Historians, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi teaches us, record the past as it was. Jews, by contrast, remember the past not necessarily as it happened, but rather in light of the significance they ascribe to it. Yosef Ḥayim Brenner—the hero of Anita Shapira's book—is the champion of memories.

It would seem that there is no other Hebrew author about whom so many memories have been written. One such example, mentioned by Shapira (380), is a memory recalled by the Israeli artist Nahum Gutman, son of the author S. Ben Zion. Gutman tells of a number of Hebrew authors sitting on the veranda of his father's house:

Gutman recalls himself walking through the city, which during his childhood was “a lone house on the sand,” in the footsteps of the instigators of the Hebrew revolution. Just as he had strode in Rav Kook's footsteps, so too he walked in Brenner's: “My admiration for Brenner was deep and very natural. He would pass through the lane by Bezalel on his way to the Aḥdut offices, not a tall man, bent, trying not to stand out, and I would often walk behind him, trying to place my feet in the footsteps Brenner left, and I would feel that I was doing something that expressed my very being and my own way” (Ben-Ezer, Ben ḥolot, 96).

These are semi-imaginary childhood stories. However, like many of Brenner's stories, and as Gutman himself declares, they bear symbolic meaning. Gutman follows in his heroes’ footsteps out of veneration, which succeeded in integrating the contradictory legacies of these two esteemed personalities. But how should Brenner's following in Rav Kook's footsteps be interpreted?

At least three alternatives present themselves: Brenner followed in the footsteps of the pioneering rabbi out of admiration; Brenner sought to trample the religious Rav Kook's footsteps and replace them with his own; or, a third interpretation—which I choose to adopt—Brenner did so mischievously, as a joke, as if dancing in Rav Kook's footsteps and flitting between tradition and innovation or between two types of Jewish renewal.

A reading of Anita Shapira's comprehensive book will lead to the inescapable conclusion that the third interpretation is the least probable. Shapira does not depict Yosef Ḥayim Brenner as a mythic figure; Brenner does not appear as the multifaceted and contradictory cultural hero that he constituted for the people of his generation. In other words, Shapira does not sketch for us a picture of Brenner as he should be fittingly or deservingly remembered.

With punctiliousness, she surveys the different stages of his life: his childhood; his service in and desertion from the tsar's army; his time in London and Lviv; his aliyah (immigration) to 'Ereẓ Yisra'el and his time in Jaffa, Neve Tzedek, and Ein Ganim; the move to Jerusalem and the crisis of World War I; the period of the British Mandate following the war; and the Arab riots of 1921, during which Brenner was murdered. Only the concluding chapter differs in character by providing a general outline of Brenner's personality and a description of how Brenner's legacy was fashioned following his death.

Shapira describes Brenner as he was. She utilizes every shred of available information: his letters, memoirs, autobiographical details spread throughout his stories and essays, and scattered biographical details in others’ stories. The book is composed in a diachronic fashion, exposing minute details in each of its chapters. However, its treatment of Brenner lacks consistency: for example, the opening chapter deals mainly with the young Brenner's psychological character; subsequently, Brenner's endeavor as a literary entrepreneur prior to his immigration to 'Ereẓ Yisra'el is emphasized. The chapter on Jaffa expounds on Brenner's journalistic writing and his intellectual role, while the Jerusalem chapter focuses on the coterie of writers with whom he associated and his relations with women. Short chapters of his life occasionally merit emphasis and discussion, while his extensive writing as a literary critic is almost completely ignored.

A biography such as this naturally has both advantages and disadvantages. The significant advantage is its faithfulness to Brenner's own statement: “Life is larger than any paradigm.” Brenner, too, did not conform to one single pattern. It is thus incumbent upon the reader to locate the gems scattered throughout Brenner's life.

One such gem I discovered in the book is the description of Brenner as a teacher at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium during World War I. Drafts of lessons he prepared display the figure of a respected educator, teaching Hebrew to eighth- and ninth-grade students. Brenner the author, the intellectual, and the provocative antireligious publicist is revealed here teaching love for the Jewish People's cultural and literary heritage. In one of the drafts he formulates a question for discussion: “What is a people? One race? One religion? The citizens of one country? Speakers of one language? People with a shared destiny?” And then came the definition: “People sharing a common destiny (historical unity)” (290–91). Shapira shows that Brenner, who frequently expressed reservations about being defined as a Zionist, taught his pupils, in the midst of a terrible crisis for the Yishuv (the Jewish community of pre–1948 Israel), that Zionism revives “the national desire,” and that this desire is elevated by the Hebrew language. It seems to me that this observation may characterize Brenner's life and his work.

The striking disadvantage of this genre is that the biography is not centered around one focal point and does not construct a “hero” or character with a distinct life objective or endeavor, but features descriptions of isolated episodes. It is only the axis of Brenner's depressive personality that remains as the central linchpin connecting the book's chapters. Shapira brings abundant evidence of Brenner's depression, but also points out that Brenner's functioning is inconsistent with his depressive tendencies. Indeed, it is doubtful whether this personality trait can sufficiently explain the behaviors that Shapira ascribes to him, whether explicitly or implicitly—a pessimistic attitude vis-à-vis the achievements of Zionism and the future of the Zionist movement, writing that emphasizes bereavement and failure, strange eccentric behavior, shying away from women, difficulty in intimacy and in close relationships with others—and it certainly cannot explain Brenner's literary and journalistic strength. Brenner seemingly exhibited, in a refined manner, a sort of “holy depression,” or as the pioneers of the Second and Third Aliyot preferred to term it—a type of “holy despair.” Despair appears in Hebrew revival literature as both a destructive and constructive force (as it similarly does in the literature of the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century). Undeniably, doubt, depression, and despair were not personality traits unique to Brenner, but rather a significant part of the generational ethos and that of its literary convention.

Indeed, it is only in the book's closing chapter that Shapira reveals the significance that Brenner and his contemporaries ascribed to his personality traits. She identifies the Russian “holy fool” model of Yurodivi, which sheds new light on events in Brenner's life. Whether this model is the most applicable and successful in describing Brenner may be the subject of a detailed discussion (especially in light of the fact that the term does not feature in either his writings or in those of his eulogizers). Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Brenner accorded great significance to “the ways of the abyss of madness, the doubts and the exertion of mental fortitude.” (Collected Writings of Brenner [Hebrew], 3:657. In the original context this was written with regards to Nietzsche.)

In any case, this is a powerful conceptualization, and I would recommend that the reader begin with the final chapter and thereafter turn to the in-depth study of the details of Brenner's life that have, for the first time, been so extensively and spectacularly explored by Anita Shapira.