The Jewish December 1910; or, The Parting of Ways of Eretz Yisraeli Prose and Hebrew Modernism

The date in the article’s title hints at Virginia Woolf ’s famous assertion that in this month “the human character had changed,” a change that, according to Woolf, altered the forms of literary representation of subjective experience and marked the rise of twentieth-century modernist literature. Interestingly, in this month or in the month preceding it, the prominent Hebrew writer Y. H. Brenner published his Hebrew novella Nerves. I argue that in the Jewish Hebrew context December 1910 marked precisely the decline of the early Hebrew modernist turn, parallel to the establishment of a new literary center for Hebrew literature in Eretz Yisrael. I first shed light on the story’s complex treatment of the figure of “nerves” and argue that through this figure Brenner’s story articulates the irresolvable tension between two forms of life as two forms of representation. I then contextualize the tensions inherent to the historical and poetic figure of nerves within the wider discussion of the process of decline of Hebrew modernist poetics at the very moment in which the language performed its national “return” to its native soil.