Introduction

Of the major currents in Jewish history throughout the last one hundred years, at least three can be traced to the wave of anti–Jewish violence in Russia which followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881. When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the control of Jewish affairs was placed in the hands of Jewish revolutionaries, whose primary aim was to achieve total assimilation in an atheist society. Brenner's lifetime spanned an age of agonizing transition for the Jewish people. Drafted into the Russian Army, where he suffered acute hardship and humiliation, Brenner deserted at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war. The actual escape from Russia provided the material for a third, much shorter story entitled Impressions of a Journey, which conveys the tension and the terror of illegal border crossings, an experience shared by so many would-be emigrants at that time.