Joseph Brenner represents that moment in the history of Hebrew literature when the center of creativity moved from Eastern Europe to Palestine. He personified the well-educated young Jew of the time, schooled in traditional learning in Hebrew, learning modern European languages through his own efforts and knowing in any case his mother tongue, Yiddish.

Dissatisfied with the narrow confines of life in their hometown or village, frustrated with traditional ways, young idealists like Brenner left to seek fulfillment elsewhere. Writers influenced by Zionism and the plan to revive Hebrew as an everyday modern language would eventually head East to Palestine. Writers influenced by the Bund* and who preferred Yiddish as the national language of the Jews tended to head West to Warsaw, America etc.

As Out of the Depths tells us, Brenner himself initially left his hometown of Novi Malini (Bulgaria) to try his chances in London.

Arriving in the Jewish East End, where he edited an early Modern Hebrew periodical, Hameorer, Brenner struggled with the way of life, the values being adopted by his compatriots and the English language.

Out of the Depths presents the lives of new immigrants to London around the workings of the Jewish newspaper, named ironically ’The Daily Crabb’. Mr Crabb himself is shown as a power-hungry exploiter of his workers and fellow countrymen. Here Brenner is able to expound his growing disdain for capitalism and self-indulgent materialism. Consistent though with his unromantic view of reality, Brenner is as demanding of his other characters: the sycophantic foreman, Jacobson, who struggles to implement the boss’ harsh terms of employment; or the ever co-operative Mr. Katlansky, ’Mr Editor’, as Crabb calls him sarcastically.

Brenner explores the ideological changes of the turn of the century, particularly in the lives of the women characters like Hayyah-Rahel, an emancipated woman with left-wing values. The young girl Eve Taler on the other hand, innocent and hopeful, is abused by a society where moral values are in decline, and everyone is out for himself.

The most interesting characters are the narrator and his mysterious friend, Avraham Menuhin. Conversation is mainly eavesdropped at the general meeting place ’Maisey’s Kitchen’ where matters and personalities of the day are discussed, issues regarding the new typesetting machine and the possible ’brigands’ who may eventually train to work with it. As the printing house passes through the phases of modernization, we witness the early efforts of Jewish union movements, (Brenner went on to found the Histradut labour federation in Israel) seen here in opposition to the British trade unions.

Brenner, along with S.Y.Agnon, the most important of the second generation of Modern Hebrew writers, was a stylistic innovator. For immediacy and authenticity, he uses his favoured diaristic format: — sharp impressions and half-conversations remembered soon after the event. Within this diary format though, characters are sometimes presented via dialogue and sometimes via stream of consciousness, where the narrator reflects on the significance of each episode. Considering the date it was written, 1908-9, it is groundbreaking stuff.

Although Out of the Depths reflects Brenner’s work in the pre-Palestine period, it introduces the reader to his unrelenting realism in both style and content. Out of the Depths prefigures his importance as author, mentor of other literary personalities and active socialist in Palestine after 1908. His achievement as a founder of Modern Hebrew prose is all the more poignant when we realize he died in an Arab uprising near Jaffa in 1921, aged only forty. David Paterson has presented a masterful and accessible translation.

’Tomorrow’s paper. The Sunday edition is headed "Monday," the Monday edition "Tuesday" and so on until the Friday edition which is headed "Sunday." The paper has four pages. The front and back contain big advertisements, those yellow tasteful advertisements. Inside: news from the English press, both this year’s and last year’s, put together by Spinner, the newsman, a Jew who spends the rest of his working day teaching the holy tongue according to the English method. Although a jolly man by temperament, he dreams of writing a searing tragedy drawn from the life of emigrants, revolutionaries and members of the self-defense units, and presenting it in the local Yiddish theatre — "which will reduce the audience to a state of hysteria." Katlansky himself, the editor, the "advisor" (at his master’s behest he would spend an hour every evening in the office proffering advice to abandoned wives, widows unable to remarry, impoverished Jewish emigrants, suppliants of whatever kind) writes almost every day, at Crab’s direct instigation, a column entitled "Seen and Heard" devoted to parliamentary sessions, to matters of state in general, to public institutions in need of support, to local scandals, to the question of ritual baths for Jewish women and to cantors who have gone off the rails. The rest is filled with snippets taken from the "Freynd" [another Yiddish newspaper — ed.] and other overseas papers, with romances and penny dreadfuls which are put in the paper lock, stock and barrel without acknowledgement. For the distributors and vendors there is an additional "poster" — an eye-catching announcement summarizing the main feature: "Eighty year old Jew weds fifteen year old girl; English woman strangles her three children and then kills herself; terrible new pogrom in a Jewish community ... a hundred killed and three hundred wounded ... Tomorrow’s edition will contain a detailed picture of the slain".

And I stand on a street-corner in Whitechapel, crying over and over again:

Buy the paper, Jews... buy... the daily... the daily... one ha’penny, one ha’penny ... tomorrow’s Crab, tomorrow’s Crab...

On my left — the copies; under my arm — the poster with the pogroms, both real and imagined...

I make my living out of pogroms.’ p 30-31