Rainbow Brenner: Shedding Light and Casting Shadows on Yosef Haim Brenner’s Sexuality

• In Event: Jewish and Queer Identities and Narratives

Abstract

Recent years have seen an uptick in interest in the sexual orientation and tendencies of celebrated Hebrew revival author Yosef Haim Brenner (1881-1921). This paper analyzes two recent in-depth examinations of Brenner’s sexuality: literary critic Menahem Perry’s book Sit on Me and Warm Up: The Homoerotic Dialgoue of Brenner and Gnessin (Tel Aviv: The New Library, 2020) and author Alon Hilu’s speculative fiction novel Murder at the Red House (Tel Aviv: Yediot, 2018), raising the questions: what, beyond prurient interest, can explain this recent interest in Brenner’s sexuality? Does the speculation of Brenner’s queer embodiment contribute to our understanding of his work or his death, and if so, how?

Raised Ultra-Orthodox and expelled from his Polish yeshiva for writing secular literature in Hebrew, Brenner and his intimate friend author Uri Nissan Gnessin joined a circle of authors committed to the production of literature in Hebrew and to the language’s secular revival. While in London in 1907, Brenner was the editor of Ha’Meorer (“The Awakener”), a serial publication of Hebrew fiction, essays, and poetry. After a traumatizing interpersonal rift between him and Gnessin (who later died prematurely of heart disease), Brenner eventually immigrated to Israel, where he became a vocal critic of Zionist conventions and the labor ethos, and was revered and respected for his honesty, integrity, and experimental writing style. He is widely considered to have been a seminal influence on many literary giants, including playwright Hanokh Levine. In 1921, during a horrific pogrom in Jaffa, Brenner and several other authors, including Yosef Luidor, a young author whom Brenner had taken under his wing and invited to reside with him, were horrifically brutalized and murdered at their lodging. The crime scene was so heinous, and reflected such atrocious slaughter and torture, that details were kept confidential even as the murder filled newspaper headlines.

Perry’s book employs a critical method he himself pioneered: gap theory, which reads factual evidence by looking at speculative possibilities suggested by evidence and bringing them to the “threshold of distillation” to suggest interpretive possibilities. Perry carefully examines Brenner and Gnessin’s biographies and carefully follows evidence of their encounters and interactions in both Warsaw and London, crafting the narrative of their tragic falling out around a poem they both loved, Haim Nahman Bialik’s “In Autumn” (1905). Perry’s book imagines a tortured romantic relationship between the two, briefly requited in Warsaw, and a series of misunderstandings in London that led Gnessin to panic and Brenner to aggressively pursue and to an emotional breakdown. The book created massive controversy in Israel, with some praising Perry for his careful, detailed detective work and others deriding him for pruriently exploiting our thirst for identity politics and scandal.

Alon Hilu’s book is a Rashomon-style detective novel, depicting the days leading to Brenner’s murder through the eyes of four narrators: Brenner, Luidor, a gardener who is the relative of a young Arab boy, and an elderly Arab woman who was a young girl during the 1921 pogrom. The book revisits the grounds for the pogrom, which were vague in historical accounts, as involving a soured love-lust triangle among the first three narrators. Like Perry’s work, Hilu, who is known for challenging the conventional Zionist ethos by including Palestinian voices in his historical novels, received both effusive praise and bitter critique.

That both works were critiqued for sensationalizing Brenner’s sexuality is the point of departure of my paper, which makes two claims about the emergence of the issue a century after Brenner’s murder. First, I argue that, beyond mere curiosity, the renewed interest in Brenner as an embodied person offers who important ways to revisit his place in Hebrew and Israeli cultural history. Examining Brenner’s novels, I suggest that his ability to remain within the Zionist collective as a strong advocate of the socialist ethos who nevertheless sees through the surrounding hypocrisies and social exclusion can reflect a closeted, introspective queer lens: what Brenner might have hidden about himself is, according to this argument, what he revealed about the earnest, oppressive ideology that surrounded him. He was able to be an important cultural voice in supporting the revival of the Hebrew language while, at the same time, eschewing theism as superstition and collectivism as soul destroying. I identify similar themes and characters in his two speculated romantic interests, Gnessin and Luidor.

Second, I argue that the speculation about Brenner’s sexuality offers a personalized, individualized dimension to a century-old well of unresolved shock and grief over his murder. Relying on research on Jewish trauma processing, ranging from Holocaust memory to the October 7th memorials, I argue that contemporary expressions of grief seek attention to personal characteristics and focus on humanizing, flawed storytelling about the deceased, as contrasted with previous generations’ biographical whitewashing and hegemonic, institutionalized grief rituals. In this way, Brenner’s memory remains alive and relevant to a generation whose mourning takes a more embodied form.

Author

• Hadar Aviram