AZR opens with a cry of anguish, and portrays Brenner as a man of boundless compassion on the one hand and a merciless fighter for truth on the other:
"Brenner has been killed, the solitary fighter, the hero of truth… You were a sealed riddle in your deep, unfathomable feelings, which burst from your heart like lava from volcanic mountains." AZR, "On Brenner" (Kuntres, 5681/1921).
"Brenner's soul became bound to his neighbor's child, and when the child fell ill, Brenner tore the hair of his head… not by way of exaggeration, but literally tore out the hair of his head… He loved the Arabs too, those very Arabs who killed him, who killed Brenner, the most saintly of men…" Ibid.
"And together with this he was a fighter for truth, and in this war of his he was as cruel as death. He spared neither himself nor others… Wherever he sensed a hint of falsification, of fraud, of falsehood… truth drove him at times to raise his axe against morality, against faith, against Zionism, against everything… Seek truth!" Ibid.
AZR closes by describing Brenner's death as the crowning summit of his idealistic life, Brenner refused to be rescued unless all the members of the household were rescued with him:
"You did not want to be saved unless all the souls who dwelt with you in the house were saved together with you. And when it proved impossible to save them all (there was not enough room in the automobile), you chose to die together with them all, and with your death you crowned your idealistic life." Ibid.
About a year later AZR wrote a further piece, "A Conversation of Souls" ("Kuntres," Av 5681), an imagined dialogue with the dead Brenner. Gently, AZR places his own teaching in Brenner's mouth: Brenner rejoices that he lived, and above all that at the end of his days he was privileged "to enter the camp of the honest workers."
"I was privileged to enter the camp of the honest workers... Then it was as if the narrow prison pit in which I had suffocated all my days opened before me, and I saw the light of life in all its beauty and splendor." AZR, "A Conversation of Souls" ("Kuntres," Av 5681/1921), Ben-Yehuda read/43912.
And to the apparent contradiction (Brenner, who "freed himself from the hypnosis of the Bible"), the imagined Brenner replies that he rejected only the Bible of the hypocrites, not the Bible itself, and closes with a formula that is the heart of AZR's own teaching:
"Their Bible is not my Bible. Their prophet is not my prophet... Honest labor, only honest labor, through it the Bible will be exalted and God sanctified." Ibid.
Soon after the murder AZR wrote "Yosef Haim Brenner: His Life and His Personal and Literary Character" (Jaffa: Ahdut HaAvoda, 5682/1922), the first full biography of Brenner. The choice of AZR as the biographer was no accident: as a close friend and contemporary, he had a personal view of the man. See "Bibliography"
The closeness is documented by archival cross-reference as well: the Brenner archive (Genazim Institute) preserves a letter from Asher Beilin to Brenner (1911) in which AZR is mentioned, evidence that AZR was part of Brenner's circle as early as the first Jaffa period. Brenner archive · Genazim See "Archival Cross-References."
In Heshvan 5671 (November 1910) Brenner published in "HaPoel HaTzair" an article on the "plague of apostasy" among young Jews, containing sharp words about religion, the Bible, and tradition, and sympathy for the New Testament. The Jerusalem paper "HaHerut" accused him of "heresy and incitement"; Ahad Ha'am was furious; and the Odessa Committee of Hovevei Zion (headed by Ussishkin) withdrew its financial support from "HaPoel HaTzair" and conditioned its renewal on a change of editorship and content. Thus was born one of the stormiest controversies of the Second Aliyah, "the Brenner Affair," which flared up around freedom of expression and the spiritual independence of the Yishuv against the "patronage" of people abroad.
In Nurit Govrin's exhaustive study, Alexander Ziskind Rabinovitz is expressly listed among the public participants in the controversy (about fifty people, most signing with their full names). AZR published a "Letter to the Editor" in "HaMitzpe" (Kraków; the paper hostile to Brenner and to the "HaPoel HaTzair" circle, edited by S. M. Lazar), and the editor answered it with an "Editor's Reply."
Research · Govrin Nurit Govrin, "The Brenner Affair," Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 5745, Ben-Yehuda read/10314 (list of sources, item 16; and the list of participants).
Beyond the letter, AZR took part in the organizing of the Yishuv's people: the writers of the Land of Israel convened a general assembly at which they protested the Odessa Committee's decision and resolved to stand by "HaPoel HaTzair" and strengthen it (Govrin, ch. 2; compare item 11 in the list of sources, R. Binyamin, "From the Writers' Assembly," "HaPoel HaTzair"). AZR was one of the three conveners of the writers' assembly in Jaffa (1911), alongside A. Tsioni (Yitzhak Vilkansky) and R. Binyamin; it was they who invited writers and journalists to protest the Odessa Committee's decision, and Yosef Vitkin too signed the resolution of protest. Corroborated, editorial note of the Yad Ben-Zvi edition of Vitkin's letters (read/17992)
AZR's own position emerges from a primary source of his, from that very year: in his article "On Contradictions and Oppositions" ("HaPoel HaTzair," 5671) he explicitly names the "Odessa Committee" as an example of destructive internal division, and sets against it his foundational principle, the unity of the nation (see "AZR, Gordon, and the Joy of Labor" and "We Are All Jews"). AZR, Brenner's closest religious friend, who would later write the biography and the eulogy for him, thus entered the polemic in full consistency with his teaching against "divisions."
The bond was mutual: just as AZR wrote the biography and the eulogy for Brenner, so Brenner wrote a warm review of "The Writings of A. Z. Rabinovitz" (vol. 2, Jaffa 5674), the piece "From the Field of Literature" ("HaPoel HaTzair," Tishrei 5675/1914, signed "B., Y."). Brenner presents AZR as an honest "writer-educator" free of all falsity:
"AZR is a writer-educator… As a man speaks to his fellow, so does he speak in his stories… There is no deliberate literary mannerism… 'Better not to speak than to bring a false word out of one's mouth!'" Y. H. Brenner, "From the Field of Literature [The Writings of A. Z. Rabinovitz, vol. 2]," "HaPoel HaTzair," Tishrei 5675; Project Ben-Yehuda.
Brenner recounts how, as a yeshiva youth, AZR's early story "Without Hope" ("Be'efes Tikvah") moved him to tears:
"The taste of that sad and bitter story was sweet as honey in my mouth!… All this is ours, ours… Tears filled my eyes and my heart, immense feelings of gratitude… to this very day." Ibid. (The quotation from Goethe and AZR's addition were likewise "like an event in my spiritual life then.")
Brenner's summarizing appraisal: AZR is "among the most excellent realists in our new literature… he is the very good temperament of our literature"; and though his soul lacks "deep complexity," "a great and choice laborer is this old man for our literature… wholeheartedly, in truth and sincerity… he gives his whole soul." (Brenner even mentions "Seraiah the Scribe," see "Seraiah the Scribe.")