Detective, and the Angel of History: The Production of South African Public Memory and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ," Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 8, no. 2 (1996): 64. 1 thank my colleague Heidi Grunebaum-Ralph for bringing this article to my attention. In addition, I am greatly indebted to Grunebaum-Ralph for a series of personal communications in March 1997 during which many of the ideas concerning the relevance of the TRC hearings to these issues of memory, forgetting, and justice were worked through. I thank her for allowing me to reproduce our conclusions here. Poetics, Ideology, Biography, Myth: The Scholarship on J. H. Brenner, 1971-96 May 2, 1996, marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the assassination of the writer Joseph Hayyim Brenner and five of his friends by Arab rioters in a Jaffa suburb. In that same week, there were no fewer than four significant and wellattended conferences in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to mark the date and to celebrate the appearance of two new books on his life and work. In that same month, the Israeli postal authority issued a stamp bearing Brenner's portrait as part of a new series of stamps about writers, which were issued to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Organization of Hebrew Writers. It would be hard to find another Hebrew writer or another public figure whose anniversary would still be commemorated by so many events after so many years. Other recent significant anniversaries for important Hebrew writers (such as the sixtieth anniversary of H. N. Bialik's death in the summer of 1994, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the deaths of S. Y. Agnon and Natan Alterman in the first months of 1995, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the death of Micha Joseph Berdyczewski in November 1996) did not attract much public attention. One can feel the special significance that Brenner has, even now, or perhaps especially now, for many Israelis who are still captivated by his image; the term "cultural hero" only partially succeeds in describing him. The journalist Doron Rosenblum noted in 1985: Metamorphosis can follow metamorphosis, fashions may change. However, in the daily reality of our life in this country, which basically remains the same, it seems that the figure of Joseph Hayyim Brenner will always remain Prooftexts83 part of our environment ... for Brenner is the most living dead Hebrew writer—more living than many contemporary living Israeli writers.1 The following discussion considers what has been written about Brenner in the last generation, or, to be more precise, the twenty-five years from thejubilee of his death until the seventy-fifth anniversary. The choice of period was dictated by two factors: first, Yitshak Bakon's survey appeared in 1972 as an introduction to a selection of critical essays on Brenner's work, and summarized the stages and directions of Brenner criticism from the beginning of the century until the time of writing.2 Second, in the last twenty-five years, research about Brenner has grown so that its range and variety justify an attempt to summarize and reassess it. Brenner criticism has proved to be one of the most fruitful and vital directions of research within the field of modern Hebrew literature, and it appears that in the field of monographic research of single writers, only that about Bialik and Agnon has been more extensive. In the last twenty...