David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism 9781905981120, 9781351195232

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
List of Illustrations
Preface
1 David Bergelson (1884–1952): A Biography
2 Memories of My Father: The Early Years (1918–1934)
3 Language and Style in Nokh aletnen (1913): Bergelson's Debt to Flaubert
4 For Children and Adults Alike: Reading Bergelson's 'Children's Stories' (1914–1919) as Narratives of Identity Formation
5 Yoysef Shor (1922): Between Two Worlds
6 In Search of Readership: Bergelson Among the Refugees (1928)
7 Narrating the Revolution: From 'Tsugvintn' (1922) to Mides-hadin (1929)
8 Uneasy Patronage: Bergelson's Years at Forverts (1922–1926)
9 David Bergelson in and on America (1929–1949)
10 'Why I am in Favour of Birobidzhan': Bergelson's Fateful Decision (1932)
11 Memory and Monument in Baym Dnyepr (1932–1940)
12 From Mourning to Vengeance: Bergelson's Holocaust Journalism (1941–1945)
13 'Du lebst, mayn folk': Bergelson's Play Prints Ruveni in Historical Context (1944–1947)
14 'Jewish Nationalism' in Bergelson's Last Book (1947)
15 A Bibliography of David Bergelson's Work in Yiddish and English
Appendices: Bergelson's Literary Theory
A Belles-lettres and the Social Order (1919)
B Three Centres (Characteristics) (1926)
Index

Citation preview

DAVID BERGELSON FROM MODERNISM TO SOCIALIST REALISM

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LEGENDA LEGENDA , founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on Arabic, Catalan, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. An Editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative Literature Association.

The Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA ) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including Adorno, Einstein, Russell, Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, McLuhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today Routledge is one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide. www.routledge.com

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LEGENDA STUDIES IN YIDDISH Editorial Committee Professor Marion Aptroot, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf Professor Gennady Estraikh, New York University Professor Mikhail Krutikov, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Professor David Roskies, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York Dr Joseph Sherman, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford Legenda Studies in Yiddish embrace all aspects of Yiddish culture and literature. The series regularly publishes the proceedings of the International Mendel Friedman Conferences on Yiddish Studies, which are convened every two years by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford. 1. Yiddish in the Contemporary World 2. The Shtetl: Image and Reality 3. Yiddish and the Left ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov 4. The Jewish Pope: Myth, Diaspora and Yiddish Literature, by Joseph Sherman 5. The Yiddish Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction ed. by Joseph Sherman and Ritchie Robertson 6. David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK [email protected] www.legenda.mhra.org.uk

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David Bergelson, Kiev, 1915

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David Bergelson From Modernism to Socialist Realism ❖ EDITED BY JOSEPH SHERMAN AND GENNADY ESTRAIKH

Studies in Yiddish 6 Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2007

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First published 2007 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2007 ISBN 9-781-905981-12-0 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

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CONTENTS ❖

Dedication Acknowledgements List of Contributors List of Illustrations

ix x xii xiv

Preface

1

1

David Bergelson (1884–1952): A Biography joseph sherman

7

2

Memories of My Father: The Early Years (1918–1934) lev bergelson

79

3

Language and Style in Nokh alemen (1913): Bergelson’s Debt to Flaubert daniela mantovan

89

4

For Children and Adults Alike: Reading Bergelson’s ‘Children’s Stories’ (1914–1919) as Narratives of Identity Formation kerstin hoge

113

5

Yoysef Shor (1922): Between Two Worlds seth l. wolitz

129

6

In Search of Readership: Bergelson Among the Refugees (1928) sasha senderovich

150

7

Narrating the Revolution: From ‘Tsugvintn’ (1922) to Mides-hadin (1929) mikhail krutikov

167

8

Uneasy Patronage: Bergelson’s Years at Forverts (1922–1926) ellen kellman

183

9

David Bergelson in and on America (1929–1949) gennady estraikh

205

10 ‘Why I am in Favour of Birobidzhan’: Bergelson’s Fateful Decision (1932) boris kotlerman 11

Memory and Monument in Baym Dnyepr (1932–1940) harriet murav

222 236

12 From Mourning to Vengeance: Bergelson’s Holocaust Journalism (1941–1945) david shneer

248

‘Du lebst, mayn folk’: Bergelson’s Play Prints Ruveni in Historical Context (1944–1947) jeffrey veidlinger

269

13

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viii

CONTENTS

14 ‘Jewish Nationalism’ in Bergelson’s Last Book (1947) joseph sherman

285

15

306

A Bibliography of David Bergelson’s Work in Yiddish and English roberta saltzman Appendices: Bergelson’s Literary Theory

a

Belles-lettres and the Social Order (1919)

337

b

Three Centres (Characteristics) (1926)

347

Index

357

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DEDICATION ❖

We dedicate this book to the memory of Malcolm Bowie (1943–2007), Professor of French Literature at the Universities of London, Oxford and Cambridge, where he was latterly Master of Christ’s College. As Michael Sheringham wrote in one of many admiring obituaries written about Malcolm, ‘it would be difficult to exaggerate the extent of [his] pre-eminence in the field of French studies’, but he was also an instinctively interdisciplinary critic. His endeavours were many, but we would especially wish to record here the contribution he made to Yiddish studies. He always championed the study of Yiddish as an essential part of the European family of literary cultures, and was tireless in his efforts to create and sustain the Mendel Friedman conferences in Oxford. This volume is the latest to appear in the Legenda Studies in Yiddish series, another of Malcolm’s initiatives, ensuring a permanent record both of the Friedman proceedings and of developing work in the field. Malcolm’s greatness as a writer was matched by his humanity and warmth. He is missed by all who knew him, but he leaves an enormous legacy, and the world of Yiddish studies is gratefully in his debt. J.S., G.E., 2007

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ❖

The core of the essays published here originated as papers presented at the Sixth Mendel Friedman Conference in Yiddish, held on 23–24 August 2005 at Yarnton Manor, under the joint auspices of the European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. The establishment of this series has made it possible for new research in Yiddish studies to be opened for discussion at regular academic meetings here in Oxford and then published in the ongoing Legenda Studies in Yiddish series, of which this is Volume 6. A number of scholars, who were unable to present their papers in person at this conference, sent their texts; and several others, noted specialists in the field, were invited to contribute in different areas to ensure the fullest possible coverage of the work. Three contributions were written specially for this volume. They are a detailed biography of Bergelson; a comprehensive bibliography of all Bergelson’s published work, as far as this can be ascertained; and translations into English of two of his seminal essays on the function of literature published in the late 1920s, which have never before been translated. Warm thanks are due to Jack and Naomi Friedman for their generosity in supporting the conferences on which this book is based; to Professor Malcolm Bowie, whose vision enabled them to be initiated; and to Professor Martin McLaughlin and Professor Ritchie Robertson, members of the Editorial Board of Legenda Press, for their unwavering support and encouragement. Welcome assistance came from Oxford University’s Faculty of Modern Languages, in particular from its chairman Dr Stephen Parkinson and from the trustees of the Friedman Fund for Yiddish. The conference could not have taken place without the exceptional courtesy and efficiency of Ms Annabel Young, Domestic Bursar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Yarnton Manor, and all the staff of the Manor. In gathering material for this volume, a number of people have been singularly generous with both time and assistance. Chief among these has been Professor Lev Bergelson, who not only wrote a memoir of his earliest years with his father, but made available rare photographs from his personal album which have never been published before. Essential help in obtaining permission to use copyrighted photographs came from Ms Nancy Hartman and Mr Vadim Altskan, archivists in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and from Mr Jesse Aaron Cohen, Photo and Film Archivist at YIVO in New York. Valued help in locating different kinds of documents, references, and source materials came from Dr Tali Argov (Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies), Mr Zachary Baker (Stanford University Library), Professor Sabine Dednam (University of the Witwatersrand), Mr Hugh Denman (University College London), Dr Simon Kemp

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xi

(St John’s College, University of Oxford), Dr Mikhail Krutikov (University of Michigan), Dr Daniela Mantovan (University of Heidelberg), Professor Leonard Prager (University of Haifa), Mr Joshua Rubenstein (Amnesty International), Ms Roberta Saltzman (New York Public Library), Mr Sasha Senderovich (Harvard University), and Mr Nathan Snyder ( Judaica Librarian, University of Texas at Austin). Professor Lawrence A. Rosenwald (Wellesley College, Massachusetts) contributed some elegant translations of modernist Yiddish verse and prose which are acknowledged individually where they appear. The major work of seeing this volume through the press was the responsibility of the Managing Editor of Legenda Press, Dr Graham Nelson, whose meticulous attention to detail ensured that this volume, like its predecessors, appeared with minimum delay once the decision to publish had been taken.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ❖

Lev Bergelson PhD DSc is only son of David Bergelson. Professor of Natural Product Chemistry and Biochemistry, he graduated from the Moscow State University. In 1941 he was called up for military service and is a decorated veteran of World War II. After the arrest of his father (1949), he was exiled to Siberia together with his family — his mother, wife, and little daughter — where they had to work in a mine and metallurgical factory. After Stalin’s death, he was permitted to return to Moscow and complete his education. He worked for many years in institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences, was a Fogarty Professor at the National Institute of Health (USA), and has lectured at universities at Germany, Israel, and Switzerland. He is author and co-author of about 200 scientific publications, and is the recipient of the USSR State Prize in Sciences and the Humboldt Prize (Germany). He is currently a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Science and Professor Emeritus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Gennady Estraikh is Rauch Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies, New York University. Kerstin Hoge is Lector in Yiddish at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and Junior Lecturer in German Linguistics in the University of Oxford. Ellen Kellman is Assistant Professor of Yiddish in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University. Boris Kotlerman is Senior Academic Staff Lecturer at the Rena Costa Centre for Yiddish Studies, Department of the Literature of the Jewish People, Bar-Ilan University. Mikhail Krutikov is Assistant Professor of Slavic and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Daniela Mantovan is wissenschaftliche Mitarbeterin at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien (Heidelberg) and Guest Professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza. Harriet Murav is Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Professor of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Roberta Saltzman is the Assistant Chief Librarian of the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library. Sasha Senderovich is a PhD student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

xiii

Joseph Sherman is Woolf Corob Fellow in Yiddish Studies at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and University Research Lecturer in the University of Oxford. David Shneer is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, Colorado. Jeffrey Veidlinger is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies and Associate Director of the Borns Jewish Studies Programme at Indiana University, Bloomington. Seth L. Wolitz holds the Gale Chair of Jewish Studies and is Professor of French, Slavic, and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ❖

Frontispiece (p. iv). David Bergelson, Kiev, 1915. By kind permission of Lev Bergelson Fig. 1.1 (p. 9). David Bergelson, Okhrimovo, near Uman, around 1905. By kind permission of Lev Bergelson Fig. 1.2 (p. 11). David Bergelson (left) and Yitskhok Leybush-Peretz (sitting), 1910; third person unidentified. By kind permission of Lev Bergelson Fig. 1.3 (p. 13). David Bergelson, Nakhmen Mayzel and his brother, Kiev, c. 1908. By kind permission of Lev Bergelson Fig. 1.4 (p. 15). David Bergelson, Kiev c. 1908–09. By kind permission of Lev Bergelson Fig. 1.5 (p. 17). Standing: Yekhezkel Dobrushin and David Bergelson. Sitting: unidentified, Leah Geshelina (Dobrushin’s wife) and Der Nister, Kiev, 1912. By kind permission of Lev Bergelson Fig. 1.6 (p. 19). Boris Kletskin, Sholem Asch (standing), David Bergelson, Bobruisk, Byelorussia, c.1912. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York Fig. 1.7 (p. 26). From left to right: David Bergelson, Zishe Weinper, Daniel Charney, Berlin, summer 1929. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York Fig. 1.8 (p. 46). David Bergelson at home in Zehlendorf, Berlin, 1931. By kind permission of Lev Bergelson Fig 1.9 (p. 49). Nakhmen Mayzel (1887-1966). From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York Fig 1.10 (p. 51). David Bergelson, Copenhagen, 1933. By kind permission of Lev Bergelson Fig 1.11 (p. 55). Left to right: Peretz Markish, David Bergelson; in the background, Moyshe Litvakov; Izi Kharik, Shloyme Mikhoels, Moscow, early 1937. Soviet newspaper clipping dating from a few months before the start of the Great Terror. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York Fig. 1.12 (p. 61). Signing ceremony of the world-wide appeal to ‘Brother Jews’ to support the Soviet war effort: Moscow, August 1941. Front row, left to right: Peretz Markish, David Bergelson, Shloyme Mikhoels (standing), unidentified, Ilya Ehrenburg. Among those in the back row are Isaac Nusinov and David Oistrakh. Published with the permission of the Russian State Archives of Film and Photo Documents Fig. 1.13 (p. 63). David Bergelson, Moscow, 1944. By kind permission of Lev Bergelson Fig. 2.1 (p. 82). David and Levi (Lev) Bergelson, Freiburg, Germany, 1922. By kind permission of Lev Bergelson Fig. 2.2 (p. 86). Tsiporah (Tsipe), wife of David and mother of Lev, Berlin, 1928. By kind permission of Lev Bergelson

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PREFACE ❖

Among the finest prose stylists in Yiddish literature, David Bergelson (1884–1952) was caught up in the twentieth century’s most defining events during the course of a career that spanned four decades. The reader who engages with his fiction in the light of his life choices cannot avoid pondering their interconnection. Lacking the faith of his fathers, yet always in search of meaning for his life and his work, Bergelson ended up serving the ideology of communism. Could he have known that this was a fatal decision? Today even his engagé fiction often seems permeated with the disillusionment characteristic of his earlier work. In Nokh alemen (When all is said and done, 1913), his first novel and the one long regarded as his masterpiece, he expresses through the voice of the jaded Hebrew poet Hertz a vision that has sometimes been identified with his own: And thus have I been sitting for so long at the gate of this city, into which no one enters and from which no one leaves. Everything I once knew I have now forgotten, and in this mind of mine nothing more than a single thought remains: All, all have long since died, and I alone am alive, and no longer await anyone. And when I look about me once more, and feel the power and might that sleep in me, I no longer even sigh, but simply think: I am the guardian of a dead city.

Whether or not this association is valid is one of several questions that this volume seeks to explore. Bergelson first came to the attention of discerning Yiddish readers with the publication of his first work in 1909. He emerged as a pioneer of a modernist prose style meticulously crafted to chart the slow decay of the tsarist empire and of the Jewish bourgeoisie who had once prospered in it. From his home in Kiev, he led a group of talented young writers, later known as the ‘Kiev Group’, who sought to infuse Yiddish literature with the vibrancy of modernist trends in European letters. Politicized intellectuals, who sought to build an autonomous secular culture by which modern Jews, in search of emancipation without assimilation, could define their national identity, welcomed Bergelson as a long-awaited leader, a master of prose that could hold its own with the best produced in any other of the languages of Europe. In 1917 he welcomed the revolution, and played a formative role in the establishment of Kiev’s Kultur-lige (League for Culture), a pan-Yiddishist body that strove to set up a national network of schools, publishing houses, theatres, libraries, and clubs. So attractive and ambitious were its models

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2

PREFACE

that they were replicated and developed in scores of Ukrainian towns, and were carried to many far-f lung homes of Yiddish in Europe, North and South America, Australia and South Africa — in the whole of the Ashkenazi diaspora, in short. Ukraine’s period of independence, during which the Kultur-lige was able to implement some of its plans, was all too brief, and the bloodshed of the ensuing civil war combined with the dogmatism of the Bolsheviks drove Bergelson to emigration. In 1921 he settled in Weimar Berlin, at that time an important centre of Russian and Russian-Jewish emigration, where inf lation and low printing costs encouraged the production of Yiddish and Hebrew books and journals. Bergelson lived there for more than a decade (1921–34), travelling extensively in Europe and the United States, as his style and subject matter steadily changed to ref lect his changing perceptions of the rapidly realigning social formations around him. Recognizing the important role Bergelson played in contemporary Yiddish intellectual life, Abraham Cahan, the authoritarian editor of New York’s largest circulation Yiddish daily, Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), employed him as a journalist and fiction writer. Bergelson, however, became increasingly convinced that Yiddish culture could have a viable future only in the Soviet Union, the sole country in the world that recognized Yiddish culture as defining the identity of the Jewish people and lent it state support. He therefore began to gravitate towards communism. In 1926 he publicly declared his new political allegiance by moving his employment from the independent, anti-Soviet Forverts to the Comintern-sponsored New York Yiddish daily, Frayhayt (Freedom). The same year, he paid a return visit to Russia, where he spoke and wrote about his desire to join the ranks of Soviet writers. Disheartened by the decline of Yiddish culture in the West, he was particularly enthusiastic about the Jewish national enclaves being established in Birobidzhan and the Crimea: these seemed to him the encouraging first steps towards realizing Soviet promises to create an autonomous Jewish republic. The pledges of communism looked even more glowing in the aftershock of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the start of a worldwide economic depression that seemed to have totally discredited capitalism. The West appeared to be in terminal decline, and a bright future seemed possible only in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Bergelson continued to live in Berlin, where he was hailed as the most significant modern Yiddish novelist of his day; his works were widely published both in the original and in translation, notably in Russian and Ukrainian. When the Nazis swept to power in 1933, however, he was compelled to move quickly. He returned to live in Moscow, where he f lourished in a state-sponsored Yiddish cultural environment and for a time enjoyed the fruits of prosperity and celebrity. After Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Bergelson became a prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee ( JAFC), a body created to canvass material support from Jews in the West for the Soviet Union’s war effort, and he continued to write indefatigably, particularly concerned to register some awareness of Nazi atrocities against the Jews of the occupied territories in the context of a Soviet ideological climate

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PREFACE

3

that opposed any acknowledgement that Jews qua Jews had been singled out for particular persecution. After the war the JAFC, now less needed as a mouthpiece for Kremlin propaganda, steadily began taking upon itself the functions of an intercessory body by lobbying the party-state apparatus for assistance in solving various Jewish communal problems. In the paranoid atmosphere that intensified in the Soviet Union after 1945 with the escalation of the Cold War, these initiatives, ‘suspiciously’ supported by American Jewish organizations, were deemed harmful to the Soviet regime, and a series of anti-Semitic state repressions culminated in 1949 with the arrest and imprisonment of leading members of the JAFC, Bergelson among them. Following a rigged and secret military trial on charges of furthering ‘Jewish nationalism’ and promoting ‘anti-Soviet activities’ that was held three years later, Bergelson, together with twelve other Jewish writers and intellectuals, was shot on 12 August 1952, his sixty-eighth birthday. Of all of them, Bergelson was the best known in Yiddish cultural circles, but his fate and those of his co-defendants remained unknown in the West until Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow in 1956. Bergelson’s ideological realignment and his repatriation to the Soviet Union puzzled many in the Yiddish literary world. Although numbers of his colleagues were prepared to condone his f lirtation with communism, particularly in view of the fact that in the West the literary scene, both Jewish and non-Jewish, was densely peopled by fellow-travellers, it was still difficult to believe that Bergelson could sincerely embrace the communist ideology and become its loyal advocate. It was never fully clear why he had done so or what, if anything, had driven him to it. In the 1950s, after Stalin’s crimes had been partially unmasked, there was some pained soul-searching among his fellow writers, some of whom privately blamed such inf luential people as Cahan for not permitting Bergelson to return as a contributor to Forverts when he wanted to so in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Four years after Cahan’s death in 1951, Mendel Osherowitch, a long-serving staff writer at Forverts, published an article entitled ‘David Bergelson’ (29 October 1955) in which he described his vexation at having failed to intervene successfully on his behalf when Bergelson visited New York during his trip in 1928–29. In Osherowitch’s opinion, if Cahan had accepted the return of the ‘prodigal son’ at that time, the author of the finest modernist novel in Yiddish would certainly have gone on to greater achievements and would have occupied the highest place in the hierarchy of contemporary Yiddish literary giants. Instead, for more than fifty years critical opinion, formulated first by Shmuel Niger and then strengthened by anti-communist reaction to the tensions of the Cold War, viewed Bergelson as a gifted writer who had published his best work before the revolution of 1917 and had then prostituted his talent in the service of Stalinist propaganda. This prejudice has been deep and lasting. There are few readers, even today, who are willing to admit that talented writers, despite working within the despotic and stultifying confines of ‘socialist realism’, could have produced work of insight and worth. Such a preconception has been especially damaging to Bergelson, since it automatically privileges his earlier over his later

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4

PREFACE

work without paying close attention to the latter. Most readers of Yiddish fiction value the oblique and allusive style he worked so hard to perfect in his modernist writing, to which the vague label ‘impressionist’ continues to be attached; they tend neither to read nor to regard his later writing, because it does not work at all in the same way. This limited critical approach obscures the full extent of Bergelson’s range and ability; he was a writer unremittingly concerned to reinvent himself time and again. The temptation has also rarely been resisted to divide Bergelson’s creative life into periods. A common classification of this kind lists 1909–14 as the period of his earliest and best work; values the ‘Kiev period’, from 1918 to 1921, because it is associated with the journal Eygns and the experimental work of the ‘Kiev Group’; notes the Berlin years from 1921 to 1934 as a time when he was seeking an ideological direction and a new voice in which to express it; and then turns indifferently away from the ‘Soviet period’ following his return to the Soviet Union in 1934, when he was constrained by the rules of ‘socialist realism’. According to Niger, the years from 1919 to 1926 were ‘transitional years’ during which Bergelson was ideologically on the side of the Bolshevik revolution, but was not yet ready to undergo full Bolshevization as a writer, while the year 1926 marked the beginning of Bergelson’s ‘semi-Soviet period’. Such classifications, however, ref lect the itinerary of Bergelson’s travels far more than they identify or shed light upon his ideological makeovers. While his consistently pro-Soviet sympathies were firmly in place by 1926, Bergelson’s creative transformations were not merely leaps from one bandwagon to another. On the contrary, even if he lagged somewhat behind them, he was converted in company with the majority of those who moved in the circles of Yiddishist socialists and their sympathizers in pre-World War I Kiev. His political reorientation, though it undoubtedly originated with genuinely held socialist ideals, was chief ly motivated by faith that the Soviet regime would fulfil its promises to Yiddish culture and permit it to f lourish. Yet it is surely also significant that Bergelson delayed repatriation to Moscow until there were no other options open to him. Once back in the Soviet Union, the compromises he was obliged to make were shared by all who wanted to stay alive. Under Stalin’s repressive rule, as all who survived it knew well, there were no heroes. Bergelson’s hope, especially when he confronted the devastation wrought by the war and the Nazi Holocaust, was to save what could be saved of the shattered Yiddish world. If he trusted falsely, he was no different from millions of others. No other Soviet Yiddish writer has attracted as much interest from Western scholars, translators, and publishers. A sizeable corpus of Bergelson’s writings in translation is already accessible to English, German, and French readers, but a full critical re-evaluation of his entire corpus is long overdue. David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism seeks to challenge conventionally accepted views of Bergelson’s achievement by examining his entire oeuvre. In addition to essays that present close studies of individual works and themes across all periods of the writer’s life, this volume offers a full-length biography, the first comprehensive bibliography of Bergelson’s work, and translations of two of his most inf luential

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PREFACE

5

programmatic essays. It will more than have achieved its purpose if the readings offered here stimulate further exploration of the wide-ranging work of one of the most important writers in Yiddish literature.

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~ Taylor & Francis ~

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Taylor & Francis Group http://tayl ora ndfra nci s.com

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CHAPTER 1

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David Bergelson (1884–1952): A Biography Joseph Sherman Early Years, 1884–1904 Born on 12 August 1884 in Okhrimovo near Uman in the tsarist province of Kiev, David Bergelson was the youngest of his aff luent and pious parents’ nine children. His father, Rafael, was a follower of R. Dovid Twersky, the Hasidic rebbe of Talnye,1 in honour of whom he named the ‘miracle son’ of his old age. Although steeped in Jewish learning, Rafael Bergelson had no secular education: he spoke no Russian, merely enough Polish and, perhaps, Ukrainian to conduct his business. As one of the district’s wealthiest lumber and grain merchants, he made his home a centre for brokers, leaseholders, and landowners. His son David was given an eclectic education that combined traditional Jewish studies with secular subjects taught by a local maskil, enabling the boy to acquire f luency in Hebrew and Russian, in addition to his native Yiddish. Rafael Bergelson died in 1893, and the nine-year-old David could scarcely remember him in later life. By contrast, his mother, Dreyze, whom he remembered with affection,2 was a modest woman descended from a respected family. Though scantily educated and in poor health, she was an avid reader of the newest Yiddish fiction by such writers as Shomer (Nokhem-Meyer Shaykevitsh, 1849–1905), Yankev Dinezon (1856–1919), and Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sholem-Yankev Abramovitsh, 1835–1917), with a gift for storytelling herself.3 Left alone with his ailing mother in the vast family home, the boy David was overwhelmed by its desolate mood which was intensified by his mother’s passing in 1898, when he was fourteen. Still a dependent between 1898 and 1903, he lived with his older siblings, shuttling between their homes in Kiev, Odessa, and Warsaw; the cost of his board and lodging was deducted from his share of the family inheritance. In 1903 he settled with his brother Yakov, a lumber merchant, in Kiev where Bergelson and his wealthy friend Nakhmen Mayzel (1887–1959) — whose mother Khane was the sister of Yakov Bergelson’s wife Leye4 — became avid readers of the booklets issued by the Hebrew publishing house Tushiyah, the Hebrew journal ha-Shiloah, and the writings of Nakhmen Syrkin (1868–1924), the founder of Po’alei Zion, the Zionist Socialist Party, which sought to fuse socialism with Jewish nationalism and later embraced the Territorialist movement.5

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Although the city of Kiev was specifically excluded from the Pale of Settlement, the official census recorded that its Jewish population increased from 31,800 in 1897 to 81,256 by the end of 1913. Unofficially, it was greater: many Jews evaded the census, while commuters lived in surrounding settlements. Wealthy Kiev Jews included the Brodsky and Zaitsev families whose factories provided large-scale employment; the city was also home to numerous Jewish physicians and lawyers. St Vladimir University had the largest Jewish student body of all universities in Russia, while its Polytechnic Institute was endowed by the Jewish sugar magnate Lazar Brodsky.6 Although Bergelson was intellectually able and artistically gifted — he became an accomplished violinist and a forceful actor — his unsystematic education hampered his attempts to acquire higher qualifications, and he failed to pass the seventh and eighth grades of the gymnazium. As an external student at the university in 1901, and again in 1907–08, he attended classes in dentistry, but passed none of the examinations and gave up formal study without earning a diploma. An avid reader, Bergelson was attracted to the themes of loneliness and displacement in the Hebrew writings of Ahad ha-Am (Asher Ginsburg, 1856– 1927),7 Uri-Nissen Gnessin (1881–1913) — a writer he knew personally in Kiev — and Micah Yoysef Berdichevsky (1865–1921), but his first love was for the stylistic control and psychological depth of Turgenev and Chekhov. Fortunately for his own literary ambitions, his share of the family inheritance freed him from the necessity of earning his bread. While he lived in his brother’s house, he was able to spend most of his time working at his writing, despite the snide remarks of other members of his family.8 Social Upheaval, 1905–1917 The Russo-Japanese War and the ensuing revolution of 1905 disrupted traditional Jewish life. Economic necessity drove workers from the small towns; radical ideas destabilized traditional relationships between social groups, generations, and genders.9 Initially, Bergelson seemed unaware of, and indifferent to, this social crisis. Wealthy and unencumbered, he spent his time reading belles-lettres, taking long walks through the countryside around Kiev, sailing down the Dnieper and theorizing about artistic problems with equally well-to-do companions.10 As he later recalled, when the 1905 revolution spread to Kiev, he knew nothing of the differences between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and had never heard of Lenin. Equally uninformed about the conf licting agendas of Jewish nationalist parties, he had no interest in the quest for a Jewish homeland. Nevertheless, he followed others, as he admitted, ‘in attending rallies, took part in a few demonstrations, wandered about in workers’ areas, [and] read by chance whatever socialistic literature came to hand’.11 Only slowly, through its effect on people he knew, did he perceive the way industrialization and the rapid f low of new capital undermined the social stability of an order built on inheritance and dowry.12 Bergelson began reading Yiddish literature seriously only after he had started writing himself. Primarily concerned with making his work f low in the mainstream of European letters, he worked first in Hebrew and then in Russian. In 1906 he sent

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FIG. 1.1. David Bergelson, Okhrimovo, near Uman, around 1905

his Hebrew story ‘Reykus’ (Emptiness) to the journal ha-Zman (The Time), edited in Vilna by David Frischmann (1859–1922) and Yeshaye Bershadsky (1871–1910), but it was rejected.13 His pieces in Russian were equally unsuccessful. Among those who encouraged him to turn to Yiddish was Elkhonon Kalmanson (1857–1930), a Kiev-based intimate of Sholem Aleichem (Sholem-Yankev Rabinovitsh, 1859–1916) and Lev Shestov (1866–1938), to whom Bergelson showed some of his Hebrew and Russian sketches. Kalmanson, a tireless promoter of Jewish cultural identity through the development of Yiddish, later perceptively noted that its modern literature was born because young writers like Bergelson longed to identify with their people.14 As the evolving course of his literary life was to show, this became a lifelong commitment for Bergelson. All the same, he found his transition to Yiddish difficult. In seeking an individualistic diction, he found scant guidance in the work of his immediate predecessors. Mendele’s style seemed to him outdated and, though attracted to his themes, he considered a dead end the Polish dialect of Y.-L. Peretz (1852–1915). Despite admiring the early fiction of Sholem Asch (1880–1957), he rejected Asch’s idealization of the shtetl. Only in the work of Sholem Aleichem, also a native of Ukraine, did he find a Yiddish familiar to him, so his earliest stories in Yiddish — none of them published — took Sholem Aleichem’s style as their model, with disastrous results. Sholem Aleichem’s baredevdikayt, his ‘volubility’, was, as Bergelson himself recognized, useless for his own artistic goals.15 To present

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the shtetl’s fading bourgeoisie as individuals rather than as stereotypes, Bergelson had to create his own language. Depriving the third-person narrative voice of its conventional omniscience, he required his readers to infer for themselves the motives of his characters from what they said or failed to say. Moreover, he took pains to foreground this mode of telling, making it self-consciously call attention to itself. Both techniques — the displacement of narrative control and the uncertainty of knowing what is true — marked his work as modernist.16 That this approach was radically new to Yiddish literature and, in both style and theme, was initially unwelcome is demonstrated by the difficulty he experienced in getting his earliest stories published. Two of his first Yiddish works, a story entitled ‘Blut’ (Blood), in which a young woman with revolutionary sympathies inadvertently causes the death of her own father, and a second in which a young man returns from military service to find his wife seriously ill,17 were, according to Mayzel, strongly reminiscent of Chekhov and Schnitzler, and characteristic neither in theme nor in style of what later became Bergelson’s distinctive prose. Submitted to Vilna’s Literarishe monatsshtriftn (Literary Monthly), neither piece received so much as an acknowledgement.18 Bergelson’s first mature Yiddish story, ‘Di drite’ (The third one) (1907), was rejected by Khaym Tshemerinsky,19 the editor of the Kiev Yiddish daily Dos folk (The People), when Bergelson refused to change the tale’s ending, and he had no better success with several other stories, among them ‘Der toyber’ (The deaf man), completed in 1906, which he sent to various Yiddish publications in both Vilna and Warsaw. In 1907 he forwarded it to Hillel Tsaytlin, editor of the Warsaw miscellanies Naye tsayt (New Times), who kept the work on file for more than a year, but finally rejected it. In 1907 Bergelson also sent fragments of ‘Arum vokzal’ (At the depot) — the novella that established his reputation — to Peretz, the sought-after mentor of all aspiring Yiddish writers, from whom he did not receive the courtesy of a reply. Returned by editors reluctant to take risks, and accompanied by comments veering between tentative admiration and conviction that such texts were ‘too modern’ for Yiddish readers, some of Bergelson’s best stories had been completed by the time he was twenty years old, yet they remained unpublished. Although he had completed ‘Arum vokzal’ in 1908 as a reworking of his rejected Hebrew tale ‘Reykus’, it was only published in 1909 because of Nakhmen Mayzel’s intervention. As Kiev had no Yiddish print shop in those years, Mayzel travelled to Warsaw where, according to his own account, he walked the streets trying unsuccessfully to interest one of the city’s many publishers in the novella. He finally engaged Yakov Lidsky, the founder-owner of the publishing house Progres, to print it; Bergelson personally defrayed half the costs. This agreement concluded, Mayzel sent for Bergelson by telegram: We both wandered about literary Warsaw and met none of the writers. We were afraid to visit Peretz. On one occasion we came to Ceglana Street, to his apartment building, stood on the steps, wanted to ring the bell, and in trepidation went away again. [...] We thought little of a great many very wellknown literary names. We believed that they should yield place to newer, more interesting talents.20

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FIG. 1.2. David Bergelson (left) and Yitskhok-Leybush Peretz (sitting), 1910; third person unidentified

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When ‘Arum vokzal’ was finally published, its originality was recognized by leading critics including A. Vayter (Ayzik-Meyer Devenishki, 1878–1919), Avrom Reyzen (1876–1953), and Shmuel Niger (1883–1955); Niger discussed it in the St Petersburg newspaper Fraynd (Friend).21 Encouraged by this success, at the end of in 1909 Mayzel established his own publishing house, called Kunstfarlag, which brought out two more of Bergelson’s stories, ‘Der toyber’ (The deaf man) and ‘Tsvey vegn’ (Two roads), in the first volume of Der yidisher almanakh (The Yiddish Miscellany), a publication that Bergelson co-edited and sponsored.22 In a surge of creativity, he published widely in short-lived periodicals both in Kiev and elsewhere. In 1911–12, he gave the stories, ‘Ahin tsu vegs’ (On the way there) and ‘Der letster rosheshone’ (The last Rosh ha-Shanah), to Vuhin? (Whither?), and others to the miscellany Fun tsayt tsu tsayt (From Time to Time), continuing to win critical praise from sophisticated readers. Although he lived and worked for ten years in Kiev, Bergelson tended to avoid urban settings in his writing. Primarily, he claimed, this was because in the shtetl the bourgeoisie still spoke Yiddish, while in the metropolis they spoke Russian. This was only partly true. A more significant reason was Bergelson’s artistic commitment to portraying the economic destruction of the shtetl. During the first decade of his literary career, his work focused on the gain and loss of money. His chief characters, drawn from the Jewish merchant class among whom he had grown up, are impoverished by capitalist urbanization. In ‘Arum vokzal’, economic middlemen whose livelihoods depend upon buying up rural produce and arranging its distribution in urban centres are literally trapped ‘in the middle’, at the railway station between the shtetl, whose inhabitants move sluggishly about in horse-drawn vehicles, and the city, whose denizens reach out to everything in trains. His second novella, ‘In a fargrebter shtot’ (In a backwoods town), even more explicitly shows the old shtetl order undermined by economic f luctuation.23 With no optimistic vision of the new order to which the old was yielding place, Bergelson was fatalistically aware only that whatever individuals might hope for, their fates were predetermined, an attitude of mind that shaped his singular prose style. Its extensive use of the passive voice, its choric repetition of set phrases and sentences, and its general subordination of direct to reported speech, deliberately denied tension-building in favour of a monotone conveying the literary-philosophical view that every ending is predictably foreordained.24 Consequently, his earliest work reordered the conception of modern Yiddish literature developed by its three founding fathers. His was the art not of generalized typology that produced such figures as Mendele the Book Peddler, Tevye the Dairyman, and Bontshe the Silent, but of particularized individualism and psychological uniqueness. For two years (1909–10) Bergelson worked on a full-length novel provisionally entitled In goles: Ravrebe (In exile: Ravrebe). Taking as its central character a former socialist named Ravrebe, the work aimed to depict, through the life of one Jewish intellectual, the movement of modern Russian Jewry from piety to revolution. His decision to abandon this ambitious project suggests the extent of Bergelson’s artistic self-awareness. In the spring of 1910, not long after Bergelson had avoided meeting him in Warsaw, Peretz accepted the invitation of the local Literatur-gezelshaft (Literary

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FIG. 1.3. David Bergelson, Nakhmen Mayzel and his brother, Kiev, c.1908

Union) to lecture in Kiev. Keen to tell him how much his championship of Yiddish culture meant to their generation, Bergelson and Mayzel decided to present Peretz with an address, grandiosely written out on parchment by a Torah scribe using a goose quill. Prevented by a police ban on additional speeches from handing it over at the Yiddish lecture, and by anti-Yiddish zealots from offering it at the Hebrew reception, the friends were obliged to deliver their gift privately, and in this way they finally met Peretz.25 Some time later, uncertain of how far his Ravrebe novel was succeeding, Bergelson travelled to Warsaw to consult Peretz. This encounter proved unsatisfactory, as his laconic summing up reveals: forgeleyent nor Y. L. Peretz. Peretz — gefeln; mir aleyn nit; dem roman nit farefentlekht; ‘Read aloud only to Y. L. Peretz; it pleased Peretz; it did not please me; the novel was not published’.26 Mayzel

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believed this was because, lacking first-hand experience, Bergelson could not depict his socialist hero in the universities of Europe where he would certainly have spent time in real life.27 Bergelson himself claimed that he had not yet developed sufficient narrative skills to handle a very broad canvas. Preferring to follow his own artistic instincts, by this time he was deeply disappointed by Peretz’s alienation from the radical spirit of the times. From 1905 on, depressed by intensifying Polish anti-Semitism, Peretz rejected the dogmatism of rival Jewish socialist parties, the ‘corrupting inf luence’ of the Yiddish popular press and theatre, and the inf luence on new Yiddish literature of Russian and Polish symbolism. Although his own work had ref lected similar borrowing, Peretz now condemned such trends as ‘unhealthy’, and strikingly expressed his retreat in his drama Baynakht oyfn altn mark (At night in the old marketplace, 1907; rev. 1909), which attacked modernism with its own tools. Insisting that the religious past was obsolete, it also dismissed all brands of modern Jewish ideology as sloganeering, and despaired of any Jewish future in Poland.28 This play was rejected by young modernists like Bergelson, who accused Peretz of faddism and superficiality. In a letter to Niger from Odessa in 1913, Bergelson likened Peretz to an illusionist: in the days when all were befuddled with [Peretz’s] soap bubbles, he played conjuring tricks and seemed to creep through a block of wood, but when the soap bubbles dissolved, it became clear that everything had been an optical illusion — he had crept not through, but past.29

Contrary to Peretz’s fears, after the popular press had been liberated by the tsar’s manifesto of October 1907 Yiddish literature gained in both status and readership. Since more books could now be published, superior Yiddish writing could be more widely disseminated. Much of this work was translated into other languages, including Russian,30 because liberal Russian intellectuals wanted to show solidarity with the Jews. The time was thus propitious for the growth of experimental, modernist writing in Yiddish, at the forefront of which Bergelson now stood. Until the outbreak of World War I, Warsaw and its rival, Vilna, led the field in Yiddish publishing throughout Eastern Europe. Each capital, however, catered to a different reading public. Warsaw, as the chief purveyor of newspapers and journals, fed the popular taste, whereas Vilna, the centre for socialist publications and belles-lettres, appealed to a more sophisticated readership. From 1910 on, the chief patron of Yiddish belles-lettres in Vilna became Boris Kletskin (1875–1937), a wealthy Bundist dedicated to the promotion of Yiddish culture who founded his own publishing house. When Mayzel arranged for Kletskin to distribute in Vilna all publications produced by his Kunstfarlag in Kiev, the two houses established an important publishing axis, since Kletskin, ideologically progressive, began inviting Yiddish writers, among them Bergelson, to live and work in Vilna, where he provided them with board and lodging. Though regrettably short-lived, the Mayzel-Kletskin publishing partnership provided the first solvent outlet for modernist Yiddish writers. For nine years, between 1905 and 1914, the Yiddish literary circles of Vilna and Kiev complemented each other in their efforts to create a highbrow Yiddish

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FIG. 1.4. David Bergelson, Kiev, c.1908–09

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literature, challenging literary mass production or what they called ‘the Warsaw trend’ by turning party periodicals into important forums for modernist literature. Among them were Kiev’s Der yidisher almanakh, nominally edited by Shmaryahu Gorelik, Mayzel, and Bergelson himself, and Di yidishe velt, a journal originally founded in St Petersburg in 1912 which Kletskin re-launched in Vilna. In 1913, he invited Bergelson to edit its literary section, which he did for only three issues, before leaving Vilna to return to Kiev, when its editorship passed to Shmuel Niger. In Di yidishe velt, one of the most important Yiddish journals of those years, Bergelson published some of his best early fiction31 and the first of his publicistic essays, entitled ‘Briv tsu der yunger yidisher inteligents’ (Letter to the young Jewish intelligentsia).32 Disappointingly, publication of both these journals was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and was never resumed.33 Kletskin’s publishing coup of this period was Bergelson’s first novel, Nokh alemen (When all is said and done). Written in 1911–12, it first appeared in book form in 1913, although some early chapters had been published in the miscellany Fun tsayt tsu tsayt (Kiev, 1911). Among sophisticated readers, it created a sensation. Almost immediately, at the suggestion of the poet Khaym Nakhmen Bialik (1873–1934), some of its chapters appeared in Hebrew translation in the Odessa Hebrew journal ha-Olam (The World) in 1913. Subsequently also translated into Russian and German, the novel was among the crowning achievements of modern Yiddish fiction, the first not only to take a woman as its central character, but also to depict radical alienation. Bergelson’s prose sunders speaker from speech: monosyllabic language is punctuated by silence, as though to conceal rather than reveal thoughts. Minutely described everyday objects and events are no longer manifestations of reality but metaphors for existential exhaustion. Like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary — a clear inf luence — Mirl Hurvits, the novel’s focal character, seeks to escape from provincial tedium in romantic daydreams, in pursuit of which she abandons a loving husband for an abortion and a doomed affair. From the time Mayzel established his publishing venture until the outbreak of World War I, he and Bergelson attracted round themselves a like-minded group of young writers. Their meetings in Yakov Bergelson’s big house in Kiev nurtured such talents as Der Nister (1884–1950), Leyb Kvitko (1890–1952), Yekheskel Dobrushin (1883–1953), and David Hofshteyn (1889–1952), all of whom, a few years later, formed part of what became known as the ‘Kiev Group’. Nearly three decades later, sending birthday wishes to Bergelson from Kharkov in 1940, Der Nister recalled the attitude of mind these meetings inculcated: Please recall that at one time you always maintained the custom, either when you read your work to others, or when others read their work to you, to ensure that this always took place in the presence of lighted candles in candelabra. This was not some empty, cheaply pretentious ornamentation. No! Each time this was intended to signify that literature was hallowed, literature was solemn... This was very simple, and had absolutely no connection with the Warsaw literary marketplace of those days [...] Whoever came within your sphere of inf luence was obliged to oppose that jostling marketplace, to place himself on your side, and to begin creating what was for those days a new literary tradition, a new literary school, at the head of which you stood, worthy and summoned by vocation to lead it.34

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FIG. 1.5. Standing: Yekheskel Dobrushin and David Bergelson Sitting: unidentified, Leah Geshelina (Dobrushin’s wife) and Der Nister. Kiev, 1912

The new work emerging from Kiev did not appeal to everyone, however. Ignored by the so-called masses, it was not admired even by all educated readers. In 1916, for example, the London-based editor Leo Kenig (1889–1970) disparaged Bergelson as ‘a sickly-melancholic intellectual’, urging him to write in any other language of Europe but Yiddish, which in Kenig’s view should not imitate other literatures, but should preserve its own ‘national identity’.35 Bergelson and his circle, however, had long sided with the secular internationalist Berdichevsky, and thus against the religious Zionist Ahad ha-Am, in believing that Jewish literature should promote the values of Western culture.36 The most precise and sparing of writers, and the least self-indulgent, he shared the chief concerns of European modernism — scepticism of all ideological systems, distress at the hollowness of existing society, perplexity about the function of art, and a quest for individualistic new forms. But his sense of fragmentation was exacerbated by being a Russian Jew writing in Yiddish, a language respected neither by the assimilated nor by the leaders of the Zionist movement. The former demanded linguistic acculturation to their home countries; the latter insisted on the revival of Hebrew as a precondition for fulfilling Jewish national-political aspirations that Bergelson rejected. For Jewish artists, as much as for their Gentile contemporaries, the old order was changing, but the new order to which it was yielding place was even more insecure. It seemed that once Jews had abandoned a cultural heritage predicated on religion, they had effectively pulled themselves up by the roots, without either country or culture on which to ground their national identity.

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War, Revolution, and Emigration, 1914–1921 When war broke out in 1914, tsarist censorship was reinforced, with particular ferocity in Kiev where all Yiddish outlets were closed down in March–April 1915. The general tension that accompanied the deteriorating situation at the front erupted into the turmoil of the revolution, and sharpened Bergelson’s sense of futility, since the Bolshevik victory after October 1917 swept away the well-to-do Jewish shtetl bourgeoisie who formed both his subject matter and his chief readership. His novella Opgang (Descent), begun in 1913 and abandoned at the beginning of the war, was completed and given to the publisher only in 1919. As he later recalled, the social upheavals around him paralysed him creatively: It seemed to me that no one needed belles-lettres any longer. [...] I came to the conclusion that with Opgang I was writing my last book. I had nothing more to say, nothing more to write ... In my earlier work I had shown the end of the shtetl, the end of the bourgeoisie in all its varied strata and shades, had now shown the death of the intelligentsia, who no longer even had anyone to talk to ... After all, [in Opgang, the chief character] Khaym-Moyshe now spoke exclusively to a dead person, to Meylekh. . .37

‘In fartunklte tsaytn’ (In darkened times), another novel started in 1913, was abandoned, however. The concept of ‘darkened times’ evoked an obsolete era that Bergelson was determined to leave behind; in any case, most of the manuscript was destroyed during the pogrom that erupted around him in 1919. He saved only its first part, which first appeared as a fragment entitled ‘Yankev-Nosn Viderpolier: a kapitl fun a greserer zakh’ (Yankev-Nosn Viderpolier: a chapter of a something larger) in Di yidishe velt in March 1915.38 Three years later, with significant stylistic alterations,39 it was republished in the first issue of Eygns;40 but in its final form, as the novella Yoysef Shor, it appeared only in the first edition of Bergelson’s Verk (Work, Berlin, 1922).41 During the war years he published only short pieces, like the vignette ‘Baynakht’ (At night), published first in the Petrograd daily, Togblat, in 1915, and, surprisingly, contributed to the children’s magazine Grininke beymelekh (Little Green Trees) two stories, respectively entitled ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ (The little golden ball, February 1914, republished Kiever-farlag, 1916), and ‘A mayse mit zibn feygelekh’ (A story with seven little birds, March 1915). War and revolution demanded a wholly new intellectual and artistic synthesis from him if he was to develop as a writer. In Odessa in 1917 Bergelson met and married Tsiporah (Tsipe) Kutzenogaya, a recent graduate of the Odessa gymnazium for girls. Bialik proposed the bridal toast; only half in jest, he urged his new wife to save Bergelson from committing himself to the Bolsheviks.42 A year later, on 8 August 1918, just as pogroms began raging across Ukraine, the Bergelsons’ only child, their son Lev, was born in Gaisin, near Vinnitsa, a town on the Bug River that was Tsipe Bergelson’s birthplace, and Bergelson found employment in Kiev where he and his family lived in 1919–20. Kerensky’s provisional government abolished the Pale of Settlement in February 1917. Some while later a group of nationalists, declaring Ukraine independent, set up the moderate socialist Central Rada, which survived until April

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FIG. 1.6. Boris Kletskin, Sholem Asch (standing), David Bergelson Bobruisk, Byelorussia, c.1912

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1918 and gave emerging Yiddish culture its best chance by adopting a policy of national autonomy. Three socio-political models for the reconstruction of Jewish life had long been proposed: Zionism, which demanded a sovereign political state in the biblical Holy Land; Territorialism, which sought Jewish political autonomy in any independent territory, not necessarily Palestine; and Diasporism, which viewed the Jewish people as a nation distinguished by extraterritoriality and united by cultural autonomy predicated on secular Yiddish culture. This latter ideal, realized brief ly in Kiev in 1917, seemed capable of international realization when, for the first time in history, Jews as a nation and Yiddish as a language were recognized: a Jewish delegation, among whose members was Nakhmen Syrkin, was received at the Versailles peace conference in 1919. Four Jewish political parties functioned in Kiev after the revolution: the Bund, the Folkspartey (Folkist Party), with which Bergelson sympathised, the Labour Zionists, and the Fareynikte (United Socialist Labour Party). Under the Rada, they joined forces to serve a pan-Yiddishist ideal. The Fareynikte launched Di naye tsayt, a Yiddish daily — published also on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath, to f launt its anti-religious militancy — that lasted from September 1917 until May 1919 with Bergelson brief ly in charge of its literary section and Moyshe Litvakov (1875–1937) as one of its editors. Litvakov had studied in a yeshive until the age of seventeen, and then read philology at the Sorbonne. Committed to radical politics since 1895, he returned to Russia in 1905 as a dedicated revolutionary. All four parties nominated representatives, among them Bergelson, Litvakov, Dobrushin, and Mayzel, to the central committee of the Kultur-lige (League of Culture), created in January 1918 as a supra-political Yiddishist body that sought to cover all areas of cultural activity in the former tsarist empire. In Kiev it set about organizing a school system, a teachers’ training college, and a publishing house. In the event, two publishing house were established, the Kiever farlag and the Folksfarlag; among their founders was the historian Shimon Dubnov (1860–1941).43 Optimistic euphoria found expression in the titles of such politically engagé publications as Oyfgang (Sunrise) and Baginen (Dawn), both published once each during 1919. Many who worked with the Kultur-lige had little in common beyond being socialist, non-Zionist, and Yiddishist, but they cooperated with zeal. Among them were independent spirits like Peretz Markish (1895–1952), who ran the Kultur-lige’s Yekaterinoslav branch, and Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944), who worked for the newspaper Komunistishe fon (Communist Flag) and contributed to Baginen and Oyfgang.44 Bergelson’s story ‘In eynem a zumer’ (During a certain summer) also appeared in Oyfgang, and he wrote another children’s story, entitled ‘Mayse-bikhl’ (Little story book),45 for the educational wing of the Kultur-lige. Although Singer, for one, regarded all experimentation with narrative forms other than strict realism as ‘pretentious’,46 and considered the members of the Kulturlige egocentric and affected,47 they did not regard themselves as moral spokesmen for the Jewish people, but rather as individualists seeking to move beyond the ‘folk’ quality of earlier Yiddish writing into the mainstream of European letters, like their Russian contemporaries. Consequently, they enthusiastically welcomed new talent, like that of the young poet Kadya Molodowsky (1894–1975), whom

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Bergelson warmly encouraged.48 In her memoirs, Molodowsky unstintingly praised Bergelson’s gifts as a mentor: Although there was a cosy intimacy in that writing circle, I felt that [...] writing was a deeply responsible matter. On one occasion I read to Bergelson a new poem I had written. He pointed out one line and remarked, ‘That is a weak line’. [...] Bergelson did not enter into any explanations. On his desk lay a copy of the Bible. He opened it and sought the chapter relating the story of Balaam riding his ass, and read out the verse: ‘And the ass saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way’ [Numbers 22. 23]. Balaam, who was riding on the ass, did not see the angel. That is a strong line, Bergelson told me, because it can be explained in various ways. [...] Bergelson never ever advised me how to alter any particular line in a poem [...] but he gave me a great deal of courage. [...] I would often call on him in his home, where I would meet other writers who also came to visit him. One detail sticks in my memory: on one occasion Bergelson read aloud to us a chapter of a short story he was working on at the time. [...] There was an intimacy in his reading, a kind of closeness to the people he was depicting. One felt that this was not some fictional tale, but one that had actually been experienced. It sprang from deep interiority. These meetings with Bergelson stimulated me to grasp the true essence of what writing meant.49

The most inf luential of the literary periodicals published at this time was the first issue of Eygns (Our Own, 1918). Editorially led by Bergelson and Der Nister, Eygns rejected specific political alignment, linking itself aesthetically to modernist trends like symbolism, impressionism, and expressionism. Its title made a double-pronged declaration: though its contributors wrote in Yiddish, ‘our own’ language, they would publish ‘our own’ writing, original in both content and form. Proclaiming a determination to create secular Yiddish culture, Eygns was the voice of what became known as the ‘Kiev Group’, a loose union of Yiddish writers committed to promoting the ideals of European modernism according to the agenda of the erudite Vilna journal Literarishe monatsshriftn, whose manifesto before World War I had made no concession to ‘the masses’ but had argued that literature could not develop freely by aiming to please the uneducated reader or limiting itself to the needs of those who had no access to world culture. Its appearance sparked a furious debate with far-reaching consequences. In a review published in the first issue of the rival journal, Bikher-velt (Book World, February 1919), Litvakov censured its contents for ‘elitism’ that ignored ordinary readers.50 Dismissing the verse of Kvitko as ‘immature’, the poetry of Hofshteyn as ‘old-fashioned’, and the prose of Bergelson and Der Nister as passé, he found that Markish alone had found the true voice of the new generation. Six months later, in Bikher-velt, 4–5 (August 1919), Bergelson responded with a substantial essay, entitled ‘Dikhtung un gezelshaftlekhkayt’ (Belles-lettres and the social order), addressing what he took to be the role of art and literature during revolutionary times.51 Litvakov and Bergelson shared much common ground: equally opposed to Zionism and assimilation, both championed Yiddish as the official language of the Jews in Russia and regarded it as the natural medium of Jewish literary expression. In pursuing ‘modernity’, both sought a radical break with debased shtetl

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existence. Where they crucially parted ways, however, was over the function of the new literature. As a Marxist ideologue — albeit he became a Bolshevik only in 1921 — Litvakov demanded that art serve the revolution as a utilitarian instrument to free individuals from ethnic particularity. Bergelson, on the other hand, insisted on distinguishing artistic from social questions; art could follow the revolution, but it could not lead it.52 Defending the artist’s right to creative freedom, Bergelson also supported his right to draw freely on the forms of the past. Considering the ideological terms in which the function of art was being redefined, this argument demanded the reconciliation of glaring contradictions. Was it possible to pour new wine into old bottles? Bergelson confidently insisted that the revolution could use old forms to create new art, and that universalism and individualism were not incompatible. What he had not yet recognized was that modernism was simultaneously both a revolutionary and an elitist movement, and that it could never satisfy the demands of both the artist and ‘the masses’. Although in his review Litvakov had hailed Bergelson as ‘the creator of the real artistic Yiddish novel [with Nokh alemen], the originator of artistic modernism in Yiddish literature’, in his demand for an anti-religious, universal literature, he insisted that Yiddish writers fulfil the condition under which the emerging Soviet state had accepted the Jews as a viable national minority, namely their claim that only through Yiddish could the ‘popular masses’ be sovietized.53 This was the ground on which a bitter ideological war would eventually be fought. Though in theory the constitution of the Rada favoured the Jews and Yiddish was declared an official language, the new government had no power to implement its directives: to take a small example, since the telephone service had no Yiddishspeaking operators, callers were obliged to speak in Russian or Ukrainian. For their part, the Jews had reservations about Ukrainian independence. Unwilling to separate themselves from fellow Jews in the rest of the former empire, most regarded themselves as Russian rather than Ukrainian, esteemed Russian above Ukrainian culture, and had good reason to fear that the intellectuals who had created the new state were unable to protect them. Almost universally perceived as pro-Bolshevik, Jews thus became targets for the violent hatred of both peasants and nationalists.54 In February 1918 the Bolsheviks took Kiev, but by early March they had been expelled by the Germans who set up the authoritarian, anti-socialist Hetman government of Pavlo Skoropadsky (1873–1943), which abolished the Rada. Following the capitulation of the Central Powers and the Armistice on 11 November 1918, however, an uprising of the Ukrainian National Union overthrew Skoropadsky’s Hetmanate and created the Directory government, headed by Symon Petliura (1879–1926), which continued the fight to maintain Ukrainian independence. From the beginning of 1919 a series of vicious pogroms, fomented by military units and peasant gangs, overwhelmed Jewish towns and villages, killing tens of thousands. With bitter irony, the Kultur-lige’s most productive period and the battle over the function of secular Yiddish modernism was joined between February and August 1919, at the height of these pogroms. Petliura, desperate to keep his disintegrating army’s loyalty, did nothing to stop these attacks, but he could not save Ukraine. Taking the offensive, the Bolsheviks reoccupied Kiev on 3 February 1919, but

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were fiercely resisted by Ukrainian partisan forces led, among others, by Nykyfor Hryhoriv, Nestor Makhno, and Danylo Zeleny. Meanwhile, Jews streamed into Kiev seeking protection: between 1919 and 1921, 1236 murderous riots were counted in 530 cities and towns, during which some 200,000 Jews were killed.55 In May 1919, the volunteer White army of southern Russia, commanded by Anton Denikin (1872–1947), launched a major offensive into the Ukraine with an advance on Moscow. In his attempt to re-establish ‘one, indivisible Russia’, Denikin re-empowered the gentry, destroyed Ukrainian cultural and educational organizations, and terrorized the population. Sustained pogroms followed the entry of his troops into Kiev on 31 August 1919, but his reactionary policies provoked mass insurrection. By supporting the Red Army between February and April 1919, Hryhoriv was able to ensure the defeat of the Whites in southern Ukraine, while Makhno, in brief alliance with the Bolsheviks, defeated Denikin in September 1919 and forced the Whites to abandon their Moscow offensive. By December 1919 the White army was in full retreat, and on 17 December 1919 Kiev was retaken by the Red Army. Twelve days later, on 28 December 1919, the Bolsheviks concluded a treaty with the Ukrainian soviet and recognized its independence.56 Until this time, it had made little difference to the Jews which of the contending forces had the upper hand; all seemed similarly anti-Semitic. The civil war and its accompanying pogroms had dispelled many illusions about the revolution. By the beginning of 1920, when Kiev was firmly in its grip, the Bolshevik government seized control of the hitherto autonomous Kultur-lige and agreed to support its work on condition that it served the revolution. Yiddish was officially acknowledged as one of the languages of Soviet peoples with long-established literary traditions. Nevertheless, many of the Kultur-lige’s leaders, still clinging to ideals of artistic freedom, were among those whom cultural commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933) contemptuously labelled ‘fellow-travellers’, a designation with which Lev Trotsky (1879–1940) stigmatized suspect writers who were neither members of the Party nor of proletarian origin.57 Russian ‘fellow-traveller’ writers included Isaac Babel (1894–1940) and Boris Pasternak (1890–1960); among Yiddish mitloyfer were Hofshteyn and Kvitko, Der Nister and Bergelson. Other factions formed. Bergelson rejected for publication some stories by Israel Joshua Singer, and continued to disparage Markish’s work; Singer and Markish disliked Bergelson. The Kiev experiment collapsed and gave way to pessimism in the face of political instability and lack of a ‘mass’ readership. Bergelson had been among those who naïvely expected the revolution to bring Yiddish writers a wider audience; his disillusioning experience with Eygns convinced him that this was a fantasy at the very time that more rigorous ideological demands began to be made. To punish Kiev for having served as the hub of the Ukrainian independence movement, the Bolsheviks moved the capital of Soviet Ukraine to Kharkov. Kiev Yiddish organizations either ceased to function or were transformed into ideologically cohesive Soviet institutions. In September 1920, the educational and cultural activities of the Kultur-lige were severely curtailed, and its central committee, abolished by decree, was replaced by an appointed executive dominated by communists. Already by the end of 1919, as the work he had pursued in Kiev

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withered away, a despondent Bergelson was one of nine Yiddish cultural activists who appealed in letters to colleagues in New York for assistance to f lee Kiev and emigrate to the United States.58 Their desperate situation was sketched in Bergelson’s personal appeal ‘to all friends of Yiddish art and culture in America’, dated 26 May 1920:59 Amidst shockingly inhuman conditions, among ruined towns and villages razed, drowned in blood, and now obliterated, in the small desolate island of Kiev lives a small exhausted group — a group of Jewish writers, sculptors, painters and poets who, in great anguish and pain, drag out what is left of their lives over here. Huddled together, utterly devastated by the shattering blow that has struck Ukrainian Jewry, each one here [...] tries to pursue his vocation as long as the slaughtering knife, an ever-present threat, has not yet slashed his own throat, as long as his hands and his heart still serve him.[...] Suffering pogroms in the most horrifying senses of the word, without the slightest means of subsistence, cut off from the whole world, without books, without paper, paint, or clay with which to model, the local group of writers and artists here have survived barely long enough to use this opportunity of letting their colleagues in America know something about themselves [...] Will you provide this exhausted group of artists with visas and the material resources to travel across to America?

Nothing resulted from this appeal, and Bergelson and his colleagues joined the stream of migrants f lowing towards Moscow in search of survival. Moscow, 1920–1921 Officially proclaimed the state capital in March 1918, Bolshevized Moscow also became the first city of Soviet Yiddish literature, a status it had enjoyed even earlier because pre-revolution military censorship, strictly enforced everywhere else, had been relatively relaxed there, thus enabling a Yiddish publishing infrastructure to develop: Kletskin, for example, had used a Moscow print shop to publish Yiddish books as early as 1917. In the summer of 1918, the Moscow Circle (later Association) of Yiddish Writers and Artists was established to aid those struggling with poverty and homelessness; other writers f locked in, either fired with revolutionary idealism or seeking help to emigrate. The Jewish commissariat, established specifically to deal with Jewish affairs, published the Yiddish daily Der emes (The Truth) and the journal Di komunistishe velt (The Communist World) and promoted other Yiddish literary activity. In the first decade following the revolution, the Soviet government was too preoccupied with consolidating and extending its political and economic control to enforce mass literary conformity. Declining either to demand an official mode of writing or to permit any one literary group to speak in its name, it distinguished between political or official Party literature, over which it maintained watchful control, and all other writing, including fiction and poetry, where diversity and competition were encouraged. Authors were expected to be sympathetic to the new order, but apart from making openly counter-revolutionary statements, they could write as they wished.60 On the Yiddish front, political differences were also tolerated, since both Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik Yiddish activists shared the

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dream of synthesizing Yiddish with universal culture. Thus Daniel Charney (1888– 1959), a leading member of the Folkspartey and general secretary of the Moscow branch of Kultur-lige,61 found it possible to serve also as one of the editors of Der emes from July 1918 until February 1919.62 As the harsh conditions of ‘war communism’ brought starvation to Moscow and drove its population into the country in search of food and work, the task of the Jewish commissariat was supplemented by the Yevsektstia, the Jewish section of the Communist Party, staffed by functionaries who began to expect political conformity. On 7 November 1920 it re-launched Der emes — its title again shadowing that of the Russian daily Pravda — using the new Soviet Yiddish orthographical code. Having arrived in the capital, Bergelson worked brief ly as a literary editor of Yiddish and Russian in the Yevsektsia apparatus, but his hope soon faded that it would be possible to create in Moscow an environment similar to that of Kiev’s Kultur-lige. Uncomfortable with the determination to yoke creative endeavour to an ideological agenda, and disappointed in his hope of launching a new literary journal, in early 1921 Bergelson left the frozen, starving capital to take up an invitation from one of the co-owners of the Folksfarlag, Zev-Wolf LatzkiBertoldi (1881–1939),63 from whom he had received an advance for work still to be written, to join him, Der Nister, and Kvitko in Berlin. Travelling on a Lithuanian passport provided by Jurgis Baltrušaitis, the Lithuanian ambassador to Moscow64 — an invaluable travel document that enabled him to come and go at will all over Europe — he left Moscow as part of a group of forty people (and eight horses) in a freight car,65 spending a few weeks en route from Moscow to Kovno (Kaunas) in Lithuania. Among those travelling together were old Kiev associates like Der Nister, Zelig-Hirsh Kalmanovitsh,66 and Issachar-Ber Rybak, and new companions like Abraham Rosin (1878–1942)67 and Yakov Lestschinsky (1876–1966). Most were driven to Berlin chief ly, if not exclusively, by its promise of improved living conditions and publishing opportunities which offered the unexampled combination of low prices, high quality, and lax censorship. The Berlin Years, 1921–1933 Serving as a meeting-point between East and West, Weimar Berlin, which developed after World War I into a cosmopolitan, multilingual centre of European learning and culture, offered a haven to a wide range of refugees, including Russian writers and intellectuals who had either f led from, been expelled by, or avoided the Bolsheviks. These included Andrei Bely (1880–1934), Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967), Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) — whose politically active, liberal father was murdered there in 1922 — and Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941). These émigrés established so significant a Russian presence that Charlottenburg, the suburb in which most of them settled, was jocularly known as ‘Charlottengrad’. United only by a desire to preserve their cultural heritage, they substituted literature for the homeland they had f led, continuing to edit and publish highbrow ‘thick’ literary journals which, combining belles-lettres with social commentary and politics, organized their readers into different shades of thought and opinion, as they had done in Russia before 1917.68

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FIG. 1.7. From left to right: David Bergelson, Zishe Weinper, Daniel Charney, Berlin, summer 1929

Between 1920 and 1924, the city also became a leading centre of Yiddish and Hebrew culture, and most of the century’s leading writers in both languages spent time there. Although anti-Semitism continued to be rife, and German Jews generally despised unassimilated Ostjuden, a number of German-Jewish intellectuals came to value Eastern European Jewish culture for embodying what they viewed as an ethnicity they had lost. As early as 1901, Martin Buber (1878–1965), in a programmatic essay for Ost und West entitled ‘Jüdische Renaissance’, called for a rebirth of Jewish culture based on a creative reconstruction of the past. He illustrated this ‘past’ by publishing some of his own German translations of Yiddish literature in Die Jüdische Moderne and in the Zionist organ Die Welt, an example followed by translators for other periodicals, including the twice-weekly Die Jüdische Rundschau. Buber’s German-language redaction of the teachings of the Hasidic rebbes (1906–08) was widely acclaimed, and generated other anthologies devoted to Eastern European Jewish culture. During the war, the military occupation of Poland had given serving German Jews the opportunity to ‘rediscover’ Yiddish as a medieval ‘German dialect’, and such writers as Alfred Döblin (1878–1957), Sammy Gronemann (1875–1952), and Arnold Zweig (1887–1968) wrote travelogues recording their ‘encounter with the East’.69 A neo-romantic conviction of the spiritual superiority of Eastern European Jewry stimulated an interest in Yiddish and Hebrew culture,70 and Yiddish came to be admired as an unadulterated medium of Jewish cultural transmission. A propitious combination of socio-political discourse and cultural interaction thus made Berlin a welcoming place for Jewish artists and intellectuals.

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For their part, many educated Eastern European Jews believed in the superiority of German Kultur. Berdichevsky lived in Berlin from 1911 until his death in 1921, while the bilingual novelist and poet Zalmen Shneour (1887–1959), a protégé of Bialik, had been interned as a foreign alien during the war, when he studied medicine at the University of Berlin. Between 1922 and 1923, Shneour published a novel, a volume of short stories, a memoir, and two volumes of poetry; from Berlin between the wars, he wrote almost exclusively in Yiddish for the American Yiddish press. The equally bilingual novelist and critic David Frischmann, who came to European culture via the German language, had studied at the University of Breslau from 1890 to 1895 and had also been brief ly interned in Berlin when war broke out. By the time Bergelson arrived, Berdichevsky, Frischmann, and the polemicist Saul Israel Hurwitz (1860–1922) who, under the pen-name Shay Ish, had edited the Hebrew yearbook he-Atid between 1907 and 1914, had all died and been buried in Berlin within a few months of one another. In 1920, Bialik was one of many Hebrew writers who applied for an exit visa from Russia. Living and working in Berlin from 1921 until he moved to Tel-Aviv in 1924, Bialik established and ran the Hebrew publishing house and scholarly journal Dvir. The Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichowsky (1875–1943), a physician who had served as a surgeon in the tsarist army, composed some of his most fervent Zionist poems during the nine years, from 1922 to 1931, in which he lived in the German metropolis. Unlike Bialik and Shneour, Tshernichowsky never wrote in Yiddish himself, although his Hebrew poems were early translated into Yiddish, among others by Uri-Nissen Gnessin, and in his autobiography he noted with pride that his mother was often praised for her ‘outstanding eloquence in Yiddish’, and that as an eleven-year-old, he himself had spent a year in a private school where ‘all the subjects were taught in Yiddish’.71 Between 1913 and 1924, Berlin was home also to the Hebrew novelist Shmuel Yoysef Agnon (1888–1970), who acquired a wide knowledge of German literature from his mother, and financial patronage from the department store magnate Salman Schocken (1877–1959) which enabled him to live comfortably, write much, and collect rare and valuable Hebrew books.72 Schocken’s generous support of Agnon sprang from having been won over by Buber’s enthusiasm, and he determined to use his wealth to offer westernized Jewish readers the depth of the Jewish heritage through the German-language publishing house he established in Berlin in 1930. After Agnon and Bialik left for Palestine, Abraham Stybel (1884–1946) moved his Hebrew publishing firm and its journal, ha-Tekufah (The Era), to Berlin in 1926, and the philosopher Simon Rawidowicz (1897–1957), one of its editors, led the Hebraist circle in Berlin until the rise of Nazism. Jewish visual artists also f lourished in Weimar Berlin. When Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945), who had been a professor at the Moscow School of Art from 1894, travelled to Berlin with his wife and two daughters in 1921 to undergo eye surgery, Bialik — with a view to enlarging the Jewish cultural life of the city — encouraged him to stay on, and Pasternak established himself as a portrait painter there; among his subjects were both Bialik and Tchernichowsky. Apart from Issachar-Ber Rybak, other important Russian-Jewish artists living and working in Berlin during the 1920s were Iosif Chaikov (1888–1986), El (Lazar) Lissitzky (1890–1941), and Henryk

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Berlewi (1894–1967), who became the artistic standard-bearer of di khalyastre (‘the gang’), a group of avant-garde Yiddish expressionists in Warsaw led by Uri-Tsvi Grinberg (1896–1981), Meylekh Ravitsh (1893–1976), and Markish. Berlewi’s brand of expressionism and his experiments with Yiddish typography perfectly complemented these poets’ angry, fragmented language, and he designed the covers for Di kupe (The heap), Markish’s lament for the pogroms of the civil war, published in 1921, and for Markish’s expressionist tirade Radio (Radio), as well as for Grinberg’s Mefisto (Mephistopheles). In 1921 Berlewi met Lissitzky, and in 1922 followed him to Berlin where both fell under the inf luence of ideas from De Stijl and the Bauhaus. Berlewi’s final contribution to Jewish expressionism was in his graphic work for the Yiddish journal Albatros (Albatross) between 1922 and 1923, which brilliantly integrated text, graphics, and typography.73 Another valued form of Jewish cultural interchange in Berlin was the work presented by the Vilna Troupe, the Yiddish theatre company that settled there between September 1921 and March 1923, and the Hebrew-language Habimah theatre company, founded in the studios of the Moscow Arts Theatre in 1917, which made its initial tour of Germany in 1926. Two years later, in 1928, the performances given by the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (GOSET) were equally rapturously received. What chief ly impressed German-Jewish theatregoers was the combination of such Jewish folkloric material as dybbuks and golems with the most avant-garde experiments in stage design, direction, and performance. Ironically, what westernized Germany regarded as authentically Jewish was viewed in Poland and Russia as the most modern European art theatre. This was both ironic and predictable. Although Jewish writers generally committed themselves to the ideals of the Left, there is little evidence that Weimar’s best artistic innovations made any significant impression on what they produced themselves. Literary modernism had been exploited in Yiddish by the Kiev Group before the war, but their subsequent work in Berlin showed little inf luence of contemporary experimental trends in German culture. Hebraists like Bialik and self-absorbed scholars like Dubnov had little interest in, and less contact with, their German surroundings.74 While Bergelson appears to have moved in wider German cultural circles, no trace of these contacts is apparent in his work of the Berlin period. His concerns with the role and identity of Jews in the newly emerging socio-political order led him towards a growing allegiance to the communist cause, which increasingly stif led creative innovation. That was why in 1930 Kurt Weill (1900–50) broke off his highly successful collaboration with Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956); according to his widow Lotte Lenya (1888–1981), he protested that he was unable to ‘set the Communist Manifesto to music’. Metaphorically speaking, this was nevertheless the task demanded of all artists who aimed to serve communism, as Bergelson was steadily to find. Publishing opportunities above all promoted Jewish literary activity in Berlin. Apart from a freedom of expression absent in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, low costs — the result of post-war inf lation — and first-rate printing technology made Berlin second only to Warsaw as Europe’s leading producer of Yiddish books. The financial support of the Berlin Jewish family Ullstein, among Germany’s

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largest publishers, enabled Latzki-Bertoldi to revive his Kiev Folksfarlag under the new name of Klal farlag as the Jewish section of Ullstein Verlag,75 and during 1922 alone, the Folksfarlag published over eighty Yiddish books. In addition, putting out the work of major Soviet Yiddish writers resident in Berlin were entirely new Yiddish publishing firms which included Wostok (East), Shveln (Thresholds), Funken (Sparks), and Yidisher literarisher farlag (Yiddish Literary Publishing House). More than twenty short-lived Yiddish periodicals, interdisciplinary, universalistic, and cross-cultural in approach, were launched, among them Der onheyb (The Beginning), edited by David Einhorn (1886–1973), Shmaryahu Gorelik (1877–1942), and Max Weinreich (1894–1969) which, in the single issue it was able to bring out, published not only poetry but also scholarly redactions of old Yiddish manuscripts. The Kunst-ring-almanakh (Art Circle Miscellany), edited by Kalman Zingman (1889–1929), the most prolific Yiddish publisher in pre-1922 Berlin,76 published literary criticism, Expressionist poetry, and new art prints, while even some political journals published significant belletristic sections.77 By the time Bergelson arrived in Berlin, the Lithuanian-born poet Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937) had been living there for a year, working as a prompter in Erwin Piscator’s theatre;78 Der Nister and Kvitko, allies from the Kiev days, followed soon after. In 1922, the linguist Nokhem Shtif (1879–1933) came to lead a group of eager Yiddishists, including the young Max Weinreich, then completing a doctoral dissertation in Yiddish philology, and the historian Elias Tsherikover (1881–1943), who was researching the history of Ukrainian Jewry. With their participation, and that of Dubnov and Lestschinsky, Shtif founded YIVO, the Jewish Research Institute, at a conference in Berlin in August 1925.79 Active littérateurs included the poet, essayist, and critic Hirsh-Dovid Nomberg (1876–1927), the first conscious aesthete in Yiddish letters, who had made Yiddish translations of Shakespeare, Rabindranath Tagore, and The Thousand and One Nights, and Uri-Tsvi Grinberg, who had f led Warsaw to avoid prosecution in November 1922 when the Polish censors banned Albatros. In Berlin during 1923, Grinberg published the last two issues of Albatros before bitterly renouncing European society, abandoning Yiddish, and emigrating to Palestine where he became a major voice in Hebrew poetry. The congeniality of Berlin for Jewish writers was augmented by grants to the poorest among them from the American Joint Distribution Committee ( JDC), represented in Europe by Sholem Asch. The worlds of Yiddish and Hebrew rarely overlapped, though. In the years prior to World War I, the Hebraists and well-off émigrés favoured reserved tables at the Café Monopol, while the early Yiddishists, most of whom lived in the impoverished district of the Scheunenviertel, gathered at the Progress Cultural Club.80 After the war, there were ‘Yiddish tables’ in the Monopol, but the regular meeting place for Yiddish writers shifted to the Romanisches Café. In the spring of 1921, that was where Bergelson found himself surrounded by friends and colleagues. There he met many of Berlin’s leading artistic and cultural personalities, among them the chess master Emmanuel Lasker (1868–1941), with whom he played several games. Between 1922 and 1923, all his writing to date was published in six volumes as Verk (Works) by Wostok. Unlike many of his fellow

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writers, Bergelson lived quite comfortably, first in the Turmstrasse in Moabit, then for two years in Neuendorf, and finally, from 1923, in Zehlendorf.81 There he followed a strict routine, writing and admitting neither guests nor telephone calls in the mornings, and in the afternoons walking and talking in company with family and friends. Mayzel describes his work habits thus: [His] desk was a sort of open workshop. Heaped on top were piles of scattered paper and the toolkit — several pens, a pot of glue, and a little pair of scissors... And more importantly, there also lay a piece of chocolate, and when he had written a page with which he was satisfied, he rewarded himself: there, you’ve earned it! [...] There was also an ashtray overf lowing with cigarette butts. Often there could be found several beginnings of a chapter he had written and discarded and started again. [...] From his earliest years he was unable to continue writing until he had read through what he had written earlier and received the approbation of those closest to him.82

He relaxed by playing his violin. From his earliest years, the music Bergelson cared for was that which accorded most closely to the moods he created in his writing, as Mayzel notes: In his own individualistic manner he played only elegiac, deeply lyrical melodies in minor keys and — most importantly — slowly, carefully, in attenuated fashion. He especially loved the twilight pieces of Tchaikovsky, Kalinnikov, Grieg, and these were the melodies he continued to play, always more deeply and tremulously on his fiddle, year after year, with his face to the wall and his eyes closed, sighing and groaning as though in pain as he did so.83

Bergelson also welcomed visits from younger colleagues, giving generously of his time, his constructive criticism laced with humour. His circle of artistic friends included Alfred Döblin and Arnold Zweig (1887–1968), the director Erwin Piscator (1893–1966) and the actor Alexander Granach (1893–1945), and drama critics Herbert Jhering (1888–1977) and Alfred Kerr (1867–1948). A gifted raconteur, Bergelson enlivened his Eastern European Jewish stories with Hasidic melodies, folk tunes, and impersonations that evoked a wide variety of moods.84 Though still reliant on his wife’s salary as a typist, Bergelson earned well when his work was published in the mass-circulation New York daily Forverts, which paid in US dollars. Journalism was a profession of economic necessity forced on all émigré writers, and like them, Bergelson eagerly took such work wherever he could find it. By the middle of the 1920s, however, many Jewish émigrés began drifting away from Berlin, for reasons that included the rise of overt Jew-hatred in the wake of Hitler’s failed beer-hall putsch of 1923, and intensified deportation of Ostjuden. The check on galloping inf lation at the beginning of 1924 made publishing in Berlin less economically attractive. Moreover, if Berlin was the centre of production, the centre of consumption of Yiddish books remained in Eastern Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the United States; and of Hebrew, in Palestine.85 The existing international Yiddish readership was of two distinct kinds — an intellectual minority riven by conf licting politics and personal jealousies, and a mass readership for whom modernism was both inaccessible and unwelcome. Such a dichotomy split readers of all European literatures, but given the limited numbers of those

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who read Yiddish seriously, its dedicated writers found themselves addressing everdwindling numbers. Der Nister’s work, for instance, heavily symbolic and drawing on a mystical tradition difficult of access even to highbrow readers, spoke into a void when it was published at all. Life in Berlin made Der Nister keenly aware of the hopelessness of the modernist project in Yiddish literature, as he revealed in a 1923 letter to Niger, by then established in New York: Many of us have already simply stopped feeling [...] An entire generation of us will die without leaving any legacy. [...] We were sharp and insightful ahead of our time. Our cause is, and for a long time should have remained, a matter for devoted and loyal individuals; a cause which [...] demanded that all should dedicate themselves exclusively to it and sacrifice themselves for it. No compromise, no accommodation with any middle ground ... Yet here everyone has grown sloppy ... everyone has given in, all have relaxed their discipline, and our ideals have been frittered away. [...] In Berlin it’s a disaster. The Yiddish intelligentsia has been left without roots, and they rot away individually and collectively [...] Some kind of action is demanded: summon us to America, or to anywhere else you wish...86

Unable to find employment in Berlin, both Der Nister and Kvitko moved to Hamburg where they worked in the Soviet trade mission. Bergelson, however, stayed on in Berlin, contributing to periodicals in defence of what he regarded as the true themes of Yiddish modernism. For instance his polemic entitled ‘Y.L. Peretz un di khsidishe ideologye’ (Y.-L. Peretz and Hasidic ideology), which appeared simultaneously in Die Jüdische Rundschau and Literarishe bleter during April 1925, attacked the popular reading of Peretz’s work as an idealization of piety by stressing its defence of the oppressed in the familiar homiletic form of the Hasidic tale. In opposition to German-Jewish intellectuals who idealized the world of the shtetl, Bergelson insisted that Peretz’s world depicted the bitter struggle to survive crushing poverty. In trying to redress this balance, however, Bergelson emphasized the social dimensions of Yiddish culture at the expense of its religious aspects.87 Nevertheless, he was well aware that avant-garde literature in Yiddish reached only an acculturated, polyglot minority. Having lost the cultured middle-class readers whom he had initially addressed, he sought a new ‘mass’ readership, and was thus careful to keep abreast of developments in what in 1922 became the Soviet Union. That year, three committed Marxists originally from Kiev, Dobrushin, Nokhem Oyslender (1893–1962), and Arn Kushnirov (1890–1949), founded the Moscow-based journal Shtrom (Stream), which attempted to square the circle by simultaneously supporting the revolution while striving to retain its autonomy. Its first-issue mission statement, published in February 1922 under a cover designed by Marc Chagall (1887–1985), promised ‘to unify all responsible artistic Yiddish forces that are forging the aesthetic values of our period’. This international objective was bitterly opposed by established ‘proletarian’ writers led by Khaym Gildin (1881–1944) and backed by such beginners as Itsik Fefer (1900–1952) and Izi Kharik (1898–1937). Gildin and his group demanded that ‘petty bourgeois’ aesthetics — including ‘negative’ writing like ‘Veyland’ (Land of anguish), Markish’s elegy for the losses sustained during the civil war pogroms which appeared in Shtrom’s first issue — be replaced by unqualified celebration of the bright future awaiting

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dedicated Soviet workers.88 Exalting the cleansing destructiveness of revolution, they called for the effacement of Jewish religious traditions and the creation of sloganeering propaganda accessible to the unsophisticated. Predictably, Litvakov published three separate attacks on those who supported Shtrom, charging them with dereliction of political duty. When he was appointed editor-in-chief of Der emes in the summer of 1924, he set about ensuring that all writers were henceforth ‘vigilantly controlled’ by ideologically sound Party cadres. Out of the direct firing line, the dubious Bergelson published wherever he could, including in such unaffiliated journals as Warsaw’s Moment, but he retained his fellow-traveller status by also contributing to Shtrom, 3 (1922 ). His ongoing uncertainty about where he really wanted to live and work is mirrored in the themes he explored in several new stories he set in Berlin, which depicted its émigrés’ dislocated existence with its psychological and emotional centre located elsewhere, in a landscape shadowed by an inescapable awareness of the Jewish past. In 1923 a German translation of Nokh alemen made by Alexander Eliasberg was published for Berlin’s Jüdischer Verlag under the title Das Ende vom Lied, and Döblin reviewed it for the Vössische Zeitung on 24 August 1924: This is a fine book which makes very reticent use of language and which deploys its characters precisely, circumspectly and with conscious purpose. After just a few pages, one realizes that it is a transitional work, not in its origins Yiddish, even though it was written in Yiddish. The author is familiar with Western writing styles and with the techniques of the Western novel [...].89

Döblin’s contention that the novel is keine jiddische Originalarbeit, ‘not in its origins Yiddish’, identifies the false criteria by which Yiddish writing was evaluated by German-Jewish readers in search of ‘authenticity’. They thought they recognized this in romanticized pictures of the defunct shtetl painted, for example, by Sholem Asch in his idyll A shtetl (1905), with the result that German versions of Yiddish literary works published in the 1920s were adaptations that misrepresented the intention of the originals to pander to sentimental prejudices. Since the Yiddish authors most often rendered into German were Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz, inaccurately perceived as purveying the requisite naïveté and nostalgia, there was no interest in the modernist works of contemporary Yiddish letters.90 A more sophisticated manifestation of a related trend was Milgroym (Pomegranate), a highbrow, lavishly illustrated Yiddish periodical with a Hebrew counterpart entitled Rimon. The literary editors of the first Yiddish issue were the scholar and Yiddishist Mark Wischnitzer (1882–1955), Bergelson, and Der Nister. Idealistically, the journal hoped to heal the breach caused by divisive Yiddish–Hebrew language politics by publishing in both languages, and aimed to draw Jews to an appreciation of Western high culture by merging the forms of each.91 The owner-publisher’s wife Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein (1885–1989), a pioneer of Jewish art history, designed the journal’s covers to illustrate ways in which traditional medieval Jewish manuscript motifs could be reinvented for modern decorative purposes.92 To its first issue, under a full-colour cover representing a pomegranate in naïve folk style, Bergelson contributed two pieces, the chief of which was a review essay entitled ‘Der gesheener oyf brokh’ (The awakening [into the modern] has occurred), in

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which he paid tribute to the new Russian-Yiddish poets, four of whom he quoted: Kushnirov, Kvitko, Hofshteyn, and Moyshe Livshits (1894–1940). Infused with the ‘festive breath of the present moment’, these new voices, Bergelson maintained, spoke not for the individual and his hackneyed personal woes, but articulated the aspirations of the multitude. In near-expressionistic prose, he acknowledged the chaos of modern life and expressed admiration for those who communicated its discontinuity in unconventional language and forms. He dismissed traditionalist critics by attacking the decadence of Western European intellectualism; its search for law and wholeness, he argued, had been replaced by an emotional f lood of language: Do not seek wholeness from the young generation of poets [...] Wholeness? Who thought up that lie? There is no longer any law, any limit, any order. Fantasies! Law was conceived in the human intellect, but a chaotic life lies within me, within you, within everyone. There is no uniform meaning in my life or in yours [...].93

Given how far this outpouring ref lected the drive to restructure a new world, he deplored the fact that little of this experimentation was valued in Russia where established Yiddish critics ignored these ‘new, happy, free singers’ who had plunged like swimmers into the waves of ‘a joyous newly-washed world’.94 The story he contributed, entitled ‘Onheyb Kislev 5769’ (The beginning of [the month of ] Kislev [November/December] 1919), is among the earliest of his depictions of the civil war pogroms. Using truncated, cinematic descriptions, he f lashes before the reader random, disconnected sights to body forth the devastation wrought by the pogroms — a frozen corpse abandoned in the snow for three days, a goat and a simpleton left comforting each other in a deserted marketplace; the overcast sky the same colour as snow made filthy by the departed footprints of the marauders. Stark f lashes of colour — black, white, and red — mark the omnipresence of death, innocence, and blood, techniques that identify the first stage in Bergelson’s carefully reconstructed narrative craft. Milgroym’s commitment to high culture, Jewish tradition, and folklore — the f lyleaf of its first issue even carried a woodcut of Jerusalem — and its esteem for the Hebrew language, ref lected in its use of a typeface imitating the hand-lettering of a Torah scroll for its headings,95 and one commonly used in setting the text of the Bible for its essays, represented everything the builders of Soviet Yiddish culture detested. Iosif Chaikov reviled the publication as ‘a gravestone inscription [...] created for dead people’;96 Litvakov, in a review for Der emes in October 1923, insisted that for modern Jews there were only two options, ‘bourgeois bigotry or proletarian ascent’.97 By contrast with Milgroym, he continued, Shtrom had now come to seem ‘a good neighbour of the proletarian revolution’. Alarmed by the violence with which they were assailed for joining ‘the forces of reaction’, unable to reconcile their personal sense of uprootedness with the Wischnitzers’ conservative insistence on Jewish national unity, and unwilling to sever ties with colleagues in Soviet Yiddish centres, after the first issue both Bergelson and Der Nister resigned from Milgroym’s editorial board, publishing a joint one-sentence letter in the third issue of Shtrom implying their desire to show solidarity with their progressive friends and co-workers.98

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Not all the Yiddish writers in Berlin abandoned Milgroym, however. Kulbak, Kvitko, and Hofshteyn had contributed to the first issue; its remaining six issues, until publication ceased in 1924, carried fiction and poetry from Nokhem Shtif (under his pen-name Bal-Dimyen), Kvitko, and Avrom-Nokhem Stencl (1897– 1983); essays on architecture and contemporary Russian-Jewish painters from Lissitzky and Berlewi; and fiction from the New York Yiddish writers Joseph Opatoshu (1886–1954) and H. Leyvik (1888–1962).99 Nevertheless, the hasty retreat of Bergelson and Der Nister exposed deep fissures in the way contemporary Yiddish literature was being conceived. Many writers who had remained in Eastern Europe deplored their colleagues’ exodus to Berlin. Among them was Ravitsh, in his essay ‘Vu iz der tsenter?’,100 and Markish, who in the first issue of Di khalyastre derided both Bergelson and Der Nister for betraying the struggle for Yiddish culture in its true motherland.101 This re-emphasized the longstanding ideological dispute between the modernists, represented by Bergelson and former members of the Kiev Group, and members of the avant-garde like Markish. Bergelson urged the necessity of a modern Yiddish literature linked to Jewish culture, which used a language rich with specifically Jewish associations in order to westernize its readers; Markish and, even more inf luentially, Litvakov, demanded a literature totally disconnected from any past that used Yiddish merely for the expedience of mass communication. Where Bergelson’s modernism sought to create an aesthetic literary art in the Western tradition, Markish and more radical Marxists were violently anti-aesthetic, treating literature as simply another instrument for socio-political reform. In retrospect, 1924 was a watershed year. Lenin’s death in January precipitated an unsettling power struggle. By December, the moderate Daniel Charney had quit both Der emes and the Soviet Union and moved to Berlin, while Shtrom, having failed to gain state sponsorship, had ceased publication. In February, tightened ideological control in Soviet Yiddish circles made itself felt when Hofshteyn was disciplined for having pleaded, in a public memorandum, for the official reinstatement of the teaching of Hebrew. He was expelled from the Moscow Association of Yiddish Writers and Artists, now totally communist in orientation, which later that year disbanded to re-form as the Yiddish section of the Moscow Association of Proletarian Poets. The support of Lunacharsky, the State Commissar for Culture, enabled this ‘proletarian’ association radically to alter the tenor of Soviet Yiddish literary life. For example, it organized the ‘literary trial’ of Shtrom, which was condemned for its failure to reach a mass readership, and formerly ‘elitist’ writers were compelled to submit to the Party’s ideological demands. Writers still seeking some measure of artistic independence began to feel stif led in Moscow, and sought outlets further afield. Two important new Yiddish journals, with similar aims, were launched in 1924: Di royte velt (The Red World) in Kharkov, and Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages) in Warsaw. The former, edited by Henekh Kazakevitsh (1883–1935), was intended to be the intellectual ‘thick journal’ of Soviet Yiddish culture;102 the second, founded by Nakhmen Mayzel in association with I. J. Singer and Peretz Markish, became the West’s most significant Yiddish periodical of the interbellum years.103 In 1924, Bergelson travelled to Bukovina and Bessarabia on a fact-finding mission sponsored by ORT (Obshchestvo remeslennogo i zemledelcheskogo truda [Society

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for Trades and Agricultural Labour]), re-established in Berlin after World War I to develop the skills of Jewish artisans in Eastern Europe. Its general secretary in Berlin, Dr Aaron Singalovsky (1889–1959), a close personal friend, helped Bergelson to found Berlin’s Sholem Aleichem Club in December 1924. Situated in a large apartment on the Savigny-Platz, it soon became popular in Jewish émigré circles for its excellent Ashkenazi cuisine, offering Yiddish speakers a heymish alternative to city’s other cafés and lessening their sense of social and cultural isolation. It hosted evening lectures, discussions, and charity concerts at one of which, as his son recalls, Bergelson and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) performed together as violin soloists.104 Cultural soirées of this kind were a regular feature of Berlin’s Jewish cultural life for both the Hebraists and the Yiddishists, though they rarely attended each other’s functions; the political implications of the language issue had become too divisive.105 Bergelson was particularly active in the cultural life of the Eastern European Jewish community in Berlin, strongly promoting a future socialist society on the Soviet model. His ideas on emancipation without assimilation and Jewish cultural autonomy were enthusiastically supported by educated young intellectuals.106 With its government under attack from both the Left and the Right, the Weimar Republic’s political and economic centre of gravity was continually shifting. When the Deutschmark was stabilized in 1924, right-wing extremism soared in proportion with the cost of living. In 1925, the election as President of the conservative militarist Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) undermined democracy by introducing ‘presidential government’ in which the President rather than the Reichstag appointed the Chancellor.107 Such destabilization made Germany less attractive to many émigrés but, like others, Bergelson’s options were limited. Dedicated to building up Yiddish culture, he was still uncertain where he could do this best. By 1925, Yiddish culture in Poland seemed to him conservative and commercial; he rejected the Zionists’ political quest together with their contempt for Yiddish, and he feared the assimilation demanded in America. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, Yiddish appeared to be f lourishing with state support, and Bergelson had intimations that he would be welcomed. As early as 1922, Dobrushin had praised his work for pioneering Yiddish ‘constructivism’, by which he meant rejecting personality and direct experience in favour of ‘objective’ truth. This, in Marxist terms, meant portraying life not as it was but as it ought to be.108 Nevertheless, Bergelson elected to stay on the fence in Berlin, although that autumn, while lecturing in Riga, he argued that, because life that did not exist could not be depicted, it was its stress on realism that distinguished Yiddish from Hebrew literature. To prove his rule, he noted two exceptions: Kulbak, the Yiddish writer most obviously inf luenced by German expressionism, and Tshernichowsky, whose Hebrew poetry followed Russian realist traditions. After this lecture, given at the local communist club, Bergelson was one of fifteen people brief ly detained by the Latvian police, an incident that publicized his emerging political affiliations.109 Emerging Soviet policy towards the Jews strongly encouraged him. After seizing power, the Bolsheviks upheld the Kerensky government’s proclamation of the rights of minorities. These included the Jews, even though, unlike other ethnic groups, they could lay no historical claim to any national territorial autonomy.

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Aware of this concession’s provisional nature, those committed to developing Soviet Jewish culture intensified their efforts to further Jewish land settlement within Russia.110 In January 1925, to clarify the Jews’ anomalous position vis-à-vis other ‘national minorities’, the government established the Gezelshaft far aynordenung af erd arbetndike yidn in FSSR (Society to settle Jewish toilers on the land in the USSR), a body known by its Yiddish acronym Gezerd and by its Russian acronym Ozet, comprising leading members of the Yevsektsia and various Party officials. The original plan was to settle, by the end of 1926, about half a million Jews in a still-to-be-determined region of the Soviet Union that would first be declared a territorial unit and would later become an autonomous Jewish republic.111 Despite bitter opposition from the Zionists, the scheme was enthusiastically accepted by many Soviet and Western Yiddish intellectuals, Bergelson among them. Having attacked the Yevsektsia and its functionaries several times in Forverts during 1923, he now felt the need to retract, and in a penitential letter to Der emes published on 2 March 1926, he apologized in uncomfortably tortuous language: I confess to having erred in 1923 by openly coming out in print against the Yevsektsia. [...] I think the question of my returning to Soviet Russia is inopportune under present circumstances, because I clearly understand the firm attitude that my aforementioned attack has called forth on the part of the Yevsektsia, and I would be constantly depressed in the immediate proximity of such an attitude shared by the greater part of the current creative generation in Soviet Russia. As a result I should not be able to function as a fellow-worker, and would moreover bring nothing of use. I do this because I am wholeheartedly with you in that great Yiddish undertaking that you are leading, and which will only grow still greater because it is being effected under broad socialistic skies following the direction of the worldwide socialist revolution, in which I believe. I find that the exile that I suffer here is a deserved punishment for my earlier failure to understand the difficult position of the Yevsektsia.112

Asserting that the punishment of exile was necessary to earn the privilege of return suggests that, despite his declarative tone, he was still hoping to buy time before making a final commitment. While keeping his Moscow options open, he spent the next eight years exploring alternative destinations, vacillation on the Left that compared with analogous conduct on the Right by Sholem Asch. In 1926, when Piłsudski set up a military dictatorship in Poland, Asch controversially praised him in an open letter; six years later, in 1932, he was rewarded with the order of Polonia Restituta, which he accepted, though a massive Jewish protest soon forced him to refuse it. Like Asch, and despite his intensifying commitment to the Left, Bergelson’s work remained identifiably Jewish: in 1926, Kulbak paid him the compliment of making him groye Bergelson, ‘grey Bergelson’, an integral part of Jewish Vilna, ‘grey’ with its weighty past and heavy present, which he celebrated in his evocative ode to the city.113

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Ideological Reorientation, 1926–1933 The political restructuring of Eastern Europe necessitated by World War I and the Bolshevik revolution forced Yiddish writers to consider the previously superf luous question of literary ‘centres’. The disintegration of the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires deprived Yiddish writers of their former non-territorial national identity, while the hostility of Zionist ideology guaranteed that Yiddish culture would play no role in any national-territorial settlement in Palestine. Since the realignment of Europe’s political borders, coupled with large-scale emigration, produced newly polarized literary centres with different objectives, Yiddish culture began moving in different directions. The number and titles of short-lived literary publications during the 1920s testify to a growing sense of fragmentation: a literary miscellany entitled Vispe (Islet) appeared in Kovno in 1923; two years later, another called Inzl (Island) came out in New York; and in 1929 Charney attempted — and failed — to publish a monthly journal entitled Brikn (Bridges).114 In a sincere, if naïve, attempt to bridge this geographical and ideological schism in Yiddish letters by uniting the intellectual and creative strengths of both communists and ‘fellow-travellers’, at the beginning of 1925 Bergelson invited a number of leading Yiddish literati, with many of whom he had been creatively associated for years, to get in shpan, ‘into harness’, with him to create a new journal of quality that would reach the ‘worker reader’. Among those invited were Niger and Opatoshu, to both of whom he expressed the hope that his journal, to be called In shpan, would become a force for renewal for ‘that productive part [of the Yiddish-speaking world] which has from the beginning organically bound itself to Yiddish culture [...] because that culture is not a pastime for them, but a vital necessity’.115 Bergelson’s letters, free from Party clichés, suggest that, although welldisposed, he did not yet regard himself as a dedicated communist. On the contrary, he ingenuously anticipated the distribution of his journal in the Soviet Union. On the face of it, his hope to enlist the participation of the best contemporary Yiddish literary talents was justified. Many in America, all with strong socialist sympathies, wrote for either the liberal daily Der tog or for the pro-communist Frayhayt; all were hostile to Forverts and Cahan’s belief that ‘Americanization’ was the chief goal of immigrant Jewish life. Yet almost all of those he approached declined to participate; perhaps they feared moving too close to Moscow. Undeterred, under Kletskin’s imprint, from Berlin in April 1926 Bergelson produced the first issue of In shpan as promised. Although the editorial board was never named, its driving force was Bergelson, assisted by his close friends: Singalovsky, Charney, and Alexander Khashin (1886–1939), a leading member of Po’alei Zion who had gone over to the communists and was then living in Berlin.116 Bergelson’s inability to win sympathy for his project was intensified by the publication in its first issue of his programmatic essay ‘Dray tsentren’ (Three centres) which, by a tendentious process of elimination, dismissed two major centres of Yiddish creativity, New York and Warsaw, in favour of Moscow.117 Bergelson may have published this polemical piece at least partly in frustration at his colleagues’ lack

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of enthusiasm. If so, his argument caused a furore, not least because the very act of identifying different ‘centres’ with divergent values denied two foundational pillars of Yiddishist ideology: the extraterritoriality of Yiddish literature, and the cultural homogeneity of the Yiddish-speaking diaspora. Repeating his conviction that American aff luence bred assimilation, Bergelson insisted that only the American Jewish worker could provide the necessary counterweight to the predisposition of the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, he claimed, Polish Jewry, economically deprived, riven by factionalism, and oppressed by Zionism and religious orthodoxy, had no interest in creating, supporting, or defending Yiddish culture. Only in the Soviet Union, because it offered Jews cultural autonomy, could modern Yiddish culture develop as a result of the productive relationship between Yiddish writers and the proletariat. To prove In shpan’s commitment to the working class, the editorial of its second (and final) issue urged members of workers’ organizations to contribute.118 Since it had hitherto published highly sophisticated belles-lettres, this appeal was wishful thinking, yet it identified a profound revision of Bergelson’s view of literature. His 1919 essay on the disjunction between belles-lettres and the social order had accepted the common Western assumption that art was autonomous. By 1926, however, he had come to view art as both a product and a function of the social order, and he acted on his thinking. Despite the fact that he had recently published two fine stories in New York’s Forverts — ‘Altvarg’ (Obsolescence) in March, and ‘Tsvey rotskhim’ (Two murderers) in April — he resigned from this fiercely anti-c communist daily to join its pro-communist rival, Frayhayt, in which his first piece, published on 28 May 1926, effectively continued his argument in ‘Dray tsentren’. Entitled ‘Vi azoy vet oyszen dos yidishe lebn in Rusland shpeter mit etlekhe yor’ (How Jewish life in Russia will look in a few years’ time), the essay outlined the task facing the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia under the guidance of the Yevsektsia. The next day, 29 May 1926, Frayhayt published his explicitly pro-Bolshevik story, ‘Hersh [later Hershl] Toker’. Simultaneously serialized in Moscow’s Der emes, the story’s first instalment there appeared in conjunction with a short, pointed note, dated 18 May 1926, in which Bergelson announced — though without giving reasons — his break with Forverts.119 Other stories for Frayhayt followed rapidly: ‘Shvester’ (Sisters) (27 June) and ‘Stantsye Kotlyet’ (Kotlyet station) (26 July). In the narrow world of Yiddish journalism, Bergelson’s resignation from Forverts was the biggest sensation of 1926. It marked, in the most public way, the fault line along which the Yiddish world permanently split, and unfounded rumours about its cause were spread, not least by Abraham Cahan in a letter to Lestschinsky, the head of his Berlin bureau:120 [Since] the communist Frayhayt [...] can barely pay, it became clear to me that writing itself was completely unimportant to [Bergelson]; for him, the main thing was to be connected to the communists and to be able to get back to Russia. His aim in Russia is to involve himself in business, to become a NEPman, a book publisher. Others say that he will become a timber merchant, as his father used to be. There is also an opinion that he hopes to acquire his father’s property with the help of the communists.121

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Malicious and absurd as these claims were, Bergelson’s increasing championship of the Soviet cause suggested that, like so many of his characters, he yearned to replace one set of lost values with another. Dedicated to promoting Yiddish culture, he was desperate to discover, at a time when Yiddish-speaking communities worldwide were dwindling, where it could best be developed, and the Soviet Union appeared to offer the broadest prospects. It was home to 2 million Jews whose home language was Yiddish; its government supported Yiddish educational and cultural institutions, sponsored newspapers and publishing houses, outlawed the public expression of anti-Semitism, and had recently encouraged national minorities to conduct official business in their own languages; there had consequently been a considerable increase in the number and variety of Soviet Yiddish publications.122 Appearing at what seemed to be a propitious moment, Bergelson’s attempt to define a new direction for Yiddish writing was none the less shot through with contradictions that exposed the ideological bind in which he found himself. However much he might empathize with the Jewish working class, his own literary reputation derived from nuanced depictions of the moneyed Jewish bourgeoisie to which his own family belonged, whose aspirations he knew at first hand, and from whom his most discerning readers had always come. He himself was neither a proletarian nor an active revolutionary, but a middle-class inteligent. In shpan itself was an émigré publication. Yet Bergelson remained acutely aware that, having lost not only his subject matter but also his readership to the revolution, he was obliged to make acceptable political perspectives inform his future themes if he was to pursue his vocation. Predictably, his new manifesto pleased neither the Left nor the Right. By extraordinary coincidence, on 20 June 1926 responses to In shpan appeared simultaneously in two diametrically opposed Yiddish dailies: Litvakov’s Der emes, and Niger’s Der tog. Both critics had received complimentary copies, mailed to them by Charney. Litvakov predictably dismissed In shpan. As a politically shrewd operator, he recognized that the continued existence of Yiddish cultural autonomy in the Soviet Union demanded instant adaptation to every change in general Party policy. The four years between Lenin’s death and the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924 and the Fifteenth Party Congress of December 1927 were marked by an ideological struggle between Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, and Stalin. In trying to read the right signs by stepping up his doctrinaire demands, Litvakov responded with a subaltern mindset. Irritated by the fact that Jews continued to cherish their national identity, he was adamant that in order to demonstrate their loyalty, Soviet Yiddish writers were obliged not only to accept the Party line, but also to be more zealous than others in promoting it.123 Hence he vigorously denied that Bergelson’s journal was of any use to the Party and its purposes. In the Soviet Union, he said, the Yiddish proletariat ‘draw their communist ideology from the primary source’, while Yiddish newspapers in bourgeois-ruled countries like Poland and America were guided by the Comintern, so who needed In shpan?124 By contrast, in an ‘Open letter to David Bergelson’, Niger gravely warned of the artistic dangers of bowing to doctrinaire demands. While the politician and the publicist might need to express the needs of the present, the poet, he argued, was obliged to express

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the eternally human, because literature should enlarge, not confine, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual perspectives. In opposing the creation of ‘a narrow class literature’, Niger rejected precisely what the Party demanded. At stake for Bergelson was not solely his ideological commitment, but also his personal integrity. Two months later, in August 1926, he published a reply to Niger in Frayhayt.125 His tone was irritable, and the points he chose to refute selective. His personal sense of loss emerged in a rhetorical question: Do you not feel [...] the great pain of people who can no longer nourish themselves with the spiritual wholeness of their fathers, and find themselves in the great quandary of rummaging for something with which to replace it?

He, and others like him, he asserted, had now rediscovered this lost ‘wholeness’ in the Soviet enterprise. Promoting its ideals did not mean binding up Yiddish literature, but rather setting it free to address the great challenges of contemporary reality, which was the only source from which true literature could be created. All Niger’s objections, he claimed, would in time be comprehensively met in the work of every new artist nurtured by the Soviet Union: I will esteem myself fortunate if my work is also to be found among them. I will hope for that. If my hope is not realized [...] it will simply be my personal misfortune — the worth of the new world-life will not be one jot diminished as a result, because a successful new life is of primary concern. Only thereafter [...] does the question of literature arise.126

With this self-negating assertion, Bergelson openly acknowledged that he was expected to be an apologist for the new society. By early 1926 the Soviet regime was already claiming that it was only a matter of time before, under the supposedly irresistible pressures of ‘historical determinism’, Marxist values would spread across the world. The task of literature, consequently, was to depict the historically inevitable transformation of society, not merely to represent life. The first issue of In shpan accordingly also carried a substantial extract from Bergelson’s new novel Mides-hadin (The full severity of the law), his attempt to dramatize this theory in fiction.127 This major work presents the chaotic condition of the world as beyond the control and often beyond the understanding of the individual, whose duty is simply to acknowledge history as an abstract force and obey its dictates. This force is manifest in the historical legitimacy of the Bolshevik regime, which the individual must first recognize and then contribute towards. The uncompromisingly moral Chekist Filipov embodies the ‘truth’ of the revolution and sacrifices himself for it. All who oppose him, from common criminals to religiously observant Jews, are in different ways brought to concede his inevitable triumph. To convey his radical new ideological orientation, Bergelson made more overt his technique of ref lecting through objects the moods and thoughts of individuals. Yet despite its reliance on a linear plot and an omniscient narrator, the novel’s events are communicated to the reader from a variety of viewpoints so that, typically for Bergelson, what happens, and the meaning of what happens, emerges from subtly shifting perspectives.128

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Mides-hadin is consequently far from a work of ‘socialist realism’, a doctrine in any case not formally enunciated until 1932, and only enforced as the ‘official aesthetic’ two years later. Though Mides-hadin demonstrated the seriousness of Bergelson’s commitment to Marxism in the mid-1920s, it tried to define his adherence on his own terms. Once again, this was a position that satisfied no one. Several Soviet critics condemned Bergelson’s vision of the revolution as too individualistic to serve the Party line,129 while Niger shrewdly noted that Bergelson was a novelist who wrote about the revolution rather than a ‘revolutionary’ writer.130 Striving for a middle view, Mayzel believed that Bergelson had not yet adjusted to the new social order, and that this novel, like much subsequent work, was an experiment in meeting new artistic challenges.131 Experimentation was certainly part of Bergelson’s vitality as a writer, but his ideological struggles did not readily produce satisfactory results. While Mides-hadin can narrowly be read as a Bolshevik interpretation of the civil war, in a deeper sense it is an inconclusive metaphysical exploration. In theory the task of the individual may be to obey the dictates of historical forces, but — as Bergelson is profoundly aware — individuals remain incapable of fitting predetermined formulas. Having chosen at this point in his artistic career to embrace Marxist teachings to resolve his existential crisis, his inherently sceptical nature could accommodate only a partial commitment. His new novel’s overt attempt to promote a schematic political vision notwithstanding, it emerges as highly questioning of the very solutions it seems to offer. Bergelson clearly accepted neither the Marxist concept of ‘historical necessity’ nor the current Soviet ideological line as satisfying philosophical structures on which to build his future art. Instead, he offered only a potential answer to the questions posed in all his earlier work. In August 1926, after an absence of five years, he returned to the Soviet Union as the journalistic representative of Frayhayt with a brief to report on the changes the country had undergone. He spent a week in Moscow, dispatching idealized sketches of Soviet life that were published in September. Bergelson voluntarily decided not to be objective. He praised Moscow, the vibrant capital of the world’s only country not enslaved to capitalism, as a place living according to its own time, ‘the time of the future’, and — with proleptic irony — a place in which people moved freely because they knew that no one was watching them.132 From Moscow he travelled down to the Crimea where the government was sponsoring Jewish colonies that might potentially be consolidated into a Jewish territorial unit. In his account of the Crimean settlers, published simultaneously in both Frayhayt and Der emes also in September 1926, he attacked Zionist-oriented migrants, who used the new colonies as staging posts en route to Palestine, and middle-class fugitives from ruined shtetlekh who sought shelter there, for not being passionately committed to building genuinely Soviet homes. These pieces, compensating for lack of factual detail by emphasizing crude outward symbols like red f lags, were obviously calculated to identify Bergelson as an ideologically acceptable Soviet writer, since they were not only glamorized, but lacked his customary precision of observation.133 Many of their conclusions were f latly contradicted by others, notably Israel Joshua Singer, whose parallel accounts for the Forverts — later collected into a single volume

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entitled Nay-Rusland (New Russia; Warsaw, 1928) — noted, among other sinister details, that the eyes of the secret police were everywhere and inhibited Muscovites even from relaxing in nightclubs over the weekends. On 18 September 1926, just when these idealized sketches were being published, Bergelson, wearing patent-leather shoes that were ridiculed by his rugged hosts, was called to public account at a reception given in his honour at Moscow’s Central Jewish Workers’ Club ‘Komunist’. Eight hundred people crowded in to hear Bergelson denounced for specific ‘errors’ of ideological thinking.134 Litvakov, the main speaker, stressed that as a Soviet writer, Bergelson was obliged to follow the communist, not merely the Soviet, line, and to acknowledge the ‘emptiness’ of all his earlier writing, which had hitherto been merely unterhandlungs-literatur, ‘entertaining light literature’. In order to become a true writer, Litvakov went on in the martyrological clichés favoured by apparatchiki, ‘it was first necessary to suffer all the diseases with which our literature has been aff licted’. Welcomed with a standing ovation when he was called upon to reply, Bergelson began by modestly admitting that he had been prepared for rebuke. But what he had heard, he went on, surpassed his worst expectations. Hurt more by Litvakov’s disparagement of his work than by his ideological censure, he responded with great anger, thumping the lectern with his fist: What do you mean by ‘entertaining, light literature’? I wrote every word in pain, in suffering. I do not repudiate one single literary work I have created. I have brought with me eighty folios of print which I shall submit to the reader to judge, not you, you desiccated gullet! You want to swallow up all writers and ram them through your desiccated gullet, but to do this they must first shrivel and wither, forfeit their hides, and become a mound of bones! You are an insensitive schematist: first you set up rigid parameters and then you force writers into them! I am Bergelson, not some beginner, and you can leave off wishing sickness on me. I’ve never ever wanted to be sick, and I went abroad to avoid such sickness. I’ve remained healthy and you’ve grown healthier — so we can be together.135

That Bergelson should clearly see Litvakov for the thoroughgoing dogmatist he was, yet resist the recognition that the Soviet regime itself had created him, proves how desperately he wanted to believe that only the Soviet Union could offer him a future. This was obviously why he did not simply walk out of this gathering, but stayed to suffer all its humiliations in a ritual that became standard practice for returning émigrés.136 The new story he read aloud, ‘Der royter armeyer’ (The Red Army soldier),137 was attacked as ‘rubbish’. Far from being ideologically reborn, he was told, he had remained ‘backward, retarded’; to be a proper Soviet writer he would in future have to contribute to the social development of the masses. Bergelson was clearly ready to be ideologically reprimanded: in his letter of recantation the previous February, he had presented himself as a prodigal son who had to be punished. Conforming to the Party line, however tortuous and f luctuating, was the only way he could see in which to advance Yiddish culture and contribute to it. So he gave his hosts what they wanted: he publicly declared that ‘All in all, I love this evening. This evening, with its strictness, binds me to you even more tightly that before’. His days as a ‘fellow-traveller’ were over.

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As though to put his Party bona fides to the test, the following year Bergelson published a new collection of engagé stories under the title Shturemteg (Days of storm; Kiev, 1927). Many of these, first published individually in such periodicals as Shtrom (Moscow) and Shtern (Minsk), were seemingly realistic depictions of the civil war and its pogroms during what Mayzel called ‘those grim days when spring and slaughter continually changed places with each other’.138 But his changed political convictions demanded innovations in style, symbol, and metaphor with which Bergelson experimented in these new stories, the common theme of which was the individual’s search for a meaningful role in the reconstituted social formation around him.139 Since Bergelson’s concern was always with the individual rather than with the group — a cardinal sin in Marxist terms — he located the protagonists of his fictional conf licts in isolated provincial localities rather than in big cities. To depict the revolution in the metropolis, the site of the real upheaval, demanded an engagement with the masses, and Bergelson’s concern, as much personally as professionally, was less with the centre than with the periphery, less with major events than with their consequences. The chief characters of these new stories are Jewish bourgeois striving to ‘proletarianize’ themselves in the face of opposition, sometimes from their natural instincts, sometimes from ‘reactionary’ associates. A telling example is ‘A zeltener sof ’ (An unusual ending, 1926),140 which depicts the dilemma of an impressionable young writer with the right ‘revolutionary’ intentions who cannot successfully depict the positive forces of the new era because he does not yet understand them. This tale has been read both as Bergelson’s personal confession and as self-satire.141 Bergelson’s search for new forms ref lected a long personal struggle to regain his intellectual and emotional bearings, evident as early as 1922 in his sketch ‘Botshko: fragment fun a roman’ (Botshko: fragment of a novel).142 Despite developing other pieces with the same theme and characters over the next few years, Bergelson never succeeded in unifying them into a cohesive whole. They remain fragments, operating cumulatively rather than progressively, as the wanderings of a predatory band of former soldiers and deserters during the civil war are tracked through a series of disparate episodes lacking any cohesive theme or ideology. The wanderings of Botshko and his gang present purposeless existence in the midst of chaos, mirrored in the unstructured narratives that recount them so that, whether consciously or unconsciously, the diffuseness of their journey and the vagueness of its destination come metonymically to depict the disjunction in Bergelson’s mind between the socio-political events around him, and his search for new artistic means to grasp and express them. Shturemteg also pleased no one. In his review, Litvakov objected that Bergelson excelled at portraying the obsolete petit-bourgeoisie while his ‘revolutionary’ figures displayed offensively unacceptable qualities. Heroes of the revolution, Litvakov insisted, should be endowed with every positive virtue; Bergelson, by contrast, had depicted them as wavering, uncertain, and generally as human as the class they had superseded. For his part, Niger’s review repeated his conviction that binding literature to the dictates of the Party would reduce it to barren propaganda. Bergelson, he reminded his readers, had himself condemned the old shtetl world for

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having ‘narrowed [...] the Yiddish prose writer’s full range of expression’, yet these new stories were ruined by another kind of tendentiousness; he deplored the way Bergelson had, in his view, compromised his gifts of insight, empathy, satire, and style in the service of ideology.143 For different reasons, neither critic realized that what they censured as Bergelson’s limitations derived from the inherent scepticism that made him a good writer. Just as he had been unable to create any ‘positive’ hero in his work prior to the revolution, so he was incapable of creating one after it. All he could do was to present, through a number of characters, revolutionaries who go forward looking back, whose enthusiasm for the future is tempered with nostalgia for the past, whose utmost contribution to the cause of the new order is to die in its service. Definition and vibrancy were qualities alien both to Bergelson’s life and to his fiction; he was temperamentally incapable of empathizing with dynamic Jews who fought the Bolshevik cause with burning enthusiasm. In Shturemteg, the allusive techniques that had so vividly bodied forth the pre-revolutionary world could do little more than render the revolution’s aftermath as senseless cruelty and slaughter. The heroic role assigned to the figure of the Jew in Russian fiction of the 1920s contrasts instructively with their ineffectuality in Bergelson’s Yiddish work of the same period. Until the revolution, the Jew in Russian literature had generally been depicted negatively as a weak, dishonest outsider. Now, however, class bouleversement thrust the Jew from the margins to the centre of a new social order; their class mobility enabled them to take leading roles under the Bolsheviks. In new Russian fiction, therefore, Jews were presented as dedicated communist activists, the chief characters in such major Russian works as Babel’s Red Cavalry (1923), Fadeev’s The Rout (1927), and later Kataev’s Time, Forward! (1932). Obviously Soviet Yiddish writers also wished also to show Jews actively participating in the movement of history,144 but it was precisely this ‘movement’ that Bergelson found difficulty in depicting. Despite extensive experimentation with form and style, his fiction failed to create action. Shturemteg could not satisfy Litvakov’s ideological criteria because, in typical Bergelson fashion, its chief characters, so far from overcoming insuperable obstacles, find themselves lost in marshes, stranded in forests, intercepted at border crossings, cut off in the countryside, powerless to fire revolvers — all confirmation that Bergelson was struggling, with limited success, to refocus his personal and artistic vision. This struggle seemed to Niger, on the other hand, a betrayal of true artistic talent. Although judgement of Bergelson’s pro-Soviet work was negatively coloured for more than half a century in the West by Niger’s critique, the scandal provoked by his political reorientation greatly boosted his fame, since in the mid-1920s it was virtually normative for Yiddish writers to be pro-Soviet. His name began to appear as a separate entry in a variety of literary lexicons, among them the German Encyclopaedia Judaica (1928) and the first Soviet Encyclopaedia (1927); his entry was enlarged for the Soviet Literary Encyclopaedia of 1930, in which Isaac Nusinov (1889–1950), the inf luential Russian-language critic, attributed to Bergelson both the introduction into Yiddish letters of ‘impressionism’, in continuation of ‘the traditions of Flaubert’, and the establishment of the Ukraine’s leadership in Yiddish letters, thus removing the ‘hegemony’ of Poland and Lithuania. According to

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Nusinov, Bergelson’s prose shaped the style of almost all Soviet Yiddish writers who followed him.145 In proof of Bergelson’s eminence, between 1928 and 1930 Kletskin in Vilna published his collected works to date in nine volumes; these also appeared in Russian and Ukrainian translation in the Soviet Union, where they proved enormously popular. Three of the volumes in the Kletskin series — Shturemteg, Velt-oys, velt-ayn (A world goes, a world comes, 1929) and Tsugvintn (Draughts of wind, 1930) — assembled stories set either during the civil war or in Weimar Berlin, in all of which Bergelson tried out new styles and narrative techniques. In the ‘Berlin’ stories, mood is given precedence over plot or character development, and existential alienation is juxtaposed against the city’s energy and sophistication. Berlin’s natives, slaves to capitalist self-interest and decadence, function side by side with disorientated émigrés living isolated lives. As long as he lived outside the Soviet Union, Bergelson continued to act independently. During the spring of 1928, when GOSET, still under the direction of its about-to-defect founder Alexander Granovsky (1890–1937), stopped in Warsaw en route for its extended tour of Germany, it was greeted by an essay on Yiddish theatre that Bergelson published for the occasion in Literarishe bleter.146 Later during the troupe’s six-week run in Berlin, its leading actors, Shloyme Mikhoels (1890–1948) and Benjamin Zuskin (1899–1952), got into trouble with Litvakov and the Yevsektsia, who were closely monitoring their behaviour on tour, for having taken tea at Bergelson’s Berlin apartment with Sholem Asch, whose conservative anti-revolution work had made him anathema to Yiddish communist ideologues in the Soviet Union.147 In 1929, when Frayhayt started to appear in the morning instead of the afternoon, it appropriately changed its name to Morgn-frayhayt,148 and from November 1928 until May 1929 it sponsored Bergelson, still able to travel freely, on a six-month tour of the United States. This extensive visit, during which he was royally received wherever he went, nevertheless simply confirmed his negative views about Yiddish cultural development in America. In an essay published in May 1929 in the New York journal Der oyfkum (The Rebirth), he attacked the elitism and detachment from working-class life of avant-garde directions in American Yiddish poetry: Yiddish writers in America are head over heels in love with Yiddish literature. From this derives its extensive dissociation from everyday life experiences. [...] As always, those deeply in love see nothing but the love object. They are by no means enemies of social progress or of the battle for this progress. They simply feel themselves to be people in another line of business, like musicians, who care very little whether the couple, at whose wedding they play with great ability, will live in harmony or tear each other’s eyes out and divorce. Their main concern is that there should be a good performance at the wedding.149

This arresting analogy might suggest that Bergelson had recognized the incompatibility between literary modernism and revolutionary activism that he had failed to see nearly twenty years earlier, and was now writing for a mass readership. This was certainly not the view of Cahan, who always maintained that belles-lettres did nothing to boost the circulation of a Yiddish mass daily: When I was in Berlin three years ago [1922] and again last year [1925], I took

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FIG. 1.8. David Bergelson at home in Zehlendorf, Berlin, 1931

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every opportunity to explain to Bergelson that his articles have very few readers; that his style is difficult; and that despite his fine belletristic talent his pieces lack charm and appeal. He would thank me for my frank comments and would ask me to show him how to improve his style in order to reach a wider readership. And I did everything I could. The number of his readers remained very small, however.150

As sincere as Bergelson’s commitment to the working classes might have been, they did not read his work, and his commitment to the communist cause sprang partly from his desire to reach a wider readership. The problem of attracting appreciative readers beset virtually all serious Yiddish writers, whose work was denigrated by boorish critics on one hand and ignored by the sensation-seeking general public on the other. In Warsaw in 1928 even a writer as hostile to modernist innovation as Israel Joshua Singer categorically declared in an open letter that the Yiddish language could no longer nurture the creative literary imagination.151 A viable future seemed only to lie in the opportunities offered by Soviet state sponsorship of Yiddish culture. Hence Yiddish communists in the United States, led by Moyshe Olgin (1874–1939), who took over as editor of Morgn-frayhayt in the autumn of 1929, urged Bergelson to be proud of his citizenship of the world’s first socialist state and to return to his work there. After a lecture-and-reading tour of Poland and some of the Baltic States, however, he went back to Berlin. Almost five months later, panic-selling of shares — after a prolonged period of speculation between 29 October and 13 November 1929 — caused the collapse of the stock market, the erasure of over US $30 billion from the United States economy, and a worldwide economic crisis that ushered in the Great Depression. Although this disastrous consequence of capitalism shook him severely, Bergelson found 1929 in other respects a highly productive year. In Kiev Mides-hadin appeared in book form under the imprint of the Kultur-lige, and he celebrated two decades of literary production which Mayzel commemorated with an entire issue of Literarishe bleter (Number 37) devoted to Bergelson’s work, in which he also published one chapter from his newly begun, semi-autobiographical novel, later known by its collective title Baym Dnyepr (At the Dnieper). In 1929 Bergelson also made his debut as a playwright. He had always enjoyed the theatre, and was a gifted performer and reader who had brief ly been the literary director of the Kultur-lige’s theatre school. During his tour of America, he had taken part in a stage adaptation of his short story ‘Baym telefon’. Now he reworked one of his earliest stories, ‘Der toyber’, into a play first called Oybn un untn (Above and below) but later known as Di broytmil (The f lour mill), the title under which it was published. It was first performed at the Byelorussian State Yiddish Theatre in Gomel under the direction of Mikhail Rafalsky, one of Bergelson’s old Kiev friends, but achieved its greatest impact in the production directed by Sergei Radlov for GOSET in January 1930, with Mikhoels in the lead. Staged with high realism, the dramatization demanded didactic sloganeering which reduced the emotional nuances of the prose version to a black-and-white conf lict between labour and capital in a stock plot: a mill owner’s son seduces a deaf employee’s daughter who, pregnant and abandoned, kills herself, leaving her vengeful father to lead a failed

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rebellion of mill workers.152 In Frayhayt Bergelson subsequently published two further dramatizations of earlier short stories, ‘Baym telefon’ and ‘Oyf der hundert un eynster vyorst’ (At the hundred and first mile), but these were never issued in book form, and were never performed in the Soviet Union. More significantly, in October 1933 he adapted Mides-hadin into a three-act stage play to open the refurbished Moscow State Yiddish Theatre. In an interview with Der emes at that time, Bergelson was at pains to explain that the play aimed ideologically to validate the exposure of counter-revolutionaries and keep progressive forces continually on their guard. Inventively staged by Mikhoels, using a huge cast on a split stage, both play and production were highly praised, not least by Litvakov who, in a review for Der emes, identified in the script — which appears not to have survived — a true merger of Bergelson’s talent with a proper class-centred world-view.153 Working with the theatre’s demand for immediate effect, direct speech, and melodramatic intensity may have served psychologically to mediate Bergelson’s acceptance of, and performance as, a ‘proletarian socialist-realist artist’. In turning his short stories into plays, he learned dramatic techniques and, more importantly, how to accommodate himself to the ideological demands of the time by transforming personal problems into class conf licts. By 1929 Stalin had consolidated his power, and the climate in Yiddish literary circles changed with Soviet society as a whole. Officially, the period came to be called ‘the year of the great break’, since it marked the end of tolerance for experimental art in the Soviet Union, and the enforcement of rules that curtailed artistic freedom. The first public insistence on ideological conformity came with the campaign against two Russian-language writers whose work had appeared abroad: Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) had published his dystopian satire We in Prague, while in Berlin, Boris Pilnyak (1894–1937) had brought out his novella Mahogany, which satirizes NEP-men who descend on a provincial town seeking to snap up mahogany furniture from impoverished townspeople, and offers a sympathetic depiction of a Trotskyite who is unhappy with the changes he finds in his home town. In mimic subaltern fashion, the functionaries of the Yevsektsia launched a corresponding attack on the young Yiddish writer Shmuel Gordon (1909–98), who had ingenuously published some poems in Literarishe bleter. To ensure his survival, Gordon was compelled to make a grovelling public apology for this lapse.154 The inf lexible power of the Party line was exemplified by a crude volte-face in regard to Jewish settlers in Palestine. In August 1929, a series of riots fomented by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem resulted in the murder of sixty-seven Jewish men, women, and children in Hebron. After some hesitation, Morgn-frayhayt, although ideologically anti-Zionist, condemned the massacre as a manifestation of fanaticism. A few days later, however, under pressure from the Comintern, its editors reversed their stance and characterized the riots as a justifiable revolt against the oppressions of Zionism and British imperialism.155 This compliant support for Moscow against Jewish national aspirations caused consternation among Morgn-frayhayt’s readers and contributors alike, and Avrom Reyzen, H. Leyvik, Isaac Raboy (1882–1944), and Menakhem Boraisha (1888–1949) all resigned from its staff in protest. Like other Jewish left-wingers, Bergelson was compelled to reconsider his position, but he

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FIG. 1.9. Nakhmen Mayzel (1887–1966)

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chose to remain with the newspaper, thus implicitly siding with stridently proSoviet colleagues like Kvitko and Markish who declared that henceforth all who disagreed with the Party line were enemies of the Comintern. Although Bergelson was making an increasingly irrevocable choice, ambivalence was still apparent in some of his publishing decisions. Tsugvintn, the ninth volume of his collected works (1930), contained the ‘Botshko’ stories first published in 1922, when the horror of the Ukrainian pogroms was still fresh in his mind. In its title piece, through the inversion of both Jewish and Christian religious images, he depicts an apocalyptic landscape in which both animal carcasses and human corpses indiscriminately litter the earth; motivated by bestial instincts, people eat carrion and kill at random. The savagery on which the story dwells strongly suggests its author’s doubts about violent change.156 In June 1930, Bergelson returned to Warsaw for the first time in twenty years. In Literarishe bleter, Mayzel expressed the hope that, coupled with his recent trip to America, this visit would confirm him as an ‘extraterritorial’ writer who addressed the entire Yiddish-speaking world.157 Warmly welcomed by the Warsaw Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists, Bergelson nevertheless reasserted his new ideological commitment. In a lecture on 3 July 1930, he identified dedication to Zionism as the chief deficiency of contemporary Yiddish writing in the West, and he condemned Jewish Poland for its ‘creative vacuum’: by contrast with the founders of Yiddish literature, he claimed, their successors outside the Soviet Union cared nothing for the masses ‘who create everything — language, imagery, and motifs’. For this reason the Soviet Union was the only place in which the gulf between tradition and modernity could be bridged.158 His reprimand to his Warsaw audience notwithstanding, Bergelson was sharply criticized by both Polish and American Yiddish communists for visiting Poland at all, since they regarded it as the impregnable ‘fortress’ of corrupt bourgeois writing.159 In the autumn of 1931, he returned to the Soviet Union on a three-month visit; at a reception in his honour, Litvakov sharply reminded him that he had not openly condemned those American writers who had broken with Morgn-frayhayt in 1929. Since he had himself remained a contributor, Bergelson shrugged off this criticism. Instead, he expressed his desire to return permanently to the Soviet Union, even though prescient warnings were sounded from disparate sources: not only his old friend Mayzel in Warsaw, but also his old antagonist Markish in Moscow cautioned Bergelson that he would find it difficult to adjust to the life of a Soviet writer, which demanded ‘iron discipline’ and radical self-reformation.160 Bergelson was unswayed, however: when he returned to Berlin in January 1932 he publicly reaffirmed his decision. Assurance that this was the right choice appeared to come later that year when the Soviet Union released Nosn Beker fort aheym (The return of Nathan Becker), its one and only Yiddish-language talking picture. With a screenplay by Markish, it tells the story of a Jewish bricklayer who returns to Russia after twenty-eight years in America to work in the new industrial centre of Magnitogorsk where he soon finds that the work habits he has acquired in America conf lict with the Soviet system. By transforming himself, Becker contributes to the triumph of socialist productivity and the cohesiveness of Jewish communality.

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FIG. 1.10. David Bergelson, Copenhagen, 1933

In January 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and Bergelson and his family began learning at first hand what Nazism meant. His son Lev, at the time a schoolboy of fifteen, was harassed in the streets, and the family apartment was searched. Almost immediately, Bergelson sent his wife and son to Denmark, and having rejected Sholem Asch’s appeal to return to America with him, joined his family in Copenhagen. Although he found life in Denmark congenial, the country had no Yiddish-speaking community, and no interest in Yiddish belles-lettres. To survive professionally, Bergelson saw no alternative but to act on his public promises and return to the country where the majority of his readers lived. Moreover, in the Soviet Union he had money, in the form of accumulated royalties on the publication of his books which could not be converted to any other currency. Although his wife was reluctant, their son longed to be accepted as an equal by other boys of his own age, while only the Soviet Union guaranteed a university place to a Jewish boy at that time.161 At the beginning of 1934, therefore, after a short trip to Paris, Bergelson became the last of a number of prominent Yiddish writers who, in a crucial re-emigration, sought refuge in the Soviet Union.

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Return to the Soviet Union, 1934–1941 With his writings regularly reissued both in the original and in translation, by the time Bergelson returned he was by far the country’s highest-paid Yiddish writer, an extraordinary achievement for one who had defied the definition of Soviet Yiddish culture by living abroad for over ten years.162 Yet his new work ref lected the compromises he was obliged to make. Attempting to fuse Jewish national concerns with the international aspirations of communism, his writing never lost the earlier ambivalence that had characterized the old, but in making room for propaganda, never fully resembled it either. Having lost the class he understood best, he had no real ability to depict joyous workers, of whom he had no experience and who found his writing inaccessible. Nevertheless, he continued to experiment. Immediately after his arrival he paid a return visit to Birobidzhan, the showcase of Soviet Jewish policy which he had visited well before his repatriation, and published a wildly enthusiastic book in which he expressed himself dazzled by everything, above all the brilliant sunshine. Although he was expected to live in the house that had been specially built for him there, he never did so. A thoroughly urban writer, he chose instead to settle in Moscow where he enjoyed fame and prosperity for close on fifteen years. In a letter addressed to Opatoshu in New York, dated 6 July 1935, Markish noted the esteem in which Bergelson was held: Bergelson lives like a count! He has never in his life had a more prosperous time — both creatively and financially. An apartment is being built for him. And until it is completed, the government is paying a hotel 1,000 roubles a month for him and he is growing as broad as he is tall from the proud pleasure of it!163

His books, protected like those of his Russian colleagues by the state-supported Writers’ Union, were printed in standard runs of thousands of copies. The royalties he received, based on copies printed, not on copies sold, enabled him to buy his apartment in a co-op building in Moscow, itself proof of his status, since in those days, even for those with money, the opportunity to buy an apartment was a privilege not granted to all. Whatever Bergelson’s private reservations about Stalin’s regime might have been, he was evidently regarded as a loyal Soviet citizen who accepted the leading role of the Party and respected its doctrines. In the spring of 1934, expectations that the Soviet Union would encourage further development of Yiddish culture were heightened when the status of Birobidzhan as a ‘national district’ or rayon was upgraded to that of ‘autonomous region’ or oblast´, a change viewed as a further step towards the creation of a Jewish autonomous republic, particularly because the government announcement came on 7 May, to coincide with the official opening of the Kiev Yiddish Language Conference, the most important forum in the history of Soviet Yiddish-language planning.164 Bergelson’s acceptance into the Soviet literary hierarchy was confirmed in August 1934, when he was chosen to represent Moscow Yiddish literature at the First AllUnion Congress of Soviet Writers, a propaganda parade of unity between men of letters and the Party leadership convened in Moscow. Over a period of two weeks, 500 delegates attended twenty-six sessions and listened to more than 200 speeches.165

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During the course of this assembly, Bergelson was several times publicly hailed by his Soviet Yiddish colleagues: Khatskl Dunets (1896–1937) praised his plays, Itsik Fefer lauded his prose, and Yasha Bronshteyn (1897–1937) held up Penek, the first volume of Baym Dnyepr, as ‘a striking example of self-purification in Yiddish literature’,166 a purging process to which Bergelson had subjected some of his earlier short stories as well.167 Behind its gala façade, however, this congress served a more sinister purpose. Despite appeals to respect authorial autonomy made by Babel and Pasternak, and a ringing defence of an artist’s right to experiment made by the French delegate, André Malraux (1901–76),168 Stalin’s literary doctrine of ‘socialist realism’ had become unwritten law. Henceforth to be exclusively ‘national in form, socialist in content’, presenting admirable, optimistic heroes from the proletariat as models for the triumphant socialism of the future, the discourse of Soviet literature became inseparable from the discourse of the regime. Writers and editors, now all obliged to become members of a single unitary organization, the Soviet Writers’ Union, were also required to believe that a literary work was dangerous unless it conformed in all respects to aims defined by the Party. Bergelson was the only former Yiddish ‘fellow traveller’ — and only one of four Yiddish writers in total — permitted to address the congress. He argued that Soviet literature, the ‘vanguard’ and ‘guiding’ literature of the whole world, could no longer employ the techniques of Western writers because Soviet life, and hence the content of Soviet writing, had become wholly incompatible with life outside the Soviet Union. He warmly welcomed the directive, given by Stalin, ‘the great leader of the world proletariat’, that writers should henceforth become ‘engineers of human souls’, and called for the international unity of ‘the persecuted Jewish worker masses’.169 To turn boilerplate Party rhetoric into acceptable literary form, Bergelson published his newest book, a reportage-style narrative entitled Birebidzhaner (Moscow, 1934) purportedly based on the glowing impressions he had gained during his visits there. This was the first book Bergelson produced as a resolutely Soviet writer living in the Soviet Union, and its radically different content startled Western readers. Mayzel, himself a partisan of the Soviet experiment, claimed to see in this new volume a renewed spirit of creativity: Birobidzhan [...] enchanted the artist, inspired him with a new spirit, with particular joy and optimism. [...] The sunshine of Birobidzhan drove away the murk and gloom in his writing and in his frame of mind. [...] Like every one of the migrants in his book who [...] comes to a new, unknown land where each must start everything afresh, so also the artist Bergelson [...] comes hither to challenge himself with something entirely new...170

For less enraptured readers, the tale’s language, replete with Yiddishized acronyms of state and collective enterprises, relied heavily on colloquialisms, while its schematized, episodic plot was bumped along by pasteboard figures operating within crudely defined class categories. Character conversion arises mechanically from a switching of class categories, while the work’s chief point — to extol the heroism of ‘new’ Jews building a revitalized Jewish community on Soviet principles — is facile Party sloganeering. The story’s uncritical exaggeration made it clear that this was work written to order.

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An altogether more complex work was Bergelson’s quasi-autobiographical novel, Baym Dnyepr. Originally conceived as a saga in five volumes,171 only two finally appeared: the first, Penek, was published in 1932, just before Bergelson returned to the Soviet Union, and the second, Yunge yorn (Early Years) eight years later in 1940. Mayzel asserts that, in correspondence with Bergelson, he communicated his admiration for the socio-political sweep of Maksim Gorky’s unfinished cycle The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–36) and urged Bergelson to record, through an account of his own childhood and adolescence, the momentous socio-political changes that convulsed Kiev at the beginning of the century, a proposal that ‘Bergelson gladly and gratefully accepted’.172 What emerged was more problematic than this account suggests. On one hand, at its best Penek showed Bergelson at the height of his powers, recreating the pre-revolutionary period he understood so well; on the other, however, the actions and reactions of his characters were predetermined by ideological imperatives that drove its plot: irresistible historical forces enable the son of a wealthy merchant to assimilate into proletarian society. Unlike the ambivalence that had clouded Mides-hadin, Penek left no room for doubt about Bergelson’s ideological position. It presented a ‘revisionist’ view of the pre-Soviet past, immediately embraced by Party-line critics and praised for the narrative dexterity with which it had been expressed.173 Although Western critics condemned the novel for what they regarded as its misrepresentation of the past, they too were obliged to praise the vividness with which it depicted material and spiritual decay.174 The Bildungsroman had a distinguished lineage in Yiddish literature: both Mendele and Sholem Aleichem had written one. By choosing this respected form, Bergelson simultaneously signalled a connection to the Yiddish literary tradition and a radical departure from it. His depiction of a child’s learning processes enables the mature artist — himself — to explain its development, and to justify it.175 Written outside the Soviet Union, the novel was not subject to Party oversight and was thus free of mandatory slogans; as a result Penek was a cohesive artistic expression of Bergelson’s genuinely held socio-political ideals, and the last novel in which he was able independently to merge conception and style. It went through five Yiddish and four Russian editions and was subsequently included in the Soviet literary canon as its most significant Yiddish novel. After his return to the Soviet Union, Bergelson increasingly became a writer divided against himself: his authorial gifts led him in one direction, while Stalinist demands drove him in another. Some sense of working under these constraints emerges, albeit unconsciously, from his third-person biographical essay written to Party order in December 1933. What he claims with seeming pride about the improvement in his modus operandi can also be read as the confession of a hack: Bergelson perceives a great distinction between his former and his present method of working. For the last ten years [1923–33] Bergelson works in a more organized fashion and is less dependent upon his ‘muse’. Until 1914 he used to work with continual hiatuses. Even Mides-hadin was written between long suspensions. Bergelson would wait for ‘inspiration’, for the return of creative enthusiasm, and long months would often pass in this way and he would be unable to return to his earlier material. Bergelson explains it by not having seen clearly the foundational aim of the work, for whom and for what purpose he

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Fig. 1.11. Soviet newspaper clipping dating from a few months before the start of the Great Terror. Left to right: Peretz Markish, David Bergelson; in the background, Moyshe Litvakov; Izi Kharik, Shloyme Mikhoels. Moscow, early 1937 was writing, and perhaps also a part was played by his not being sufficiently in control of the technique of writing. Now Bergelson can even work successfully on two works concurrently. In this way during the past year he simultaneously worked on Birebidzhaner and the second part of Baym Dnyepr.176

Four years later, Bergelson complained that the Yiddish literature of his day lacked the vocabulary to describe landscapes, nature, and the beauty of women.177 He argued that Yiddish writers who made expert use of folk idioms and oral constructions in depicting traditional modes of Jewish life evinced little ability in drawing characters outside the shtetl.178 While this essay pointed Yiddish authors in the politically correct direction of writing about Party-approved stereotypes in Party-endorsed clichés, it unconsciously highlighted the harmful effect of ideological repression on their art. Jewish writers, using an exclusively Jewish vernacular like Yiddish, were being asked to step back from the cultural world that provided their inspiration — their official directive was to find the ‘right proportion’ between ‘socialist content’ and ‘national form’ — and, rather than nurture a sense of Jewish identity, were required instead to write about a lifestyle that, according to Party doctrine, had no national-cultural distinctiveness whatever, and could therefore be described only in blandly universal terms. Moreover, apart from subject matter, there was also censorship of literary devices deemed ‘bourgeois’, among them irony

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and satire, two of Bergelson’s most effective modes. The humour of ridicule was suppressed; proper Soviet humour was supposed to evoke only the joyful laughter of the victorious proletariat. The year 1937 marked the start of the Great Terror. Repression was ever-present. The regime forbade foreign travel or emigration, and in the course of the mass murders that Stalin set in motion, a great many leading voices in Soviet Yiddish letters were silenced. The dread of being denounced, even by members of one’s own family, fell on everyone. Like many who feared for their lives, Bergelson found it necessary to endorse the purge trials, and from Birobidzhan he sent to Moscow a strident condemnation of the defendants.179 In the bitterest of ironies, among the first Yiddishists to be purged was Litvakov together with his long-standing ideological opponents Dunets and Bronshteyn, all ludicrously accused of belonging to the same anti-Soviet terror group in Minsk. In consequence, Yiddish circles in Belorussia suffered most. Yiddish was removed as an official language of the republic, and the entire editorial board of its literary journal Shtern was replaced. With Litvakov eliminated, Der emes was shut down and many of its staff arrested. To preserve a token national culture for the rapidly assimilating Jewish minority, however, other writers and critics, notably those from Kiev who had previously been criticized for years as petit-bourgeois nationalists — Bergelson among them — were left unharmed for another decade. All the same, the regime intended little by little to eradicate the inf luence of national cultures on the national groups to whom they belonged, so there was a steady reduction in the scope of Yiddish education throughout the Soviet Union. This policy was implemented sub rosa; outwardly, the cultures of minorities continued to be respected. Accordingly, during the spring of 1939, the eightieth anniversary of Sholem Aleichem’s birth was marked throughout the Soviet Union with a plethora of publications, exhibitions, and dramatic performances. The most impressive of these commemorations was a gala evening held on 19 April 1939 in Moscow’s Hall of Columns in the House of Trade Unions which was broadcast on national radio and widely covered in the press. Bergelson was one of eight writers who delivered addresses; leading Yiddish poets read their own tributes in verse; and Mikhoels and the actors of GOSET performed dramatized selections from Sholem Aleichem’s work. For the sole purpose of celebrating Yiddish culture, this event assembled the Soviet Union’s Yiddish cultural élite all of whom, virtually without exception, were destroyed in Stalin’s anti-Jewish purge ten years later.180 After the Molotov– Ribbentrop pact of September 1939, first eastern Poland, and then, in 1940, the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina fell under Soviet rule and swelled the Jewish population of the Soviet Union from three to more than five million. For its own propaganda purposes, the Soviet regime therefore reinvigorated Yiddish education in heavily populated Jewish areas. New Yiddish periodicals began to appear in the ‘new Soviet cities’ of Lvov, Riga, Vilna, Kovno, and Bialystok. Though sporadic arrests of Yiddish activists continued, Soviet Yiddish literature as a whole was granted a reprieve in the years leading up to and including World War II. In 1940 Bergelson was consequently able to publish Yunge yorn, the second volume of Baym Dnyepr, which traced Penek’s late adolescence, his recognition

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of his vocation as a writer, and his gradual acceptance of Bolshevik ideology in a big city — obviously Kiev, Bergelson’s home at the same period — during the first decade of the twentieth century. However, while the Bildungsroman form gave Penek unity through careful presentation of the hero’s social milieu, Yunge yorn lacks this tightness of structure. Analytical interiority exploring Penek’s progress as writer and nascent revolutionary is replaced by a loose attempt to document, rather than interpret, a politically approved version of the events before and after the 1905 revolution. The mechanical plot degenerates into confusing melodrama, and Bergelson’s language drifts into official clichés. While critics in the West instantly identified all these f laws and dismissed the novel as cheap propaganda, the increasingly harried communist Yiddishists, acutely sensitive to the nuances of political correctness, improbably claimed that Yunge yorn was a better novel than Penek.181 The War and After, 1941–1948 Six weeks after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, eight prominent Jewish cultural leaders, including Bergelson and Mikhoels, wrote to Solomon Lozovsky (1878–1952), a Jewish member of the Central Committee who was at this time deputy chairman of the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo), proposing a rally to rouse the support of Jews internationally, chief ly in the United States and Great Britain, and suggesting as speakers leading Jewish academicians, writers, artists, and Red Army officers whose names were known abroad. At the same time, they also appealed to Sovinformburo to establish, as a matter of ‘urgent need’, a special Yiddish wartime newspaper to bond the ‘Jewish masses’. While it initially rejected the idea of the newspaper, the regime did organize both an international broadcast and a mass rally, attended by thousands of people, in Moscow’s Park of Culture on 24 August 1941. Led by Mikhoels, speaker after speaker emphasized the need for Jewish unity in the face of Nazi persecution.182 The speeches, all approved in advance by Sovinformburo, were broadcast by Radio Moscow and a transcript, in Yiddish, was published in Paris three days later in the Yiddish underground resistance paper Undzer vort (Our Word). In his peroration, Bergelson boldly asserted: For all people of occupied countries, Hitlerism means slavery, persecution, and torture; for us Jews, though, it means total extermination and the end. The question of survival becomes absolutely clear. It concerns life or death for our people [...]. Vandalizing Fascism still rages. It destroys everything, and we Jews will be the first to be thrown into the fire. Our people, though, will not perish [...] the people who, thousands of years ago, proudly told its tormentors, Lo amut ki ekhye, ‘I shall not die, but live’ [...].183

To quote Psalm 118.17, and in Hebrew to boot, would previously have been unthinkable because it f louted a twenty-year-long prohibition against any mention of Jewish unity or particularistic Jewish suffering. The crisis precipitated by Hitler’s blitzkrieg, however, demanded the rescinding, however temporarily, of many previous restrictions.184 Later in 1941 Bergelson expanded his remarks into a partisan pamphlet entitled Yidn un di foterlendishe milkhome ( Jews and the war for the Fatherland) which admiringly described the front-line combat activity of

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Jewish soldiers. Following up the regime’s instruction to encourage assistance for the Soviet war effort from abroad, on 23 September 1941 Bergelson wrote a lengthy letter to Khaym Zhitlovsky (1865–1943), the Russian-Jewish intellectual who from 1888, first in Russia and then in the United States, had been a leading architect of secular Jewish culture and a staunch promoter of Yiddishism. Throughout his long public career, Zhitlovsky had been linked with progressive movements, had many supporters in both pro- and anti-Soviet camps in America, and was consequently the perfect addressee for an initial approach of the kind envisaged. To stress the gravity of the threat to the Soviet Union, Bergelson mentioned in passing that his son Lev, without waiting for his call-up papers, had volunteered for army service, and that he himself, with other writer-colleagues over forty, were serving in the Home Guard. His central point, though, was to underscore the need for international Jewish unity in the face of the shared Nazi menace. This appeal to national particularity would later have the most shocking repercussions: [...] the great danger of destruction which presently menaces the entire Jewish people; the necessity to undertake a great action that should, in practical terms, demonstrate to the whole world that Jews, regardless of their dispersal, are a unified nation, of which each part is ready to defend the other not simply by collecting alms and writing elegies, but by being prepared to sacrifice life and shed blood for the other — all this is so important that divisive economic, social and even some ideological differences are pushed aside [...].185

Notwithstanding his truthful assertion to Zhitlovsky that at the front Jews were fighting side by side with ‘their dedicated and sincere brothers-in-arms, Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians’, however, the aggressive anti-Semitic agitation begun before the war continued. In a 1942 memorandum to members of the Central Committee, Georgi Aleksandrov (1908–61), head of the Party’s agitprop division, openly demanded specific anti-Jewish measures: he complained of the excessive representation of ‘non-Russian persons’ in Soviet cultural institutions and suggested that Russian employees be promoted in their place, to ‘renew the staff ’. Ordinary citizens also became markedly more anti-Semitic. Partisans refused to house Jews, robbed those who had f led into the woods, and did little to save those confined in ghettos. Jews were slandered as being too cowardly to fight, and as being concerned solely with making money from shady business dealings; Jewish war veterans were insulted on the streets and accused of buying their medals on the black market in Asia, far from the front.186 In part to counter such calumnies and demonstrate steadfast patriotism, a further proposal to establish a Jewish committee against Hitler, first mooted soon after the invasion by the Polish Bund leaders Henryk Ehrlich (1882–1942) and Viktor Alter (1890–1943), was resubmitted; it was formally accepted in April 1942. This became one of five bodies — the other four were for women, youth, scientists, and Slavs — created to appeal to different international constituencies for material aid for the Soviet Union’s war effort. Operating, as did all five groupings, under the direct supervision of Lozovsky, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee ( JAFC) was set up under the chairmanship of Mikhoels, with the journalist Shakhno Epshteyn (1883–1945) as executive secretary and Bergelson, one of several leading academics and cultural leaders, as a member. At the committee’s

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opening session Bergelson gave the only address that, by concentrating on the tragic history of the Jewish people, avoided ritualistic Party clichés. Committee members were now officially authorized to stress Jewish suffering and heroism, and the need for Jews throughout the world to work together, ‘as brothers and sisters’, to defeat Hitler. On 22 June 1942, the first anniversary of the German attack, the first plenum of the JAFC sent an international appeal to world Jewry together with an oath of solidarity for them to swear. By the time of the JAFC’s second plenum in Moscow between 18 and 20 February 1943, numerous ordinary members who were not part of the presidium, aware that they served a propaganda agency, had grown increasingly reluctant merely to mouth regime-approved slogans which forbade any acknowledgement that the invading Germans were specifically targeting Jews for mass murder. Shocked also by the extent of Jew-hatred among large sections of the population, many wanted to broaden the reach of the JAFC’s assistance to victims. Such members as Ehrenburg, Markish, Hofshteyn, and Nusinov urged the committee to help survivors in the liberated regions and raised the issue of Soviet citizens collaborating with the Nazis.187 Indeed, Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman (1905–64) were among the first Russian journalists to highlight both the planned destruction of Jews and acts of heroism by Jewish individuals and groups in the Red Army. In March 1942, following a fresh appeal from the JAFC, permission was granted for the publication of a new Yiddish newspaper to provide ‘political education’ for evacuees and to counter anti-Soviet propaganda from ‘insidious hostile elements abroad’. To be called Eynikayt (Unity), it was to appear once every ten days with Epshteyn as its editor-in-chief, and Bergelson, Kvitko, Fefer, and Mikhoels on its editorial board. When its first issue appeared on 2 June 1942, it joined Birobidzhaner Shtern (Birobidzhan star) as the second of only two Yiddish-language periodicals permitted in the Soviet Union during the war years. Eynikayt affirmed Soviet Jewry’s national identity by devoting space to explicitly Jewish subjects and stressing specific Jewish contributions to the struggle, themes ignored in the general press which, for fear of undermining the patriotic unity of all nationalities, carefully played down both German genocidal massacres and Nazi propaganda equating Bolshevism with Jews.188 In all languages but Yiddish, the Soviet press was also silent about the enthusiasm with which many Ukrainians welcomed the Germans, and acted as guards and helpers in the ghettos and extermination camps they set up. Almost nothing was reported about the suffering of the civilian population until 18 December 1942, when Pravda published the Allies’ pledge to punish those responsible for war crimes. In a memo the next day, 19 December 1942, Lozovsky reported in detail about the extermination of the Jews. For the rest, silence prevailed.189 Although authorized to appear three times per week from the beginning of 1945, in keeping with the regime’s policy steadily to extinguish Soviet Yiddish culture, Eynikayt was never allowed to increase its print run, so demand always far outstripped supply.190 During the entire seven years of its life, Bergelson contributed stories, articles, and essays intended to awaken horror at the murder of the Jewish people and to reinforce what he took to be the permissible expression of powerful nationalist emotions against the invasion throughout the Soviet Union.

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Open expressions of anti-Semitism continued unabated. After GOSET, in company with large numbers of Jewish refugees, had been evacuated to Tashkent in 1941, inveterate Jew-haters like the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–84) began maliciously referring to them as ‘Tashkent partisans’.191 Nevertheless, as reports of Nazi extermination atrocities poured in, war conditions created space in which affirmations of Jewish identity could be made publicly, particularly in the theatre, and Bergelson returned to writing plays. At the end of 1941, he penned Kh’vel lebn (I will live), a piece set in the present and affirming Jewish resolve to survive. Although part of its second act was published in Eynikayt on 27 December 1942, this play was eventually staged only in the United States (by the Naye yidishe folks-bine in 1945), in Romania, and in Palestine (by the Habimah theatre company in a Hebrew translation) where its pro-Soviet ideology occasioned vigorous controversy.192 More significant was Bergelson’s 1944 play, Prints Ruveni (Prince Reuveni), based on the life of a sixteenth-century Jewish adventurer and false messiah who scoffs at the sanctity of martyrdom, fearlessly asserting that the Jewish people will survive only by taking up arms.193 The play’s text was first published in the New York journal Yidishe kultur in 1946, and with an added first scene in book form, in a print run of 2,500 copies, by YKUF a few months later. Both these plays spoke to the spirit of nationalism encouraged by the war effort, and to the advice given to GOSET as early as 1930 by Lazar Kaganovich (1893–1991), the only Jew in Stalin’s Politburo, who urged the company to generate national pride by celebrating heroic Jewish models. By the time Prints Ruveni was ready for public performance in early 1945, however, the war was about to end and Stalin’s policies both foreign and domestic were changing. Although Mikhoels was permitted to keep the play in rehearsal, the still-to-be-determined opening date never came. Its working script was reportedly found on Mikhoels’s desk in the Moscow theatre building after he had been summoned to Minsk, where he was murdered on 12 January 1948 in an elaborately faked motor accident on direct orders from Stalin.194 By the end of the war, Stalin saw no benefit in publicizing the realities of the Holocaust inside the Soviet Union. At the same time, the end of the fighting intensified anti-Semitic attitudes, particularly in German-occupied territories where there was widespread fear that Jewish refugees would return to claim their appropriated property and the posts they had held before the invasion. To suppress the anti-Soviet nationalist movements that had grown particularly strong in Ukraine and Lithuania, the regime pretended to honour an ideology hostile to anti-Semitism, while actively exploiting Jew-hatred.195 Concealing the nature and extent of the Holocaust, it neither openly supported the return of displaced and dispossessed Jews, nor took any responsibility for rehabilitating Jewish survivors, a task that fell by default to the JAFC, which continually received reports of antiSemitic hostility in newly liberated areas. There, in time-honoured fashion, the Jews themselves were blamed for their own mistreatment. In particular they were condemned for ‘insolent’ manifestations of ‘Jewish nationalism’, a term that covered any assertion of Jewish identity, even reporting individual anti-Semitic actions or appealing to the authorities.196 All this made the position of the JAFC anomalous. While it was obliged to disseminate the Party line, its attempts to care for Soviet Jewry at large set it in opposition to unspoken Soviet ‘Jewish’ policy.

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FIG. 1.12. Signing ceremony of the world-wide appeal to ‘Brother Jews’ to support the Soviet war effort: Moscow, August 1941. Front row, left to right: Peretz Markish, David Bergelson, Shloyme Mikhoels (standing), unidentified, Ilya Ehrenburg. Among those in the back row are Isaac Nusinov and David Oistrakh.

Unsurprisingly, the committee’s leading members disagreed about what its role should be: longstanding apparatchiki like Lozovsky demanded absolute loyalty to Stalin, whereas Mikhoels and others sought to protect the interests of Jewish survivors. With the return to the status quo ante during August 1946, Yiddish writers found themselves trapped in a double bind. Having published much that celebrated Jewish national identity in the encouraging climate of the war years, they could hardly repudiate work that was manifestly in the public domain, even if they had wanted to. But now, given stringent censorship and the ever-present fear of suppression, they could no longer write and publish in the same way.197 In this changed post-war climate, Bergelson joined his colleagues in striving to demonstrate that Soviet ideals were still deeply honoured in Yiddish. To do so, he returned to a theme that was highly approved of before the war — praise of Birobidzhan — unaware that this would no longer buy favour. In 1947 he began Tsvey veltn (Two worlds), a second novella set in Birobidzhan which was left incomplete when he was arrested the following year.198 Always eager to try a new approach, Bergelson presented this tale from the viewpoint of a retired Jewish-American professor of agriculture, who travels to Birobidzhan in search of the love of his youth, a woman who is the metaphorical embodiment of Birobidzhan as a Jewish utopia. The professor’s education in the principles of living a socialist lifestyle is no tormented personal quest for existential meaning, but a force-fed acceptance of

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prevailing Stalinist doctrines relentlessly contrasted with stereotyped perceptions of capitalist vices. The double pathos of this work lies in the fact that Bergelson debased his talent to produce it without achieving the purpose he hoped it would serve. Meanwhile, the sweeping anti-nationalist campaign launched in 1946 by the Party’s chief ideologist, Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov (1896–1948), began to gather momentum in the Yiddish press. In 1948, the critic Khaym Loytsker (1898–1971), writing in the Kiev journal Der shtern, savagely attacked current Yiddish writing for a range of ideological faults. Among others, these were said to include an uncritical treatment of the Jewish national heritage, an idealization of the past that blurred class differences among Jews, and a disproportionate emphasis on Jewish national self-identity. Loytsker assailed the ‘nationalistic egocentricity’ that was manifest, he claimed, in constant references to the martyrdom of Jews in the Holocaust to the exclusion of other nations who had suffered similarly, as well as in repeated expressions of ‘bourgeois Zionist nationalism’. These ‘deviations’ were evident, in his view, in the very style Yiddish writers now employed, which made exaggerated use of the word ‘Jew’ (Yid), used Hebraisms unnecessarily, and employed national and biblical motifs — known in Soviet jargon as ‘archaisms’ — like Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, Naomi and Ruth, the burning bush, and Noah’s Ark.199 In almost all these respects Bergelson was guilty. From the outbreak of war, his work had become increasingly preoccupied with the survival of the Jewish people. Though he tried hard to keep within the confines of Party dictates, it was ever more apparent that he was another who was confronting the loss of the Yiddish paradise he had believed the Soviet Union to be. Although most members of the JAFC were unaware of it, the determination to eradicate Yiddish language and culture in the Soviet Union had been taken almost immediately after the war. The work of Yiddish writers and cultural activists was closely scrutinized: a report on ‘nationalistic and religious-mystical tendencies in Soviet Yiddish literature’, dated 7 October 1946, compiled shortly before his death by Aleksandr Shcherbakov (1901–45), then head of Sovinformburo, and sent to A. A. Kuznetsov (1905–50), a high-ranking Party official, noted the following: [...] in its treatment of the fate of the Jewish people, [Soviet Yiddish literature] is imbued with sentiments of deep sorrow, inconsolability, tragic doom, and religious mysticism. This was evident particularly in the years of the Great Patriotic War as well as in the post-war literature of certain Jewish poets and writers [...] D. Bergelson [...] and others. [...] Nationalistic attitudes and the idea of reuniting Jewry within one state are also preached by [...] D. Bergelson (the play Prince Reuveni) [...]. The thought runs throughout the play that the salvation of the Jewish people lies in organized strength, supported by their own state.200

In 1947, a further investigation into the activities of the JAFC was reported in a letter from Aleksandrov, then head of agitprop, to Zhdanov: The horrors of Hitler’s invasion were portrayed by certain writers as unconnected to the historical fight against fascism led by the Soviet nation. As a result, in certain works of Soviet Yiddish literature one finds an exaggerated, acute nationalistic tone [...]. A few erroneous works [...] were removed in their time by the censors [...] D. Bergelson’s ‘Contribution’ and others. [...] Among

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FIG. 1.13. David Bergelson, Moscow, 1944

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JOSEPH SHERMAN the major shortcomings of Soviet Yiddish literature [...] are the prominence of nationalistic feelings and the pessimistic sentiments displayed by certain writers.201

The stories Bergelson wrote in response to the Holocaust, first published in Eynikayt and thus subject to censorship, were partially assembled and published in book form under the title Geven iz nakht un gevorn iz tog (Night fell and day followed) in Moscow in 1943; a further volume appeared in Moscow four years later under the title Naye dertseylungen (New stories). To get this work past the censors, Bergelson carefully deployed his gifts for understatement and literary allusiveness. He offered no blatant depictions of violence; instead he used individual experiences as metonyms for mass murders. The Party-pleasing, anti-religious contempt for Judaism’s observances he had expressed in Baym Dnyepr — for which many of his readers never forgave him — were here replaced by a warm respect for Jewish pain, subtly highlighted in the context of generalized Soviet suffering at the hands of a common enemy. In several tales, Bergelson consciously employs phrases from Judaism’s mourning tradition, citing from its Hebrew liturgy, as in the story ‘Yortsayt-likht’ (Memorial candles). Here a doctor imagines that, by restoring sight to the blinded eyes of a war veteran, he is kindling memorial candles to the memory of his murdered mother, and he recites the traditional Yizkor prayer for the departed. In ‘Grod zi’ (Only she), personal loneliness and the disruptions of war awaken a long-abandoned sense of familial duty in a highly assimilated female paediatrician for whom her father ‘once rent his garments and observed the Seven Days of Mourning’.202 In 1944, Bergelson’s sixtieth birthday was commemorated with a reception in Moscow, and a special supplement in Eynikayt that carried an anniversary tribute signed by leading Soviet artists. Lavishing praise on Bergelson’s work in general, the tribute paid special homage to ‘your great and wide-ranging anti-fascist activity. With your fiery words you summon the Jewish masses to battle against the accursed enemy of humankind, against the hangman of the Jewish people’.203 Later in 1945, like other members of the JAFC, Bergelson was awarded the medal ‘For Valiant Labour during the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945’. Such public acknowledgement of his work for the JAFC — and of how far the JAFC and its members openly identified themselves as Jews — exacted a heavy price. Party policy was strictly to deny that the Nazis had singled out the Jews for special persecution; all citizens of the Soviet Union, it was claimed, had suffered equally in Hitler’s war of aggression. Yet by virtue of its official responsibilities, the JAFC had access to more information about the fate of Europe’s Jews than was made public. It was impossible for them not to be overwhelmed by a sense of national catastrophe, but equally impossible to show such feelings openly. Only in secret, among trusted friends, could these prohibited emotions be shared. This was vividly attested by the poet Rokhl Korn (1898–1984), who f led the German invasion of Poland and spent the war years in the Soviet Union where she became a member of the JAFC. In Moscow on one occasion she attended a party at the home of poet and dramatist Shmuel Halkin (1897–1960) at which the guest of honour was the noted cantor Moyshe Kussevitzky (1899–1966), a refugee from Vilna:

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They all turned to Kussevitzky and asked him to sing something in Yiddish. He responded with a series of Jewish folk songs. [...] After he had finished and the applause wore down, Mikhoels came up to Kussevitzky, put his arm on his shoulder, looked into his eyes and said. ‘Now sing something really Jewish. Here you’re allowed to’. Then Kussevitzky’s brilliant voice rang out with the words and melody of Kol nidre. Everyone remained seated, their heads unmoving as though frozen to the spot. Shmuel Halkin stood glued to the wall. I looked over at him. His face was white as a sheet and tears, large tears, were rolling down his cheeks. He did not so much as try to wipe them off — or perhaps he was not even aware that he was weeping? It was then that it grew clear to me for the first time that these writers and prominent cultural spokesmen and leaders who wore on their lapels medals and honours of the Soviet Union were nothing more and nothing less than — marranos!204

On another occasion, Korn asserts, Bergelson momentarily opened his heart to her in his own home: He took me by the arm and led me into his study. He stopped in front of his portrait which hung on the wall and asked: ‘Do you see him?’ I answered: ‘Yes, who painted it?’ being sure he wanted to comment on the painter. But as though he had not heard my question he kept pointing his finger at his own portrait and like one possessed he shouted into my ear: ‘Look at him, take a good look at him — I hate his guts — the filthy scoundrel!’ Only later did I begin to grasp the full tragedy of this scene. This was David Bergelson’s way of turning to the free world and asking that he not be judged too harshly for having given in, and having served a false idolatry both in his work and in his personal life. He realized that he was already a prisoner of Soviet reality but I, who was still a Polish citizen, still had a chance to leave this prison that housed 200 million.

Such personal testimony vividly evokes the atmosphere of repression that prevailed by 1948, when the campaign against Soviet Jews was set in motion by such specious accusations as the following, submitted by Viktor Abakumov (1908–54), the Minister of State Security, on 26 March 1948: [...] it has been established that leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, being active nationalists with pro-American leanings, in essence are conducting an anti-Soviet nationalistic campaign. [...] Among the Committee members were [...] D. R. Bergelson — a writer and former active participant in the Zionist movement. In the period 1909–1912, Bergelson headed the so called ‘Kiev Group of Jewish Writers’ which led a struggle against proletarian literature after the October Revolution. [...] In 1921 Bergelson f led abroad [...] and returned to the Soviet Union only in 1935. While in Berlin in 1923, Bergelson published anti-Soviet articles in the newspaper ‘Forward’. Bergelson espouses nationalistic views which are also ref lected in his literary works.205

To the general Jewish public, the Soviet Union’s vote in favour of the partition of Palestine at the United Nations on 29 November 1947 suggested a change in official Jewish policy, but in reality by early 1948 Stalin had decided to eradicate Jewish culture from the Soviet Union. Pretexts were created to place the JAFC under

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suspicion as a subversive organization working with American and British spies; the very agencies in the West with whom it had been specifically charged to deal during the war years were now used to incriminate it.206 Steps were progressively taken to restrict its activities. In August 1946 it was placed under the control of the Central Committee Foreign Policy Division; in November its praise for the role of Jews in Soviet and world history was labelled a ‘chauvinistic-Jewish deviation’. Its closure was recommended because it had taken on a ‘nationalist and Zionist character’. During the second half of 1947, increasingly vehement anti-Zionist attacks on Jewish nationalism were launched, and on 13 January 1948, Mikhoels was murdered. Despite official attempts to present his death as an ‘accident’ and the lavish state funeral he was accorded, it was clear to all, Bergelson included, that there would be no renewed acceptance of Jewish national identity. On 20 November 1948, the JAFC and its organ Eynikayt were shut down together with three other Yiddish periodicals in Moscow, Kiev, and Birobidzhan; Der emes, the sole Yiddish publishing house, was disbanded; and Yiddish publications in Ukraine and Byelorussia were banned. With the abolition of most other Jewish cultural institutions, mass arrests of principal Yiddish cultural figures began in September 1948 and continued until June 1949. Bergelson was seized on the night of 23 January 1949, a week to the day after the first anniversary of Mikhoels’s state funeral. Together with his fellow accused, he lingered in prison for over three years, until brought to trial in May 1952. Fifteen defendants, including the poets Markish, Hofshteyn, Fefer, and Kvitko, were charged with capital offences, ranging from treason and espionage to ‘bourgeois nationalism’. These charges were extrapolated from deliberate misrepresentations of the work of the JAFC which, though closely monitored by Party officials, had moved into areas that provoked mistrust. As the extent of Jewish losses had become evident, some JAFC members had sought to expand the committee’s remit into such areas as amassing eye-witness testimony to Nazi atrocities on Soviet soil, resettling refugees, rebuilding collective farms, and reviving Jewish cultural life. At the urging of Mikhoels, and under his leadership, the JAFC, mistakenly viewed by dispossessed survivors as an official body representing Soviet Jewish interests, had begun approaching Kremlin officials for assistance. While the war still raged, the regime tolerated the committee’s initiatives, but when peace came, Stalin grew increasingly suspicious of the unintended role the leaders of the JAFC were playing as representatives of Soviet Jewry. His fears of America’s interventionist intentions in Europe were exacerbated by his conviction that Soviet Jews, who were presumed to have many relatives in the United States, had dual loyalties and would betray him. The mass demonstrations of Jewish national pride that greeted both the creation of the State of Israel in May 1948 and the arrival of Golda Meyerson (later Meir), its first ambassador, in Moscow in September 1948, settled the matter in his mind. On 28 January 1949, with most of the Soviet Union’s best-known Yiddish intellectuals under arrest, the regime launched a vicious ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign directed at more assimilated Jews. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ was defined as a reactionary bourgeois ideology that preached a neutral attitude to the motherland and to national culture. Where the earlier drive against ‘bourgeois nationalism’

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had aimed to stamp out Jewish national feelings inspired by the war, the anticosmopolitan offensive sought to eradicate foreign inf luences and to sever the Soviet Union and its satellites from the ‘capitalist West’. The regime therefore attacked ‘bowing and scraping’ before Western art and culture on the part of ‘passportless wanderers in humanity’ — meaning Jews — who showed ‘lack of common respect for all things Russian’; propaganda insisted that Jews were alienated from ‘the national character of Soviet Russian man’, and had only contempt for Russian national sentiments. At their trial, the principal charge brought against the leaders of the JAFC was grounded in the ‘Crimea question’. To solve the problems of dispossession and anti-Jewish hostility in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Mikhoels and others had proposed making the Crimea, where Jews had established some small agricultural colonies in the 1920s, a Soviet Jewish republic. This proposal had been strongly supported, according to a report from the security services, by Bergelson, who had argued that a Jewish republic in the Crimea would be welcomed both by the Jewish population of the Soviet Union as a whole, and by other Soviet nationalities who were reluctant to see Jews ‘using their talents to take over choice regions in other parts of the Soviet Union.’207 At first the regime pretended to treat this proposal seriously, but Kaganovich expressed its true attitude when he told Mikhoels that ‘only actors and poets’ could dream up something so absurd.208 With the start of the Cold War, Stalin chose to believe that this proposal originated with the American Joint Distribution Committee ( JDC), in his view a front organization for American imperialism, which aimed to establish a Jewish homeland in the Crimea as a ‘bridgehead’ from which to implement a long-term strategy of dismembering the Soviet Union. This plan, it was now alleged, had been devised with the JDC by Fefer and Mikhoels during their official visit to New York in 1943, and had been developed during the approved post-war visits to the Soviet Union of the left-wing Americans Peysekh (Paul) Novick (1891–1990), the editor of New York’s Morgn-frayhayt, and Sholem Aleichem’s son-in-law, the Yiddish journalist Benzion Goldberg (1895–1972). Anxious to assess the prospects for Jewish reconstruction after the war, these two journalists had naturally spent most of their time with Yiddishspeaking colleagues at the JAFC. Now security investigators misrepresented their visit with the accusation that they had been American espionage agents collecting secret economic and political information from Zionist traitors. Most of the defendants in this mock trial were treated brutally. Only Fefer, who had been the executive secretary of the JAFC and an informer for the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) since at least 1943, cooperated with the investigation immediately, detailing a multitude of baseless allegations used to frame the indictment. Right to the end, Fefer was led to believe that if he continued to cooperate, his life would be spared. Although the original intention was to conduct an open ‘show trial’ like those of 1937–38, more urgent matters intervened and individual defendants, held in isolation for over three years, began to retract their testimony. When they were finally brought before a military tribunal in May 1952, they were required to answer in turn to ‘confessions’ extorted under duress. Those who during the war had been explicitly entrusted with rousing international

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Jewish support for the Soviet war effort were now accused of replacing ‘proletarian internationalism’ with ‘cosmopolitanism’. The fact that four of the five writers charged had lived abroad during the 1920s — Markish in Poland and France; Hofshteyn in Palestine; Kvitko and Bergelson in Germany — was adduced as proof of their long-standing treachery. In the face of hostile questioning from the presiding judge, most could not avoid debasing themselves in a desperate attempt to save their lives, Bergelson included. His testimony proved that, whether or not he was dedicated to the ideology of communism, he was certainly dedicated to fostering Jewish national identity through the medium of Yiddish. Jews of Bergelson’s generation had been defined from childhood by a multitude of religious observances that he was now required to condemn. Forced to confess that these constituted ‘nationalism’, he exposed the impossibility of simultaneously being an identifying Jew and an ideologically conforming communist: I was raised and educated in a spirit of strict nationalism. [...] There is a day that falls in August when the Temple of Solomon was burned [Tisha b’Av, the Ninth of Av]. On this day all Jews fast for twenty-four hours, even the children. They go to the cemetery for an entire day and pray there ‘together with the dead’. I was so immersed in the atmosphere of that temple being burned — people talked about it a great deal in the community — that when I was six or seven years old it seemed to me that I could smell the fumes and the fire.209

In the act of seemingly denouncing a boy’s indoctrination in ‘Jewish nationalism’, Bergelson actually defines a bond with the very traditions he supposedly abjures. Why elaborate on the atmosphere of Tisha b’Av to a hostile Gentile judge ignorant of Jewish law and custom? Why not denigrate the Passover seder instead, or the twenty-four-hour liturgy of Yom Kippur, or the blessing of Levantine fruits and leaves on Sukkot? Why specifically name a fast that commemorates the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of the Jewish people? Jewish national mourning on this day is as much an expression of political as of religious loss. Given the extent to which Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union, like their Russian-language counterparts, had been increasingly compelled to deploy Aesopian language to escape the censors, it is possible to read Bergelson’s testimony both as an encoded equation of Bolshevik with Roman repression, and as an encoded assertion of national pride that, at one point, was explicit in Bergelson’s response to the overt Jew-hatred that increasingly emerged during the hearing. Taken as a whole, Bergelson’s testimony could be said to exemplify, in bitter reality, the same kind of affirmation in denial that he had fictionally dramatized in some of his ‘Berlin’ stories twenty years earlier.210 He admitted to the ‘crime’ of promoting Yiddish culture, speaking feelingly of the concern he and his colleagues had felt at the closure of Yiddish schools, and at the growing refusal of parents to place their children in such few schools as remained. Pointing — consciously or not — to the success of the state’s policy of forced assimilation, he highlighted his fear for the future of Soviet Yiddish culture, and admitted — because previously sanctioned conduct had now become a felony — that the Yiddish section of the Soviet Writers’ Union had repeatedly sent its members to various cities to promote Yiddish culture. The presumed

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encouragement of Yiddish culture by the Bolshevik regime was what had drawn him back to the Soviet Union; that regime’s malevolence in now destroying those who had taken its promises at face value was repeatedly exposed in his testimony, and that of others, in defending the work of the JAFC. To fulfil the task with which the state had charged it, the committee had no alternative but to disseminate material specifically highlighting Soviet Jewish activities, because American Jewish institutions would publish nothing else. Similarly, the committee had only been doing its duty by playing up the role of Jews who distinguished themselves at the front and behind the lines in reports for Eynikayt, since the newspaper had been specifically established to boost the morale of Yiddish-speaking Soviet Jews. How could it now be just to regard such activities as ‘essentially nationalistic propaganda’? Above all, Bergelson defended his right to be a Jew and to feel kinship with the Jewish people worldwide: [...] the anti-fascist Jews of the Soviet Union [...] were appealing to Jews of all countries during the war [...]. This was a time when people with nationalistic feelings were included in the struggle. There are many such expressions [like ‘I am a child of the Jewish people’] which were permitted at the time and were appropriate then, whereas now they would be considered highly nationalistic. There was an expression: ‘Brother Jews.’ I don’t see anything wrong with this expression. [...] There cannot be anything criminal in the phrase ‘I am a Jew.’ If I approach someone and say, ‘I am a Jew,’ what could be bad about that?211

The most ironic moment in Bergelson’s testimony came when, accused by the presiding judge of ‘slanderously’ suggesting that anti-Semitism was still rife in Ukraine, he was told that during his interrogation he had said ‘that he wanted to leave for the Jewish autonomous district, where, as he put it, he “could die in peace” ’. To this Bergelson replied quite simply, ‘The last sentence is true. I talked about wanting to move to Birobidzhan and settle there’. All he now hoped for was to be allowed to die as a Jew in a Jewish place. By this time, Bergelson, like all his colleagues, must have known that he had served a lie, but in his final appeal to the court, he tried to save his life by repeating his pride in it: I ask the court to take note of the fact that not one of the Yiddish writers of my age has entered the ranks of Soviet literature [...]. I am the only one of that entire generation of writers who accepted the ideas of Comrades Lenin and Stalin and devoted the last thirty years to Soviet themes. I was headed towards attaining the level of a real Soviet man, but did not quite reach it, and of that I am guilty.212

The indictment, and Fefer’s testimony on which it was founded, were so often exposed as fabrications by the defendants, Lozovsky in particular, that the authority of the security services was undermined. As Lozovsky incisively noted in one of his own interventions, ‘What is on trial here is the Yiddish language’. To cover this judicial sham — and to protect himself — the presiding judge halted the proceedings for almost a week, appealing for further investigation. Georgi Malenkov (1902–88), at that time the second man in the government, personally instructed the wavering judge to ‘carry out the Politburo’s resolution’. He did so, and pre-arranged death sentences were handed down on 18 July. On 12

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August 1952, his sixty-eighth birthday, Bergelson was one of thirteen defendants, including two women, to be shot.213 At the time of his arrest, the NKVD confiscated three sacks of manuscripts which, his widow believed, contained work that he had written with an increasing premonition that it would never be published. For nearly fifty years, the tensions of the Cold War, coupled with Shmuel Niger’s critical strictures, made it easy to dismiss most of Bergelson’s post-revolution work as Stalinist propaganda. This prejudice has been deep and lasting; there are many readers, even today, unwilling to admit that some of his work produced under the constraints of ‘socialist realism’ has artistic worth. Most readers of Yiddish prose associate Bergelson exclusively with the oblique and allusive style he perfected in his earliest writing. Anything else he produced, to which the label ‘impressionist’ cannot be attached, has been neglected, thus limiting perception of the extent of his versatility and the ways in which, throughout a long creative career, he continually reinvented himself as a writer. His political reorientation linked genuinely held socialist principles to the conviction that Yiddish culture, trapped between the assimilation demanded in the West, and the anti-Yiddish fanaticism practised by the Yishuv in Palestine, could grow only in the Soviet Union. Yet, significantly, Bergelson returned to live in Moscow only when no other options were open to him. Whether driven by what he accepted as the irresistible forces of history, or by the yearning to live among Yiddish-speaking Jews, after thirteen years of emigration abroad, he rejected the West and returned home. In wilfully blinding himself to the dangers that lurked there, he was one of thousands caught in a tragic lie, for whom there could be only one plea in mitigation: We are not the first Who with best meaning have incurred the worst.214

Notes to Chapter 1 1. The leaders of the Talnye Hasidim, blood relatives of both the Chernobyl and the Skvir dynasties, were Rabbi David Twersky (1808–82) and his son, Rabbi Menakhem Nokhem Twersky (1869–1915). Wealthy themselves, and holding court in great luxury, the Talner, like the Skvirer, attracted wealthy followers. The dynasty survived the Holocaust and relocated to the United States, where it remains active under the continued leadership of members of the Twersky family. 2. Bergelson recorded his recollections of his parents in a biographical sketch he wrote (in the third person) shortly after his return to the Soviet Union. See David Bergelson, ‘Materyaln tsu D. Bergelsons bio-bibliografye’, in Visnshaft un revolutsye: fertlyoriker zhurnal, ed. by Y. Liberberg, nos. 1–2 (April–June), Kiev, 1934, pp. 67–73. 3. Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye (Vilna: Kletskin, 1927–29), ed. by Zalmen Reyzen, I, col. 347. 4. Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), p. 16 5. Estraikh, In Harness, p. 15. 6. Izrail Brodsky (1823–88), whose father hailed from Brody in Austrian Galicia, came to Kiev in the 1870s where he founded the Alexander sugar refinery which eventually controlled almost one quarter of Imperial Russia’s total sugar production. His business enterprises passed to his five sons; one of them, Lazar, owned three houses in Kiev, two of which were plundered in the 1905 pogrom. See Michael Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait 1800–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 129–30.

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7. Ahad ha-Am was the founder-editor of the journal ha-Shiloah from 1896 to 1902; he was succeeded by Khaym Nakhmen Bialik. The journal survived until 1927. In time Bergelson and his circle rejected what they regarded as the narrowness of Ahad ha-Am’s ‘cultural nationalism’. 8. Nakhmen Mayzel, Dovid Bergelson (New York: Kooperativer folks-farlag, 1940), p. 15. 9. Mikhail Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 (Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 5. 10. Nakhmen Mayzel, Forgeyer un mittsaytler (New York: YKUF, 1946), pp. 328–29. 11. Bergelson, ‘Materyaln’, p. 69. 12. Krutikov, Crisis of Modernity, p. 65. 13. Reyzen, Leksikon, I, col. 347. 14. Shmuel Niger and Jacob Shatzky (eds.) Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur 1956–1981 (New York: Alveltlekhn yidishn kultur-kongres, 1981), VIII, cols. 55–56. 15. Bergelson, ‘Materyaln’, pp. 69–70. 16. Ruth Wisse, ‘Vegn Dovid Bergelsons dertseylung “Yoysef Shur” ’, Di goldene keyt, 77 (1972), 135. 17. A summary of both these stories is given in Mayzel, Forgeyer un mittsaytler, pp. 330–31. 18. Mayzel, Dovid Bergelson, p. 17. 19. Khaym (Eliezer-Moyshe) Tshemerinsky (Reb Mortkhele) (1862–1917) was a knowledgeable bilingual writer and editor. Most of his work was published anonymously and scattered in periodicals. As well as sections of the High Holy Day makhzor, he also translated into Yiddish work by Victor Hugo and Stefan Zweig. His highly regarded Yiddish adaptations of the Russian fables of Ivan Krylov (1769–1844) were published posthumously in 1919 in Yekaterinoslav. In 1917, on his deathbed, he wrote a loving reminiscence in Hebrew of his birthplace, the isolated Byelorussian shtetl Motol (Motele), the same town in which his relative and neighbour Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952) was born. A Yiddish translation of this memoir was serialized in the New York Yudishes tageblat in 1924; Hebrew republications appeared in 1951 and, more recently, in 2002. 20. Mayzel, Dovid Bergelson, p. 19; Forgeyer un mittsaytler, p. 333, my translation throughout. 21. Estraikh, In Harness, p. 21. 22. Somewhat confusingly, Mayzel recorded years later that the publisher of this miscellany was M. L. Tsitron, the owner of the big Russian-language publishing house Sotrudnik; he also claimed that he himself travelled to Berdichev to have the book typeset and printed by the Sheftel printing works. See Nakhmen Mayzel, Tsurikblikn un perspektivn (Tel Aviv: Farlag Y. L. Peretz, 1962), pp. 500–01. 23. Krutikov, Crisis of Modernity, pp. 39; 48–49. 24. Wisse, ‘Vegn Dovid Bergelsons dertseylung’, pp. 137–38. 25. A full account of this incident, including the text of the address to Peretz, is given in Mayzel, Forgeyer un mittsaytler, pp. 334–36. 26. Bergelson, ‘Materyaln’, pp.67, 70. Bergelson indicates that Reb Mortkhele Tshemerinsky was also present at this reading. Mayzel confirms that Bergelson rejected Peretz as any kind of inf luence; see Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn un der yidisher shrayber in Sovetnfarband (New York: YKUF, 1959), p. 175. 27. Mayzel, Dovid Bergelson, pp. 26–27. 28. See Kenneth Moss, ‘Y.-L. Peretz’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, CCCXXXIII: Writers in Yiddish, ed. by Joseph Sherman (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007). 29. Cited in Avrom Novershtern, ‘Igrotav shel Der Nister el Shmuel Niger’ [Letters from Der Nister to Shmuel Niger], Khulyot, 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 163–64. 30. Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 17–19. 31. ‘In a fargrebter shtot’ (In a backwoods town), Di yidishe velt, 2–5 (1914); ‘Yankev-Nosn Viderpolier’ (first draft of ‘Yoysef Shur’), Di yidishe velt, 1.3 (1915). 32. The subject of this essay was Peretz; it was published in Di yidishe velt, 4 (1915); see Reyzen, Leksikon, I, col. 349. 33. For a fuller account, see Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 17–26. 34. Der Nister, Dertseylungen un eseyen 1940–1948 (New York: YKUF, 1957), pp. 293–94.

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35. Reprinted in Leo Kenig, Shrayber un verk (Vilna: Kletskin, 1929); cited Estraikh, In Harness, p. 29. 36. Mayzel, Tsurikblikn un perspektivn, p. 503. 37. Bergelson, ‘Materyaln’, p. 71. 38. Di yidishe velt, 1.3 (1915), pp. 261–71. 39. These are all noted in Ruth Wisse’s analysis, ‘Vegn Dovid Bergelsons dertseylung’, pp. 133–44. 40. Eygns, 1 (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1918), pp. 1–38; the tale, entitled ‘In fartunklte tsaytn’, ends with the notice ende ershte teyl, ‘end of the first part’. 41. Yoysef Shur was published in both editions of Bergelson’s collected works: vol. III of Verk: naye farbeserte oysgabe (Berlin: Wostok, 1922), pp. 73–145; and vol. III of Geklibene verk fun Dovid Bergelson (Vilna: Kletskin, 1929), pp. 61–126. This work’s complicated history is traced by Avrom Novershtern, ‘Hundert yor Dovid Bergelson: materyaln tsu zayn lebn un shafn’, Di goldene keyt, 115 (1985), 44–54. 42. Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov (eds), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 145–46. 43. David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 123. 44. I. J. Singer disliked the ‘art for art’s sake’ tendencies of those who created Eygns. At this stage of his life he was politically far more radical, which may partly have accounted for the antipathy between him and Bergelson. Singer published ‘In vald’ (In the forest) in Baginen, and ‘Magda’ in Oyfgang, both in 1919. See Anita Norich, The Homeless Imagination of Israel Joshua Singer (Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 111–12. 45. ‘Mayse-bikhl’ was republished, with lithographs and woodcuts by Lazar Segal, in a limited edition of 100 copies signed by both author and illustrator, by Wostok in Berlin in 1923; it was reprinted by the Hebrew University in 1983. 46. See Norich, Homeless Imagination, pp. 9, 83–84. 47. See his mocking remarks in ‘A briv fun Amerike’, Forverts, 7 June 1942; repr. 20 February 1944. 48. Der Nister’s brother, the painter Motl Kaganovitsh, brought Bergelson some of her earliest lyrics, which he published in the second volume of Eygns (Kiev, 1920). 49. Kadya Molodowsky, ‘David Bergelson drikt op mayne ershte lider in zamlbukh “Eygns”,’ Svive, 33 (1971), 54–57; Chapter 37 of Mayn elterzeydns yerushe (My great-grandfather’s legacy), her autobiography, serialized in Svive between March 1965 and April 1974. 50. Moyshe Litvakov, review of Eygns, Bikher-velt, 1 ( January 1919), cols. 20–25. 51. Bergelson, ‘Dikhtung un gezelshaftlekhkayt’, Bikher-velt, 4–5 (August 1919), cols. 5–16. An English translation of this essay appears as Appendix A in the present volume. 52. For a fuller discussion see Seth L. Wolitz, ‘The Kiev-grupe (1918–1920) debate: the function of literature’, Modern Jewish Studies Annual, 2 (1978), 97–103. 53. Chone Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Literature in the Soviet Union’, in The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917, ed. by Lionel Kochan (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 251. 54. Arno Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews: The Red Book (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), pp. 38–39. 55. Chimen Abramsky, ‘The Biro-Bidzhan Project 1927–1959’, in The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917, ed. by Lionel Kochan (Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 66. 56. http://www.encyclopediaofukraine/com 57. See Vitaly Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive (London: The Harvill Press, 1995), pp. 139–40. 58. Apart from Bergelson and Kvitko, the group included the literary critic Bal-Makhshoves (Isidor Eliashev, (1873–1924), the linguists Bal-Dimyen (Nokhem Shtif, 1879–1933) and Elias Tsherikover (1881–1943), the philologist Zelig-Hirsh Kalmanovitsh (1885–1944), and four artists: Borukh (Boris) Aronson (1900–80), Iosif Chaikov (1888–1986), Mark Epshteyn (1897–1949) and Issachar-Ber Rybak (1897–1935). Aronson, the son of the Grand Rabbi of Kiev, was the only one of the group who made his way to America where he started work as a stage designer with Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theatre and went on to make a hugely successful career on Broadway. 59. The collection of documents that make up this correspondence are numbered 62151–62156 in

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the YIVO archives in New York. Two of these, with a brief introduction and a photograph of all the participants, were published by Gennady Estraikh in Forverts, 17 March 2006, p. 18. 60. See Robert A. Maguire, ‘Introduction’, in Russian Literature of the Twenties: An Anthology, ed. by Carl R. Proffer and others (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1987), pp. ix–xi. 61. Charney was the younger brother of Shmuel Niger (1883–1955), from 1919 New York’s leading Yiddish literary critic, and of Borukh Vladek (1886–1938), manager of the New York Yiddish daily, Forverts. 62. Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 37–45. 63. Latzki-Bertoldi was an activist in the Po’alei Zion political movement and later headed the Emigdirekt organization which assisted Eastern European Jews to emigrate. 64. Jurgis Baltrušaitis (1873–1944), a highly cultivated man who knew fifteen foreign languages, was acquainted with almost all the leading Russian writers of his day. A poet himself, he spent the years of World War I and the revolution in Russia. Elected President of the Russian Union of Writers in 1919, he assisted many during the first years of the Bolshevik regime. Between 1920 and 1939, Baltrušaitis served as Lithuania’s ambassador to Moscow. 65. A description of this departure is given in A. Ben-Adir [Abraham Rosin], ‘Ribak der mentsh’, in Yisokher-Ber Ribak: zayn lebn un shafn, ed. by Elias Tsherikover (Paris: Komitet tsu fareybikn dem ondenk fun Yisokher-Ber Ribak, 1937), p. 78. 66. Kalmanovitsh, a Lithuanian-born philologist, translator, historian, and community archivist, was an eminent Yiddish scholar. In 1929 he left Berlin to become an early director of YIVO in Vilna. After the German Occupation, he was incarcerated in the Vilna ghetto where he kept a secret diary recording the ghetto’s day-to-day life. During the day he was forced to work at YIVO, sorting through the pillaged contents of Vilna’s libraries and preparing selected volumes for shipment to Germany. He was sent to a death camp in Estonia, where he died in 1944. 67. A prolific journalist under the pen-name of Ben-Adir, Rosin was one of the founders of the Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party and an early Territorialist. Having f led Berlin for Paris after the rise of Hitler, he was fortunate to escape to New York in 1940, where he became the foundereditor of the journal Afn shvel (On the Threshold). 68. Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London: Penguin Books, 2002), pp. 539–40. 69. See for instance David Midgley, ‘The Romance of the East: Encounters of German-Jewish Writers with Yiddish-Speaking Communities, 1916–27’, in The Yiddish Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Ritchie Robertson (London: Legenda, 2005), pp. 87–98. 70. See Delphine Bechtel, ‘Cultural Transfers between “Ostjuden” and “Westjuden”: GermanJewish Intellectuals and Yiddish Culture 1897–1930’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 42 (1997) (London: Secker and Warburg, 1997), pp. 69–70. 71. Tchernichowsky supplies these details in his childhood memoir entitled Me’eyin avtobiografia [An autobiography of sorts] which is republished in Sha’ul Tshenihowski, mehkarim ve-teudot e [Saul Tshernichowsky: Studies and Documents], ed. by Boaz Arpaly ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1994). 72. When his library was destroyed in a fire that swept through his Berlin home in June 1924, Agnon took this as an ill omen, and returned to Palestine the same year. Such omens are ambivalent: after he had rebuilt his library in his new Jerusalem home, it was destroyed a second time during the Arab riots of 1929. 73. See David Mazower, ‘On Henryk Berlewi’, The Mendele Review (TMR), vol. 09.005 [Sequential No. 157] at: http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele/tmrarc.htm 74. For a fuller account, see Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 186–94; 202–03. 75. For fuller details, see Glenn S. Levine, ‘Yiddish Publishing in Berlin and the Crisis in Eastern European Jewish Culture 1919–1924’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 42 (1997) (London: Secker and Warburg, 1997), pp. 85–108. 76. This miscellany, of which only two issues appeared in 1918 and 1919 respectively, was first published in Kharkov and later reprinted in Berlin. For more on Zingman, see Gennady

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Estraikh, ‘Utopias and Cities of Kalman Zingman, an Uprooted Yiddishist Dreamer’, East European Jewish Affairs, 36.1 ( June 2006), 31–42. 77. Delphine Bechtel, ‘Milgroym’, in The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996, ed. by S. Gilman and J. Zipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 420–21. 78. See Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 98. 79. Sol Liptzin, A History of Yiddish Literature (New York: Jonathan David, 1972), pp. 127–30, 133. 80. David G. Roskies, ‘Der Nister: The Storyteller as High Priest’, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 193. 81. Lev Bergelson, ‘Erinnerungen an meinen Vater: Dir Berliner Jahre’, in David Bergelson, Leben ohne Frühling [Nokh alemen], trans. into German by Alexander Eliasberg (Berlin: Auf bau, 2000), p. 284. 82. Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn, pp. 185–86. 83. Mayzel, Dovid Bergelson, pp. 13–14; Forgeyer un mittsaytler, pp. 324–25. 84. Lev Bergelson, ‘Erinnerungen’, p. 285. 85. Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, pp. 201–02. 86. Novershtern, ‘Igrotav shel Der Nister el Shmuel Niger’, p. 205. 87. See Bechtel, ‘Cultural Transfers’, pp. 67–83. 88. Shneer, Soviet Jewish Culture, pp. 146; 166. 89. Cited by Arno Lustiger, ‘Nachwort’, in David Bergelson, Leben ohne Früling (Berlin: Auf bau, 2000), p. 288. 90. This point is explored by Bechtel, ‘Cultural Transfers’, pp. 75–83. 91. Levine, ‘Yiddish Publishing in Berlin’, p. 89. 92. See Bechtel, ‘Milgroym’, pp. 420–26. 93. Milgroym, 1 (1922), p. 41, col. 1. 94. For a fuller discussion, see Arthur Tilo Alt, ‘The Milgroym Group and Modernism’, Yiddish, 6.1 (1985), 33–44. Alt usefully notes that, ‘The word oyfbrokh is reminiscent of the same term favoured by the German expressionists in keeping with their vision of the rebirth of man’ (p. 37). 95. Known by the Hebrew acronym stam (seyfer toyre, tfilin, mezuze), this is the typeface chosen — with unintentional irony — for the heading of Bergelson’s defence of iconoclastic modernism, as well as for his story of the civil war pogrom. 96. Cited in Estraikh, In Harness, p. 69. 97. Review republished in Moyshe Litvakov, In umru (Moscow: Farlag shul un bukh, 1926), p. 28. 98. The letter, which arrived just as the issue was going to press, read: ‘We wish to inform our colleagues, whom we had invited by word of mouth or in writing to collaborate in Milgroym, that we no longer have any connection to the editorial board of this journal and are no longer contributors thereto’ (Shtrom 3 (Moscow, 1922), appended to p. 83). Cited in Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, p. 194. 99. The contents of all six issues are listed in Levine, ‘Yiddish Publishing in Berlin’, pp. 106–07. Rimon, its Hebrew parallel, was supported by all the leading Hebraists: Bialik (Issue #3); Agnon and Tchernichowsky (issues #3 and #4); Uri Zvi Grinberg (Issue #6). Dubnow contributed to Issue #3. To promote its circulation in Palestine, Rimon also published each issue’s table of contents in English. 100. Bikher-velt, 1 (1922), cols. 25–30. 101. Khalyastre, 1 (1922), 62. 102. For a fuller discussion, see Shneer, Soviet Jewish Culture, pp. 158–61. 103. Literarishe bleter attracted the participation of the best Yiddish writers of the day, including Bergelson himself. Mayzel remained its editor until 1937. 104. Lev Bergelson, ‘Erinnerungen’, p. 284. 105. Thus, although Shneour was among the many who filled the Berlin Philharmonic Hall to celebrate Bialik’s fiftieth birthday on the evening of 18 January 1923, it is unlikely that Bergelson was there, since he and Bialik had parted ways over the question of language. Similarly, when Khaym Zhitlovsky’s sixtieth birthday was celebrated at a ‘literary-musical evening’ in the Musiker-Festsäle on the evening of 21 January 1926, there were no Hebraists present at a

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Yiddishist celebration at which major speakers, apart from Bergelson, included Latzki-Bertoldi and Singalovsky. Although Dubnov’s presence on the platform was advertised, in the end he sent apologies; his ideological differences with Zhitlovsky were too great. I am indebted for knowledge of this commemoration to David Mazower, who owns a copy of the poster (in German and Yiddish) advertising the Zhitlovsky evening. 106. Arthur Tilo Alt, ‘A survey of literary contributions to the post-World War I Yiddish journals of Berlin’, Yiddish, 7.1 (1987), 42–52; here p. 46. 107. For fuller treatment, see Erich Eyck, A History of the Weimar Republic (New York: Athenaeum, 1970); Larry Eugene Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Pres, 1988). 108. Gennady Estraikh, ‘David Bergelson: From Fellow Traveller to Soviet Classic’, Slavic Almanac, 7.10 (2001), 202. 109. Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 80, 192, n. 55. 110. Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Literature in the Soviet Union’, p. 247. 111. See, for instance, Abramsky, ‘The Biro-Bidzhan Project’, pp. 64–77. 112. Der emes, 2 March 1926. 113. The dominating colour of Vilna in Kulbak’s ode is ‘grey’ — it is farshribn groy un alt, ‘inscribed grey and old’, it blooms with groye bliekhts, ‘grey blossoms’, and an inextricable part of it is dos bloyer talmid zitsndik baym groyen Bergelson, ‘the blue student sitting listening to grey Bergelson’. Kulbak’s ‘Vilne’ was first published in New York’s Di tsukunft in 1926, and again in Varshever shriftn (1926–27); it is republished in Irving Howe et al., The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New York: Viking, 1987), pp. 407–11. I am grateful to Ruth Wisse for clarifying aspects of this poem in a personal communication. 114. Gennady Estraikh, ‘Dovid Bergelson geyt “In shpan” ’, Forverts, 11 November 2005, p. 11. 115. Some of Bergelson’s correspondence is located in various collections in the YIVO archives. The letter to Niger, dated 25 January 1926, is located in the Daniel Charney Papers, RG 421, Box #1, Folder #6; his letter to Opatoshu, of the same date, is in the Joseph Opatoshu Papers, RG 436, Box #1, Folder #24. I am grateful to Ellen Kellman for locating these letters, and for her comments on them. 116. These four are named in a study of the Jewish self-help organization ORT; see Leon Shapiro, A History of Ort (New York: 1940). 117. A translation of this essay appears as Appendix B in the present volume. 118. Editorial, In Shpan, 2 (May 1926), 181–82. 119. Der emes, 29 May 1926, p. 2. 120. Lestschinsky was a leading researcher in demographics: he edited the Berlin-based journal Bleter far yidishe demografye, statistik un khronik between 1923 and 1924, and later resumed the project for YIVO in Vilna. 121. Extracts from Cahan’s letters in the YIVO archive of Lestschinsky’s papers were republished by Gennady Estraikh in Forverts, 6 January 2006, p. 17, from which this citation is taken. 122. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 147. 123. Introduction to Ashes out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet Yiddish Writers, ed. by Howe and Greenberg (New York: Schocken, 1977), p. 15. 124. Litvakov’s review is cited, with comment, in Shmuel Niger, Lezer, dikhter, kritiker: geklibene shriftn, I (New York: Yidisher kultur farlag, 1928), pp. 120–21. 125. Morgn-frayhayt (New York), 22 August 1926, pp. 5, 7; also cited in Niger, Lezer, dikhter, kritiker, pp. 121–29. 126. For a fuller discussion see Joseph Sherman, ‘ “Who is Pulling the Cart?”: Bergelson and the Party Line, 1919–1927’, Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1.52 (2004), 5–36. 127. Serialized in the highbrow Kharkov journal Di royte velt, the novel appeared in book form in 1929 under the imprints respectively of Kletskin and of Kiev’s Kultur-lige. 128. For a fuller discussion, see Susan Ann Slotnick, The Novel Form in the Works of David Bergelson (PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 1978), Introduction, pp. 1–54; Chapter 4, pp. 232–332. 129. Henekh Kazakavitsh, review of Mides-hadin, Di rote velt, 5–6 (1929), 197–99; A. Mapovets [Yasha Bronshteyn], ‘Unter der last fun yerushe’, Prolit, 6 (1929), 64–75.

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130. Shmuel Niger, ‘Di revolutsye in miniatur’, republished in Yidishe shrayber in Sovet-rusland (New York: Alveltlekher yidishn kultur-kongres, 1958), p. 300. 131. Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn, p. 181. 132. For a fuller discussion and a sample of Bergelson’s sketches, see Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Old and New Together: David Bergelson’s and Israel Joshua Singer’s Portraits of Moscow, circa 1926–27’, Prooftexts, 26.1 and 2 (Winter/Spring 2006), 58. 133. For a fuller discussion, see Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 85–89. 134. Morgn-frayhayt (New York), 8 October 1926. 135. This speech, some of Litvakov’s introductory remarks, and the ensuing furore, are wittily described in a letter dated 19 September 1926 from Shloyme-Yankev Niepomniashtshy in Moscow to Daniel Charney in Berlin. The letter is published by Avrom Novershtern, ‘Hundert yor David Bergelson’, pp. 54–58. 136. Estraikh, In Harness, p. 83. 137. First published in Forverts on 6 May 1923 and included in Shturemteg (Kiev, 1927) 138. Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn, p. 179. 139. Mikhail Krutikov ‘David Bergelson un di kunst fun revolutsye’, Forverts, 11 November 2005, pp. 16–17. 140. Bergelson, ‘A zeltener sof ’, Shturemteg (Vilna: Kletskin, 1930), pp. 201–44. 141. Susan A. Slotnick gives a brief analysis of the story; see Slotnick, The Novel Form, pp. 34–35. 142. ‘Botshko’ was first published in Shtrom, 1.2 (1922), 8–30; a slightly longer, revised version entitled Birgerkrig (Civil war) was included in volume V of Bergelson’s Geklibene verk (Vilna: Kletskin, 1929), pp. 9–64. Additional fragments featuring the same characters appeared as the title story of Tsugvintn (Draughts of wind), volume VI of Geklibene verk (Vilna: Kletskin, 1930), pp. 9–48. 143. Shmuel Niger, ‘Di kunst-teoriye — un di kunst fun David Bergelson’, Lezer, dikhter, kritiker, pp. 156–64. Niger expands his evaluation into an overview of Bergelson’s literary theory in relation to his artistic practice. 144. See Robert A. Maguire, ‘Introduction’ to Russian Literature of the Twenties: An Anthology, pp. ix–xi. 145. Estraikh, In Harness, p. 89. 146. Literarishe bleter, 17 (27 April 1928). 147. Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater; Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 94, 98. 148. For a detailed account of the history of this newspaper, see Gennady Estraikh, ‘Metamorphoses of Morgn-frayhayt’, in Yiddish and the Left, ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2001), pp. 144–66. 149. Republished by Gennady Estraikh in Forverts, 26 August 2005, p. 13. 150. Extracts from Cahan’s correspondence with Lestschinsky, republished in Forverts, 6 January 2006, p. 17. 151. See Norich, Homeless Imagination, pp. 20–23. 152. See Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater, pp. 121–25. 153. See Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater, pp. 133–35. 154. For a full discussion, see Gennady Estraikh, ‘Shmuel Gordon: A Yiddish Writer in “the Ocean of Russian Literature” ’, in The Yiddish Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Ritchie Robertson (London: Legenda, 2005), pp. 134–51. 155. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, pp. 147–48. 156. Mikhail Krutikov, ‘David Bergelson un di kunst fun revolutsye’, Forverts, 11 November 2005, pp. 16–17. 157. Nakhmen Mayzel ‘David Bergelson tsugast in Varshe’, Literarishe bleter, 22 (1930). 158. David Bergelson, ‘Problemen fun der yiddisher literatur’, Literarishe bleter, 24 (1930). 159. See Nathan Cohen, Sefer, sofer ve’iton: merkaz hatarbut hayehudit bevarsha 1918–1942 ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2003), pp. 113–25. 160. ‘Afn Bergelson-ovent’, Der emes, 22 November 1931. 161. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 148 162. Shneer, Soviet Jewish Culture, p.165

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163. Mordechai Altshuler (ed.), Briv fun yidishe sovetishe shraybers ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1979), p. 315. 164. See Gennady Estraikh, ‘Pyrrhic Victories of the Soviet Yiddish Language Planners’, East European Jewish Affairs, 23.2 (1993), 25–37. 165. Shneer, Soviet Jewish Culture, p. 216. 166. Cited in Estraikh, In Harness, p. 139. 167. See Dalia Kaufman, ‘Fir gilgulim fun Bergelsons dertseylung “Botshko”,’ Yerusholaymer almanakh, 4 (1974), 216–21. 168. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 149. 169. Cited in Estraikh, In Harness, p. 140. 170. Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn, pp. 91–92. 171. Bergelson asserted this, and even outlined the scheme of each volume, in his 1933 memoir ‘Materyaln’, p. 73. 172. Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn, pp. 181–82. 173. See, for instance, Moyshe Litvakov, ‘Dovid Bergelson: 1909–1934’, Emes, (Moscow), 12 November 1934, p. 2; M. Mizhiritsky, ‘Mit naye oygn: vegn D. Bergelsons bukh Beym Dnyepr’, Farmest, 4 (1933), 115–35. 174. Shmuel Niger, ‘Meynungen vegn D. Bergelsons Baym Dnyepr’, Literarishe bleter, 37 (1932), 589–90; Mayzel, Forgeyer un mittsaytler, pp. 319–22. 175. See Slotnick, The Novel Form, pp. 40–48. 176. Bergelson, ‘Materyaln’, p. 72. 177. David Bergelson, ‘Leksik-problemen in der yiddisher literatur’, Forpost, 2 (1937), 140–53. 178. Estraikh, In Harness, p. 164. 179. Literaturnaya gazeta, 1 February 1937, p. 5. 180. See Zachary M. Baker, ‘Sholem Aleichem’s eightieth birthday observances and the cultural mobilization of Soviet Jewry: a case study,’ YIVO Annual, 23 (Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), pp. 209–31. 181. See Slotnick, The Novel Form, pp. 51–54. 182. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, pp. 7–8. 183. Cited in Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews, pp. 98–99. 184. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 9. 185. Leyvik Papers, YIVO archives, RG 315, Box 21, Bergelson folder. Thanks to Ellen Kellman for finding this letter. 186. Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews, pp. 128; 131. 187. Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews, pp. 114–18. 188. Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 187. 189. Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews, pp. 104–06. 190. Shimon Redlich (ed.), War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the Soviet Union (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), pp. 51–53. 191. John and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vassily Grossman (New York: The Free Press, 1996), pp. 389, n. 30; p. 392, n. 13. 192. The play was first published in Der shpigl (The Mirror) (Buenos Aires, 1946), and later by YKUF in New York. See David Bergelson, Kh’vel lebn (New York: YKUF almanakh, 1967). 193. Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater, pp .243–44. 194. For a dramatic account of Mikhoels’s murder, see Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1994), pp. 159–82. 195. Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union, pp. 140–41. 196. Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews, pp. 131–32. 197. Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union, p. 197. 198. Tsvey veltn was first published in Heymland, 1 (1947), 29–42; 2 (1947), 3–14; 3 (1948), 83–97; 5 (1948), 11–29. Five years later it was published in book form in America: Tsvey veltn (New York: YKUF, 1953). 199. Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union, pp. 148–49. 200. Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, pp. 418–19.

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201. Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, p. 423. 202. See Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn, pp. 190–91 203. The full text of this greeting is cited in Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn, pp. 188–89. 204. Both citations from a speech given by the poet; see Rachel Korn website at: http://www. rachelkorn.com/text/articleyiddishculture.htm 205. Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, pp. 451–53. 206. Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews, pp. 180–81. 207. Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, p. 45. 208. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, pp. 20–21. 209. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, pp. 150–51. 210. For an analysis of one such story, see Joseph Sherman, ‘A Note on Bergelson’s “Obsolescence” ’, Midstream 38.5 ( July/August 2002), 37–42. 211. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, pp. 157–58. 212. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 478. 213. All fifteen were condemned, fourteen to death and one to a term of exile, but one died in prison before the sentence could be carried out. 214. Shakespeare, King Lear, V. 3. 3–4.

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CHAPTER 2

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Memories of My Father: The Early Years (1918–1934) Lev Bergelson When I think back to my earliest childhood, the images that f lash through my memory are usually associated with journeys and moving from one place to another. In these mind pictures, more often than not, we are travelling or preparing to travel somewhere, or have just arrived somewhere else. Today I have difficulty in distinguishing what I saw and experienced in person from what I heard from my parents, but it seems to me that as I see the scenes appearing and disappearing, I can also hear the snorting of horses, the creaking of carts, the rattle of train wheels, and whistles of locomotives. In any case, these pictures of the distant past settled in layers on later events in my long life, which I also see now as a long string of migrations from one city to another, from one country to another, associated each time with separating myself from a familiar environment, from friends and relatives, and, finally, from my beloved father, murdered by Stalinist hangmen only because he thought and wrote in the language of his people. I know from my parents that they met in Odessa in 1916. Mother was a young woman who had just finished her studies in a Russian gymnazium for girls, while Father, twelve years older than she, was already a known writer with numerous admirers. Odessa was not their home city. They had both been born in the shtetlekh on the right bank of the Dnieper in Ukraine. Both had many siblings and belonged to respected Hasidic families who strictly followed Jewish traditions and spoke the Ukrainian dialect of Yiddish. They married in Odessa in the end of 1917 or the beginning of 1918 in a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony, with a canopy, a rabbi, klezmorim, and innumerable relatives and other guests. Khaym Nakhmen Bialik was my mother’s unterfirer (best man), and in later years my mother would tell how Bialik half-seriously and half-teasingly warned her: ‘Tsiporah, you have to be careful, because he may end up with the Bolsheviks.’ For a while, Bialik and my father were close friends; they would meet often, though they always argued about the language question — whether Yiddish or Hebrew should be the national language of the Jewish people — and these profound differences finally drove then permanently apart. Soon the civil war engulfed Ukraine. In Odessa, people struggled to find food; the communal situation was alarming and even dangerous. Since my mother was

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pregnant with me, my father brought her from the turmoil of Odessa to her home town of Gaisin, near Vinnitsa, where my widowed grandmother and numerous other relatives lived quietly in their spacious house. At the beginning of 1918 people still believed that the atrocities of the war would bypass that shtetl and others like it, located deep in the backwoods. In the meantime, my father himself travelled to Kiev, where he was actively involved in Jewish cultural life, notably in founding the Kultur-lige, which sought to develop Yiddish culture, education, and literature. He did not plan to stay long in Kiev and thought he could return by the time my mother was due to give birth. The social situation was rapidly changing, however: the conf lagration of the civil war spread and covered the entire territory of Ukraine, and so-called quiet Gaisin found itself continually occupied and re-occupied by one or another of numerous military formations: White Army, Red Army, Ukrainian nationalists, or simply criminal gangs. Every change of power was inevitably associated with pogroms — the plundering, raping, and murdering of Jews. I was born during one such pogrom, in August 1918. By that time, the railway operated irregularly and it was dangerous to travel from Kiev to Gaisin, especially if the traveller was Jewish. Following a few failed attempts to come by train, my father found a Ukrainian peasant named Petro, who agreed, for a reward in money, to bring my mother and me to Kiev, pretending that we were his wife and son, a deception fairly easy to bring off as we were both fair-haired and blue-eyed. Consequently, in late autumn of 1918, Petro came to Gaisin, where he bought a horse and cart. My mother and I were wrapped in coarse peasant blankets, put on the hay that covered the bottom of the cart, and dispatched to Kiev. Although the distance was relatively short, the trip took several weeks because Petro used his sources of information — other peasants he knew or had just met — and many times changed the route, avoiding the most dangerous places. Each time he was stopped at a checkpoint, Petro convincingly explained to the soldiers that we were his wife and child. My mother would keep silent, ostensibly demonstrating her modesty, whereas I demanded to be fed or changed in a language that every one could understand. After bringing us safely to Kiev, Petro settled all the financial issues and disappeared. We never saw him again, though my father tried several times to find him and always spoke warmly of him. As I grew older, the account of that adventure was one of my favourite bedtime stories, and one of the blankets that had covered us during the journey was kept in our family for a long time. In Kiev, my mother fell ill with typhoid fever. When she recovered, we moved to Moscow in company with a group of Yiddish literati. This relocation had been organized by an official institution, but I don’t remember its name. My mother told me later that the journey took place during the freezing winter of 1920. The whole group travelled in a teplushka, a goods van, equipped with a small metal stove called a burzhuika. Passengers fed it with coal and wood in order to keep its warmth going. The journey lasted a long time, about ten days, during which the car was coupled and uncoupled to various local trains. The travellers were cold and hungry, having hardly any food apart from frozen potatoes, but in the end we arrived in Moscow without any further complications.

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Once in the capital, we were housed in a huge, completely empty room in a former bourgeois apartment which had been requisitioned by the new regime and turned into a ‘communal dwelling’, occupied by several families. My mother found it difficult to recover completely in cold, starving Moscow, while my father had daily to seek different places from which he could haul firewood and food, mainly dried fish and frozen potatoes, which was strictly rationed. Nevertheless, he continued to work intensively, wrote stories and articles, took part in various publishing projects, literary parties, and discussions. During these gatherings he was increasingly condemned as a bourgeois, decadent writer, whose style was ‘alien to proletarian ideals’. Finally, he almost stopped writing. At that time, the poet and translator Jurgis Baltrušaitis, who had been appointed as independent Lithuania’s first ambassador to Soviet Russia, suggested that my father become a Lithuanian citizen. This ‘naturalization’ was based on the fact that before World War I my father had lived in Vilna, where he had worked in the publishing house of Boris Kletskin, an active sponsor of Yiddish literature who had helped my father in the early stages of his writing career. Thanks to our Lithuanian passports, we could then legally leave Soviet Russia, and for a few months we lived in a small village not far from Kovno. I remember clearly those peaceful warm days, with their ambience of serenity and satiety, which made such a contrast with gloomy, freezing Moscow. I see myself seated on my father’s shoulders, or on the bank of the river (my father was a good swimmer), or on the very top of a tall stack of hay loaded on to a large cart. A fair-haired peasant allows me to hold the reins, and I am excited to be in charge of the rick-and-cart behemoth. In the autumn of 1921 my father journeyed to Berlin, where the publishing house Wostok planned to bring out his collected works in six volumes. Jewish literary life in Berlin appeared to be so rich, exciting, and promising that my father decided to move us all permanently to the German metropolis, and we soon joined him. In those days it was impossible to travel from Kovno to Berlin through Poland, because Lithuania and Poland had no diplomatic relations. The best remaining route was by sea, from Memel (Klaipeda) to Danzig. We travelled late in the autumn on an ancient little ship, and both my mother and I suffered terribly from sea-sickness. I think this explains why I remember my first sea voyage so vividly. Seriously and firmly we settled in Berlin, and spent thirteen happy years there. Yet, it seems to me, we always regarded ourselves as temporary and not particularly welcome residents. At the beginning of the 1920s, Berlin rapidly emerged as one of the leading centres of Yiddish cultural life, as it was home to many writers, actors, journalists, musicians, artists, and publishers from Eastern Europe. The Sholem Aleichem Club was a popular hub. Apart from tasty borscht and other dishes of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine, this club offered a varied programme of cultural activities, with meetings, discussion groups, literary soirées, and a wide selection of up-to-date issues of Yiddish newspapers and journals published in the United States, Poland, and Lithuania. My father was happy to dive in this cultural whirlpool: he often attended gatherings at the club, participating in its work by reading from his new writing and performing as a violinist.

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FIG. 2.1. David and Levi (Lev) Bergelson, Freiburg, Germany, 1922

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Possessed of perfect pitch, my father in his youth took his music lessons very seriously and even thought of embracing a professional career as a violinist. At one of the charity concerts given in the Sholem Aleichem Club, he performed on a programme that included another amateur fiddler, Albert Einstein. On that occasion they discussed the future of Jewish traditions and the Yiddish language. Although Einstein did not know Yiddish, he was pleased to learn that a book in Yiddish on the special relativity theory had been published in Berlin with an introduction written by himself. [L.B. refers to this Yiddish book: it is T. Shalit, Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory (Berlin, 1927), though it does not appear in the catalogues of leading libraries.] In this introduction, Einstein noted that, in the past, Jews had survived as a nation thanks to their devotion to the traditions of Judaism, but that they had been obliged to pay for this survival with cultural isolation, which had resulted in their developing lopsidedly in their outlook and spiritual life. He believed that the preservation of tradition would remain important for the Jewish people, but insisted that it was also important to liberate Jewish thought from its existing limitations. When our family came to Berlin in 1921, we lived first in a pension in the city centre, on Grollmanstrasse. Later my parents rented furnished rooms in the Moabit quarter, on Turmstrasse. The landlady, Frau Engel, was the widow of a German officer killed during the war, and she had a big sheepdog called Rolf. I think that Frau Engel and Rolf were prototypes for the characters in my father’s story ‘Tsvey rotskhim’ (Two murderers). After a year spent in the rooms of Frau Engel (she always scared me), and many attempts to find a suitable inexpensive f lat, my parents eventually found a shelter in Zehlendorf, a quiet, aff luent neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city. There they rented a small f lat originally intended to house the gardener of a luxury villa owned by wealthy relatives of my mother. The villa was situated in a beautiful, large park with spacious lawns, f lowerbeds, centuryold lime- and chestnut trees, with pebbled paths and a large pool surrounded by weeping willows. Although the gardener’s f lat was built as a semi-basement, it had a separate terrace with a view on to the park, and its windows overlooked a large cherry orchard. In the spring, that section of the park would be continuously covered with white blossom. Next to it, a beautiful lilac was in sweet-smelling f lower, and a fountain murmured. The owner of that luxurious place was a Russia-born doctor of chemistry, Meylekh Melamed, whose wife was my mother’s cousin. He was born in a shtetl, into the family of a poor melamed (religious teacher) who had nine children. When Meylekh turned thirteen, the barmitzvah boy left his home shtetl and moved from one place to another, doing various menial jobs to support himself while he was studying. In time, he passed the external examinations for the certificate of Russian secondary education and later graduated from the chemistry department at the Technische Höchschule in Zürich. Melamed’s teachers, including Professor Hermann Staudinger, known for his contribution to rubber chemistry, paid special attention to him as a hardworking and talented student. Under Staudinger’s supervision, and later independently, Melamed conducted research the results of which had practical applications. An owner of patents, Melamed became a

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multimillionaire, heading a big Swiss-German company. Despite his high position and numerous business commitments, he continued to conduct experiments in a little laboratory housed in an annexe to his villa. In the evenings he enjoyed sitting with my parents in our little kitchen, speaking Yiddish, listening to my father’s stories and songs, and eating my mother’s unpretentious Jewish dishes (in his villa, maids served lunch and dinner in the huge plush dining-room, decorated with Old Master paintings). I recall vividly the sympathetic image of that strong, warm person, and the specific smell of phenol resins that always emanated from him. It is quite possible that many years later his image inf luenced my own choice of profession. In the pleasant environment of Zehlendorf, my father worked easily and happily. He was forty-odd years old and, I believe, his creative activity had reached its peak. During that period, apart from writing stories, essays, and plays, he also contributed regularly to the American newspaper Forverts. His day was organized according to a religiously followed schedule. Every morning he would drink a cup of coffee, take his place at his desk, and work until two in the afternoon, completely cut off from the surrounding world. During these hours, no one was allowed to enter his study — there were no visitors, no telephone calls. Day after day he could revise and rewrite the same text. ‘Talent,’ he explained, ‘can’t produce anything on its own without working persistently and hard every day. In order to realize your talent, you need strict discipline, personal organization, and a relentlessly critical attitude to the results of your work.’ During his working hours, my father would smoke an endless number of cigarettes. He wrote in longhand with a dippingpen, and particularly loved the bamboo stick with a notch for a steel nib which the globetrotting Yiddish writer Peretz Hirshbeyn had brought him as a gift from south-east Asia. Later my father bought a typewriter and learned to type with two fingers. In the early 1920s, it was difficult to find a typewriter with Hebrew letters in Europe. If I am not mistaken, he ordered it from America. If my father was happy with a new text he had written, he sometimes called my mother and, when I grew up, also me, and read it aloud. On such days he was in a particularly good mood, joked a great deal at the table, and told us wonderful — sometimes funny and sometimes sad — Hasidic fairytales and stories about distinguished rabbis. Strict Jewish religious orthodoxy was alien to him, an essentially secular person. Yet his roots remained bound up with the Jewish religion and, it seems to me, he believed that praying had power. Whatever the case, in the early 1920s our family continued to follow some Jewish traditions: we kept the Sabbath, before which my mother would light candles and recite the blessing, and my parents celebrated all the major Jewish holy days, fasting on Tisha b’Av and Yom Kippur. On Kol nidre night and on Rosh ha-Shanah my father took me to synagogue. In his rich library he also kept religious books in Hebrew, and quite often he concentrated on reading them. He expressed admiration for the Jewish poets of the Spanish period, and maintained that the Song of Songs was the best love story in world literature. Among modern writers he particularly praised Chekhov and Flaubert. He would often re-read their works, explaining his reason for doing so: ‘Literature is a kind of craft: it needs skill, which one always has to master.’

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Yiddish was the only language spoken around our table and in our family generally. It was strictly forbidden to intermix German words. During the second half of the day, my father did not work. After lunch, he liked to take a nap on the sofa in his study. Usually he would put me, a five- or six-year-old boy, at his side, covered us both with a blanket, and would recount to me an episode from the Bible. He would narrate it so vividly, with such warmth and such humorous commentaries, that biblical heroes appeared before my eyes as if they were our contemporaries. Then I had to disappear and give my father a chance to rest. After the midday nap, he and my mother often went for a walk in the nearby forest, Grunewald. Sometimes he worked with her in the orchard, or stayed at home and played the fiddle. After dinner, he often read aloud one of the Yiddish classics, usually Sholem Aleichem, whom he admired. He read enthusiastically, demonstrating his theatrical skills, trying vocally to bring out the funny and sad sides of the narrative, the writer’s sentiments toward his unlucky characters. My mother and I were either convulsed with laughter or close to tears. In the early 1920s, my father often spent evenings in the Romanisches Café, which at that time was the favourite haunt of Berlin bohemians. Sitting around the café’s marble tables, people would drink coffee, smoke, and chat, but they would also read and write poems, create scripts for new films, and play chess, which in those days was my father’s favourite hobby. In the café he once played with the world champion, Emanuel Lasker. When my father accepted his inevitable defeat, he added that for him it had been an honour to be defeated by such a master. Lasker’s reply was: Meine Bescheidenheit erlaubt mir zu sagen, dass Sie Recht haben (‘My modesty allows me to say that you are right’). We often had guests, usually my father’s fellow writers. They cracked jokes, smoked, laughed loudly, and argued long-windedly with each other. Quite often they stayed for dinner, and sometimes they even lodged with us for a while. Many such guests were travelling from Eastern Europe to the United States (or in the opposite direction), and they made a stopover in Berlin in order to visit David Bergelson. Among the numerous Jewish cultural activists who visited us, I remember Hirsh-Dovid Nomberg, Bal-Makhshoves, Fishl Shneerson, David Einhorn, Avrom Reyzen, Abraham Kar, Joseph Opatoshu, Moshe Nadir, Peretz Hirshbeyn, David Hofshteyn, Zishe Weinper, Gina Medem, the composer Israel Glatstein, the artists Marc Chagall and Nathan Altman, the Habimah actors BenHaim and Rovina, and the German actor Alexander Granach. My father was particularly close to Daniel Charney, the journalist Shayke Klinov, and the social scientist Yakov Lestschinsky. His friendship with Lestschinsky began in Kiev, but later they had fierce ideological arguments and eventually their friendship came to an end: Lestschinsky was growing more and more right-wing, whereas Bergelson was moving to the left. Great festive celebrations were organized in our apartment when my parents welcomed Shloyme Mikhoels and Benjamin Zuskin, actors of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre that performed a season in Berlin during 1926–27. Both actors were excited with their company’s success. They remained my father’s friends until the last days of their life. Together they improvised various scenes, and my father

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FIG. 2.2. Tsiporah (Tsipe), wife of David and mother of Lev, Berlin, 1928

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read for them his new, unpublished work. They also discussed plans for future performances and convinced my father, who had no previous experience as a playwright, to write for the Moscow theatre a play based on his story ‘Der toyber’ (The deaf man). Among all these people, my father was the centre of attraction and the life and soul of the gathering. He was a source of specific energy and attraction even for those guests whose opinion did not coincide with his own or with whom he disagreed. If any guest’s work did not meet his high standards, he felt confident enough to voice his dissatisfaction openly. Sholem Asch, for example, was one of those who were obliged to listen to my father’s reproaches for writing vulgar and tasteless prose. For all that, my father was usually happy to receive guests. He liked to entertain people to dinner and sometimes cooked for them himself; on such occasions, I was used as a ‘kitchen boy’. An excellent storyteller and a great performer, my father remembered countless tales and anecdotes from Eastern European Jewish life, and his narrations would often end with the singing of Hasidic melodies. He travelled frequently, visiting countries in both Eastern and Western Europe, America, and, on several occasions, the Soviet Union. At the same time, he preferred staying at home and keeping to a regular working schedule. I think his journeys were stimulated by the desire to spend time in Yiddish-speaking environments. During his tours he met his readers, read his works to them, and communicated with people who came from many different walks of life. He would come back home full of new ideas, plans, and creative energy. During the late 1920s and early 1930s he gravitated more and more towards Jewish activists in the communist movement and some of them, perhaps fulfilling a Party assignment, tried to convince him to return to the Soviet Union. Under their inf luence, he developed a naïve belief in communist ideas and illusions. In addition, he was greatly impressed with the radical changes that the situation of Soviet Jews had undergone, and with their phenomenal achievements in all areas of life. As a result, he came to the conclusion that, whereas in other countries Yiddish was doomed to decline, the Soviet Union had created perfect conditions for the fuller and further development of Yiddish culture and education. There his works were published in large print runs, his plays were included in the repertoires of theatres, and his literary soirées attracted large audiences. Of course, he realized that his Soviet hosts did their best to embellish the reality, hiding from him the ugly sides of Soviet life, yet for all that, when he returned to Berlin he would be full of enthusiasm and even pride, excitedly describing the economically strong Jewish collective farms, the Jewish autonomous district where the official language was Yiddish, the significant contribution Jews were making to the country’s industrial development, and the ever-widening network of Yiddish cultural and educational centres which included colleges, departments at teachers’ training institutes, theatres, and publishing houses. Bergelson was a Yiddishist to the very marrow of his bones and he strongly believed that Eastern European Jews were entitled to have their own language and culture. Yet he had to admit, with a heavy heart and bitterness, that our dear, beautiful language was ultimately destined to die. It seemed to him that in the Soviet

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Union Yiddish could survive longer than in other countries. Although he disliked the conspicuously negative sides of the Soviet regime, he ascribed them to Russia’s backwardness and her low level of culture and limited consciousness of individual rights, arguing that these disadvantages would be overcome in due course. As a result of such shifts in my father’s outlook, his circle of friends changed a good deal. Changes came about also in the life of our family. Significantly, my father no longer contributed to the anti-Soviet and anti-communist American newspaper Forverts, which used to pay him sizeable honoraria, with the result that we did not have enough money. If in the early 1920s my mother had only been responsible for running our household and helping my father with secretarial chores, by the end of the decade, as a result of our financial hardship, she had to learn to type and take shorthand in Russian and German in order to get a job, which she found at the Soviet Trade Delegation. In the meantime, the nature of my father’s writing was changing too. After the Nazis seized power we could no longer stay in Germany and were again forced to emigrate — this time to Copenhagen, Denmark. There we settled for some time, but in 1934 we returned to the Soviet Union, thus opening a new chapter in the life and creative work of David Bergelson. Translated from the Russian by Gennady Estraikh

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CHAPTER 3

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Language and Style in Nokh alemen (1913): Bergelson’s Debt to Flaubert Daniela Mantovan In the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, literary Yiddish underwent enormous changes even while the ‘classic’ Yiddish writers, Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and Y.-L. Peretz, were still highly productive. While these founders were still creating a literary ‘tradition’ from the Yiddish vernacular, new forms of literary expression, ref lecting a modern, more sophisticated sensibility, were being shaped by a younger generation of writers intent on expanding the range and expressive possibilities of the Yiddish language. They were determined to connect it to the mainstream of contemporary European culture by deploying a multiplicity of new forms, no one more energetically than Bergelson, who devoted his talent to the crafting of a wholly new style of Yiddish prose. Bergelson’s innovative experiments have been viewed from different perspectives. In a critical study published in New York in 1946, Nakhmen Mayzel, among the most active Yiddish literary critics, publishers, and journalists in the first two decades of the twentieth century and one of Bergelson’s closest personal friends, gave some insights into the dynamics of Bergelson’s creative process. Every novel, every short story — writes Mayzel1 — was conceived, generated, and finally born at the end of a long process of inner growth. Mayzel’s attempt to pinpoint this creative mode accurately ref lects Bergelson’s own conception of the way he worked. In an early letter to the literary critic, Shmuel Niger, dated 8 July 1910, Bergelson wrote: Shraybn, shrayb ikh azoy: tsum onheyb vert geboyrn di shtimung fun der dertseylung mitn hoypttip (der letster kimat ale mol nit in gantsn klor) un virkt azoy af der neshome, az s’iz poshet ummeglekh ibertsutrogn. Aza modne benkshaft vert mit ot der shtimung geboyrn tsu yenem eygnartikn kolorit fun der velt, velkhe trogt zikh arum dem hoypttip un in der shtimung. Mayn gantser tsil iz shoyn nokh dem nor af aroyszugebn ot di shtimung tsusamengebundn mitn lebn un mit di gesheenishn, velkhe kumen for arum im un (oyb s’iz azoy meglekh tsu zogn) in im. [...] Yede dertseylung hot a bazundere shtimung un dermon ikh zikh nor in eyner fun zey, azoy bahersht mikh bald ir opgezunderte shtimung un git mir tsu filn dos lebn andersh, gor andersh vi s’git mir tsu filn di shtimung fun der tsveyter dertseylung.2 [I write in this way: first to be born is the atmosphere of the story, together with its main character (though the latter is almost always not wholly defined),

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DANIELA MANTOVAN and this exerts such an inf luence on the soul that it is almost impossible to convey. Together with this atmosphere, such a strange longing comes into being for every nuance peculiar to the world transmitted by the chief character and by this atmosphere. Thereafter, my entire aim is to give expression to this atmosphere, together with the life and the occurrences that take place around and (if it is possible to say this) within it. [...] Every story has its own specific atmosphere, and I need only be reminded of one such for me to be immediately possessed by its unique mood and made to feel life in a different way, in a wholly different way from the atmosphere of some other story.]

Yekhiel Hofer, reporting this letter, shows how this approach is evident in Bergelson’s early work, from ‘Arum vokzal’ (At the depot), his first publication in 1909, to Mides-hadin (The full severity of the law), his third novel written between 1924 and 1926 and first published in book form in 1929. This time-frame, generally regarded as the most innovative, modernistic period in Bergelson’s literary oeuvre, is the one from which my present considerations are drawn. Far from the overf lowing volubility of a language deeply rooted in orality and typical of the work of many early Yiddish writers, notably that of Sholem Aleichem, Bergelson’s literary Yiddish is rarefied, artificial, remote; even, at times, archaic. It prompted critics to complain that it was ‘artificial’ because no living person had ever spoken it. Yet this calculated disparagement was actually unintended praise. At the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Yiddish literature was concerned with language in a way that had not been significant previously. An oral mode of communication which had served innumerable useful purposes for many centuries past was now becoming a consciously written literary language. Where a native speaker of Yiddish might use it as a primary means of communicating immediate, quotidian content, a writer, by contrast, would now regard it as a tool to be crafted and shaped into a unique mode of literary expression. Such language is not given, in the sense that it is ‘given’ to every one of its native speakers, but is rather ref lected upon, and therefore re-created. This act of ‘rethinking language’, of seeing it as raw material demanding the effort of moulding to express a written content, is a transformational process that moves language from subconscious, or ‘native’ use, to conscious, literary use. This has taken place conspicuously and in varying degrees in every written, modern, literary language. Yiddish had suffered a long history of misconception, marginalization, and subordination both to Hebrew and to the co-territorial languages of the Ashkenazi diaspora right up until the period of the Haskalah. As is well known, from the second half of the nineteenth century, when ideological premises permitted and even encouraged the publication of Yiddish, at least for didactic purposes, all major Yiddish writers wrestled with the difficulty of employing their native tongue to create literary fiction.3 As a number of studies have demonstrated, the transition to a new understanding and acceptance of Yiddish as a literary language was tortuous and tormented; none the less, it was one of the greatest achievements of its practitioners at the beginning of the twentieth century.4 In this light, the seemingly disparaging observation that Bergelson’s Yiddish was not ‘spoken’ is quite true; it was, in fact, an eminently literary language and as such, it was a novum in modern Yiddish literature. Furthermore, the assertion ‘nobody ever spoke it’,

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implying a naïve equation between spoken and literary language, tells us precisely what the habits and expectations of Yiddish readers were when Bergelson’s work was first published. Bergelson’s efforts to avoid the orality of the ‘spoken language’ of so major a writer as Sholem Aleichem was certainly not due to his negative evaluation of his work. On the contrary, about Bergelson’s later novel Baym Dnyepr (1932–36), the Soviet literary critic Hirsh Remenik observed: ‘Bergelson’s style in Baym Dnyepr synthesizes Sholem Aleichem folk language with the terseness of his own artistic language until the revolution’.5 Noteworthy in Remenik’s remark is the polarity he sets up between folks-shprakh and kinstlerisher shprakh, which is best rendered as a distinction between ‘vernacular’ and ‘literary’ language, and Bergelson’s acceptance of Sholem Aleichem, the master of the folks-shprakh, as a model for his later work. Evidently Sholem Aleichem, the most mimetic writer in modern Yiddish literature, deeply immersed in the vernacular which he brilliantly rendered in all its multi-layered heterogeneity, was for Bergelson the representative ne plus ultra of a literary language still steaming with orality and unref lected — hence unabated — liveliness. As a kind of Rabelaisian ‘mouthpiece’ for Jewish popular culture, Sholem Aleichem’s work was the antipode of Bergelson’s conception of literature and of literary language. Bergelson’s leap into the modern, bourgeois world demanded a total reversal: his was the task of cooling down, clearing up, and purifying language, turning spontaneous liveliness into psychic introspection, abandoning popular culture to focus on the life of individuals. He thus fathered a new conception of literature and became a reference point for an entire generation of modern Yiddish writers. In the years during which Bergelson was starting his remarkable career, literary Yiddish was mutating in an astounding way. The efforts of young Yiddish writers, exploring the possibilities of their language, to shape complex literary structures into new patterns are best illustrated in the work of the so-called Kiev Group, of which Bergelson was a charismatic leader. Among the most active laboratories of Yiddish modernism, this group’s activity is seen to best advantage in its two anthologies, Eygns and Oyfgang, published in Kiev between 1918 and 1920, which assembled some of the most recent work of the newest Yiddish poets and prose writers of the time. Even Bergelson, himself a radical innovator, was occasionally surprised by the originality of some of their literary experiments. On the literary Yiddish of the symbolist writer Der Nister, for example, he commented in another letter to Niger: Nisters ‘Zibn pastekher’ (geshribn in vayse ferzn) akhuts di kaprizn fun der shprakh (der yung iz osed litoyl es hadin mit dem vos er makht di shprakh far a goyishe) iz zi shtark originel; s’iz beemes a sheynkayt vos treft zikh zeltn, zeltn. [Nister’s ‘Zibn pastekher [Seven Shepherds] (written in free verse), apart from the eccentricities of his language (this young man deserves to be punished before a tribunal, for he turns Yiddish into a non-Jewish language), is a very original composition: indeed, it is a beauty to be found only very rarely.] 6

If the Yiddish language was being turned into a sophisticated literary tool at this

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time, its readers were also growing more discriminating. Traditional shtetl society had been mirrored, often in didactic terms, in the work of the klasiker, and had been crudely painted and sharply criticized in numerous late nineteenth-century ‘low’ satires. The early twentieth century, with its substantial social changes — chief ly the rise of a mobile, educated Jewish bourgeoisie open to modern ideologies and lifestyles — required new modes of literary expression. The innovative character of Bergelson’s prose, and the acclaim with which it was received, is best measured by the popularity of his novel Nokh alemen (When all is said and done), which, Mayzel noted, ‘was in 1913–14 the most intimate and touching novel for young people whose mother tongue was Yiddish’.7 Bergelson’s sober, elegant prose, the rigorous structure of his language, and the complexity of his style, marked a radical new development, particularly by comparison with the Yiddish writing that had preceded it. Its exceptional artistry was complemented by Bergelson’s radically modern conception of the literary métier and his wide-ranging literary background, informed by a striking familiarity with mainstream European modernism. By this time, to write in Yiddish was no longer an act of literary charity on the part of intellectuals patronizingly utilizing the language of the unlearned to instruct and entertain an uncultured public. Bergelson and his dedicated contemporaries, like their European colleagues, conceived their literary work as a vocation.8 This new stance not only posed problems of technique but also, and to a wider extent, confronted the writer with a conscious difficulty of his own making. The Yiddish writer of the second half of the nineteenth century was steeped in traditional learning and only partially aware of non-Jewish European culture. By contrast, the new generation had access to Hebrew and Yiddish translations of European literature; very often they could read Russian and German f luently for themselves, and their reading background included philosophy, Oriental religion, and emergent new sciences like psychology. In his early narratives like ‘Der toyber’ (1906) and ‘Arum vokzal’ (1909), Bergelson concentrated on describing a decaying Jewish reality. This seemingly naturalistic depiction gradually developed into a multi-layered narrative technique that went beyond the limits of what the nineteenth century had established as the norm for traditional, formally structured plot delineation, a process of detachment fully accomplished in Nokh alemen (1913), generally accepted as the first truly modern Yiddish novel. As will be shown, many different elements in this central work strongly support the hypothesis that a major inf luence on its conception and execution was Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), the first European novel to break all the traditional classical rules. While it is doubtful that Bergelson read French, Madame Bovary appeared in Russian translation in 1858, only one year after its initial publication, and so would have been readily accessible — and extraordinarily exciting — to a voracious reader like Bergelson. From a formal point of view, the chief, and certainly the most obvious, debt to Flaubert can be seen in Bergelson’s use of the so-called style indirect libre, generally regarded as Flaubert’s most important stylistic achievement.9 This new mode of expression subverted and blurred the most fundamental distinction in narrative, that which keeps separate and distinct the discourse of the narrator from the discourse of

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the character. In diverse modern European narratives, even though the voice of the narrator — or of the author, or of both, if they coincide — can be heard in a host of characters, the discrete voices of narrator and character are generally kept strictly apart in the narrative f low through the introduction of dialogues which represent, as it were, ‘direct’ speech, or what must be taken as the ‘truthful’ utterances of the character speaking. Flaubert, however, questioned the ‘truth’ value of dialogues and treated them instead as signs of an underlying emotional condition and of the psychological disposition of each individual character, rather than as a direct expression of it. As Claudine Gothot-Mersch has noted, What is important is not what is in full sight — the utterances of the characters — but the emotion underlying the banal dialogue, of which the dialogue becomes a witness; in the same manner, objects, even the most modest ones, become bearers of meaning.10

The following dialogue, between Léon and Emma, is an example of this kind: Alors ils se racontèrent les petits événements de cette existence lointaine, dont ils venaient de résumer, par un seul mot, les plaisirs et les mélancolies. Il se rappelait le berceau de clématite, les robes qu’elle avait portées, les meubles des sa chambre, toute sa maison. — Et nos pauvres cactus, où sont-ils? — Le froid les a tués cet hiver. — Ah! que j’ai pensé à eux, savez-vous? Souvent je les revoyais comme autrefois, quand, par les matins d’été, le soleil frappait sur les jalousies ... et j’apercevais vos deux bras nus qui passaient entre les f leurs. (Part 3: Chapter 1; 240) [Then they went over all the trif ling events of that far-off existence, whose joys and sorrows they had just summed up in one word. They recalled the arbour with clematis, the dresses she had worn, the furniture of her room, the whole of her house. — And our poor cactuses, where are they? — The cold killed them this winter. — Ah! how I have thought of them, do you know? I often saw them again as of yore, when on the summer mornings the sun beat down upon your blinds ... and I saw your two bare arms passing out amongst the f lowers.] (E 166)11

This conventional dialogue on a marginal aspect of homely domestic life is the ‘descriptive’ surface of an emotional exchange introduced, in this case, by the narrator and functioning through the common recollection of objects. Flaubert’s psychological approach to dialogue is simultaneously impersonal and, as has just been shown, descriptive. The French author has emphasized the necessity of ‘depicting through dialogue’ or, in other words, of characterizing fictional personages through their own utterances. Gothot-Mersch remarks on this point: ‘Depicting characters, emphasizing situations, dialogue, maintains Flaubert, must be treated in the manner of a description [...] because, in fact, it is description’ (F lii). The ‘descriptive’ dialogue, so far from moving the action forward, seems only to ref lect the inner reality of the character. This new conception and its concomitant deployment of dialogue differ profoundly from the method of Balzac, for example, or of many other writers who considered dialogue mainly as a form of action,

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a means of producing events and advancing the plot. Flaubert’s dialogues reveal nothing but the psyche of the speaker. As a consequence, to enliven the plot and develop his story, he sees the necessity of introducing variety in his presentation of dialogue. Gothot-Mersch goes back to Flaubert’s intention to introduce ‘successive levels, gradations, halftones’ in dialogue using the indirect. But as soon as the question of indirect is posed, we are confronted with something imprecise since, as Gothot-Mersch remarks, using examples from Flaubert’s notes, ‘Flaubert calls “indirect” everything which is not “direct” — the narrative discourse as well as the indirect style and the indirect libre’.12 This includes the authorial narrative as well as the indirect speech of the characters, and a mixture of both: the indirect libre. Through the indirect libre, the author combines an impersonal objective style (that of the author) with one that is subjective (that of the character speaking), without renouncing the impersonality of the enunciation given by the use of the third person. Unlike the direct style, which reproduces what the reader is meant to accept as the actual words spoken by every given character, the indirect style does not necessarily offer this. Instead, it builds gradual levels that create structured variety and ambiguity in the text. Flaubert often uses the indirect libre in conjunction with direct speech and narrative authorial discourse. Even if his theory lacks a precise definition, the following passage — an earlier piece of the same dialogue between Emma and Léon cited above — illustrates the complexity and subtlety of his praxis: — J’aimerais beaucoup, dit-elle, à être une religieuse d’hôpital. — Hélas! répliqua-t-il, les hommes n’ont point de ces missions saintes, et je ne vois nulle part aucun métier... à moins peut-être que celui de médecin... Avec un haussement léger de ses épaules, Emma l’interrompit pour se plaindre de sa maladie où elle avait manqué mourir; quel dommage! elle ne souffrirait plus maintenant. Léon tout de suite envia le calme du tombeau, et même, un soir, il avait écrit son testament en recommandant qu’on l’ensevelît dans ce beau couvre-pied, à bandes de velours, qu’il tenait d’elle; car c’est ainsi qu’ils auraient voulu avoir été, l’un et l’autre se faisant un idéal sur lequel ils ajustaient à présent leur vie passée. D’ailleurs, la parole est un laminoir qui allonge toujours les sentiments. (Part 3: Chapter 1; 239) [— I should much like, she said, to be nurse at a hospital. — Alas! he replied, men have none of these holy missions, and I see nowhere any calling... unless perhaps that of a doctor... With a slight shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted him to speak of her illness, which had almost killed her; what a pity! She should not be suffering now. Léon at once envied ‘the calm of the tomb’, and one evening he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug [foot-coverlet] with velvet stripes he had received from her; for this was how they would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now adapting their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.] (E 165)

From direct speech, the f low of narrative discourse intermingles with the indirect style (avec un[...]), indirect libre (quel dommage![...]), indirect style once more (Léon tout de suite[...]), authorial descriptive narrative (car c’est ainsi qu’ils auraient[...]), and possibly an intentional authorial statement (D’ailleurs, la parole[...]). Minimal

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deviations, such as present tense (in direct speech, indirect libre, and in the authorial statement), past tense (in indirect style), change of pronouns from the first (direct speech) to the third person singular (in the indirect style and the indirect libre), and to the third person plural in the authorial narrative, cause a slight but continuous change of perspective. The complex alternation of the voices of characters and author is rendered by nuanced, though ambivalent, indirect forms in which this distinction is blurred.13 Apart from other considerations regarding Flaubert’s techniques, some of which are designed to create ‘relief ’ in the narrative fabric through the use of italics or quotation marks, thus implying different shades of truthfulness in respect of the discourse of the characters, what is important for the argument of this chapter is the extent to which the novelty of Flaubert’s style, and the inferences we can draw from these brief ref lections about them, exerted a significant inf luence on Bergelson’s emerging style as a novelist. As though serving as an introduction to the novel as a whole, the opening sentence of Bergelson’s Nokh alemen synthesizes the main motives and stylistic features of the narrative that will follow: Gantse fir yor hot zikh tsvishn zey getsoygn der heymisher kleynshtetldiker shidekh, un geendikt hot er zikh ot vi azoy: Zi, R. Gedalye Hurvitses bas-yekhide, Mirele, hot im sof kl-sof di tnoim opgeshikt un aleyn vider ongehoybn arumshpatsirn mitn krumen student Lipkis.14 [The local, small-town match dragged on all of four years and ended as follows: The bride, Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s only daughter Mirele, finally sent the engagement contract back to the groom and herself began to keep company once again with the lame student Lipkis.]15

These four lines brief ly and pointedly summarize the preceding four years and introduce the main thread of the novel: a difficult relationship, one that hot zikh getsoygn, had ‘dragged on’, has ended. The alliteration in the first line creates a strident sibilance to underscore the end of a sentimental bond. A fuller analysis of this sentence evidences, on different levels, the threads of Bergelson’s writing’s fabric. The provincial environment of the story — one which in Flaubert’s novel was declared in the subtitle itself — Madame Bovary: Moeurs de Province [Provincial Customs] — is here encapsulated in two adjectives, heymisher, ‘domestic’ or ‘familiar’, and kleynshtetldik, ‘provincial’. The traditional shtetl society in which the action is played out is evoked not only through the Jewish language (Yiddish) in which the novel is written, but also through such Hebrew-derived nouns, always employed in the context of important Jewish rites de passage like marriage, as shidekh, bas-yekhide, tnoim, and the personal name Reb [R.] Gedalye Hurvits. These words refer both to objective data — match, only daughter, engagement contract — and to a far wider cultural semantic sphere. Thus a shtetl is not simply a small market town but one populated chief ly by Jews; a shidekh is a traditionally arranged marriage, which requires the involvement of a shatkhn, a professional matchmaker; a bas-yekhide defines not simply an only daughter but one encompassed, mutatis mutandis, by the American expression ‘Jewish princess’;

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tnoim denotes a traditional form of engagement contract in which the parents of the prospective bride and groom bind themselves to a detailed agreement on the financial support they will give to the couple, and for how long. The time-frame within which the action of the novel plays itself out is kept open. The action proper began four years before the narration commences, while the ending of the sentence, vider ongehoybn arumshpatsirn, creates through the use of the word vider, ‘again’, a sense of the indefinite repetition of an action started long before. The slow, sticky motion of passing time is indicated by phrases denoting languor, like getsoygn, ‘dragged out’, sofkl-sof, ‘eventually’, and gantse fir yor, ‘fully four years’. In a manner strikingly reminiscent of Flaubert’s technique in Madame Bovary,16 Bergelson’s treatment of time in the novel seems to ref lect the need to create a psychological rather then a chronological sequence.17 The opening of the novel’s final chapter, for instance, offers another example of a vague approximation of time: eynmol in a vokhedikn donershtik, ven ir gebeyn iz shoyn lang oyfn vokzal nisht geven (Y 377), ‘Once, on an ordinary Thursday, when even a trace of her was no longer at the station’ (E 302). Through the echoes of such words as eynmol, shoyn lang, and nisht geven, the narrative hints at an indefinite time of remembrances long past. Bergelson is manifestly not concerned with a realistic chronology; the passing of time is ref lected only through religious rituals or in suggestive atmospheres. With her fiancé finally rejected, Mirele’s psychological makeup is established by means of indirect allusions: her reluctance to speak is manifested in the action of returning the engagement contract via an intermediary; her indolent indecision through the inordinate lapse of time (four years) through which her relationship has ‘dragged on’; her aimlessness by pointless ‘promenading’; her need of suitors by immediately replacing her former fiancé with ‘the lame student’; and her selfcentredness through her manipulative use of Lipkis both before and after her betrothal. She is defined as the ‘only daughter’, a condition of some privilege, of Reb Gedalye Hurvits, a man of some status. The lame student , by contrast, is set up as an inferior through glancing reference to his disability and his poverty, and to his need for recognition, however patronizing, which manifests itself in his readiness to serve Mirele ‘again’ as a companion as soon as she demands it.18 Her rejected fiancé is rendered virtually faceless through use of the third-person pronouns zey, ‘they’, and im, he/him, and is thus established as an irrelevance in Mirele’s life. Bergelson’s sophisticated stylistic allusiveness is further apparent in his intentional use of the word aleyn in the phrase aleyn vider ongehoybn arumshpatsirn. This word, unnecessary from a grammatical point of view, plays subtly with the double meaning of ‘alone’ and ‘she herself ’ and widens its semantic echoes to include, indirectly, a glancing reference to Mirele’s psychological and emotional state, an exploration of which is the major burden of the whole novel. Overall, the narrative voice is wholly impersonal, seemingly imparting factual information ironically trivialized into unimportant, provincial gossip. The opening sentence is an astonishing concentrate of Bergelson’s precise yet proleptic style. It opens the novel by introducing the end of one sentimental relationship, thus anticipating, through indirect reference, its closing, which posits the end of the possibility of relationships altogether. In this way it produces the

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impression of circularity, and of movement defined not as a progress, but as an accumulation of events. Here Bergelson displays some of the main traits of his style: extreme conciseness of expression combined with a refined sense of musicality; light irony coupled with an ability to suggest an entire world merely through the associations evoked by semantically related words. His first sentence perfectly mirrors Flaubert’s conception of an objective, impersonal narrative technique serving a lucid, psychological analysis of passions. In Nokh alemen, the indirect style is used in a macroscopic, all-encompassing way as if, some fifty years later, the Yiddish author had not only absorbed but also broadened Flaubert’s lesson. On the novel’s first page, immediately following a physical description of the father of Velvl Burnes, the rejected fiancé, the older man’s thoughts are presented in the form of indirect libre: [er hot] getrakht vegn zayne groyse dray posesyes un vegn dem, vos es past efsher nisht far im, er zol dermonen di opgeshikte tnoim mitn nomen fun zayn gevezenem mekhutn. (Y 95) [[He] thought of his three large estates and ref lected that it was perhaps not proper for him to mention the returned engagement contract along with the name of his former mekhutn [relative-in-law].] (E 3 adapted)

Here, description of an individual slides into a presentation of that individual’s thoughts expressed in the third person in a manner no different from the method of Madame Bovary: Il en coûtait à Charles d’abandonner Tostes après quatre ans de séjour et au moment où il commençait à s’y poser. S’il le fallait, cependant! (Part 1: Chapter 9; 69) [It cost Charles much to give up Tostes after living there four years and ‘when he was beginning to get on there’. Yet if it must be!] (E 46)

Bergelson’s narrator then presents Velvl’s mother: zi hot zikh derbay [baym sheltn] gehaltn in eyn shoklen un in eyn raybn eynem a revmatizm-fus un zikh shtil un farklert geklogt: — Got veys, tsi zi vet shoyn ir zuns khupe derlebn. (Y 96) [[While cursing] she kept on shaking and rubbing one of her rheumatic legs and quietly and pensively complained: — God knows whether she will ever live to see her son’s wedding ceremony.] (E 3–4)

A moment of double irritation, manifested in her actions of raybn a revmatizmfus, ‘rubbing her rheumatic leg’ and gesholtn di gevezene kale tsuzamen mitn vistn Maryenbad, ‘cursing the former bride, along with dismal Marienbad’, is followed by the melancholic thought, ‘God knows whether she will ever live to see her son’s wedding ceremony’. Typographically, a direct-speech mark precedes the words of Velvl’s mother, which would normally lead the reader to expect it to introduce a passage of direct speech in the first person. Instead, the thought is given in the third person. The stylistic difference employed in rendering the thoughts of Velvl’s father and those of his mother stems from a minimal rhetorical device — in this case, a silent exclamation instead of a f low of words. A few lines later, however, a passage

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of plain direct speech from Velvl’s mother is introduced in exactly the same way: Zi hot zikh shoyn mer nisht gekont aynhaltn, aroysgerukt dem kop in droysn un hot ir nokhgeshrien oyfn heyzerikn un kurtsotemdikn kol: — Er iz dokh shoyn a kaptsn, bay im blayb es, der tate irer, vos-zhe huliet zi nokh, vi a hunt oyfn shtrik, ot-ot-di-o!? (Y 96) [She could no longer restrain herself, thrust her head out, and shouted after her in a hoarse and short-breathed voice: — He is already a beggar — may he remain so — that father of hers. Why, then, is she still carrying on like a dog on a leash, this — this one?] (E 4)

From the way this exclamation is introduced in the preceding sentence, this is undoubtedly an instance of a direct speech. However, both the earlier silent exclamation and the subsequent shouted abuse by Velvl’s mother are introduced by the same typographical marks. In this way, Bergelson effaces all visible signs differentiating thought from speech, vocal utterance from unexpressed ref lection. From the novel’s first few pages, the reader is steadily drawn into an indefinite narrative space in which the boundaries between the narrator’s voice, the direct speech of a character, and that character’s unexpressed thoughts are f luid, at times imperceptible, or entirely non-existent. Interestingly, whereas Flaubert employs a number of typographical signs such as italics and inverted commas to express a nuanced closeness to direct speech — in other words, deepening the texture of his writing to different degrees of verisimilitude — Bergelson seems to use an opposite procedure; erasing the significance of the typographical mark as an introduction to direct speech, he implies the equation of all kinds of discourse in his novel. Direct and indirect speech, unexpressed thoughts, narrative passages, all create infinite possibilities of significance, precisely because they are on the same level of verisimilitude. In the novel’s first few pages, the family of Mirele’s rejected fiancé is introduced, and Velvl is described in relation first to his father and then to his mother. In the following brief passage of direct speech, we find an unexpected explanation for the use of the indirect third person, justified by the narrative voice as a sign of uneasiness and respect: Un der muter hot er do gevolt opgebn punkt dem zelbn koved, vos m’git muters op bay yene pritsim, vos hobn arum zayn folvark eygene un gedungene giter gehat. Er iz geshtanen far ir di gantse tsayt oyf di fis, ir nisht gekont zogn nisht ‘du’ un nisht ‘ir’, un derfar geredt tsu ir beloshn nister: — Efsher vet di mame tey trinken? Efsher vet zikh di mame oyfn bet tsuleygn? (Y 97) [Here, in the village, he wished to give his mother precisely the same respect that mothers were accorded at the homes of those squires who had their own or leased estates near his farm. He always stood in her presence, could not address her either as ‘you’ or ‘thou’ and, therefore, spoke to her in an oblique manner: — Perhaps Mother will drink some tea? Perhaps Mother will lie down on the bed?] (E 4–5 adapted)

Velvl’s manner of addressing his mother is somewhat constrained. He does not employ the formal ir which is the traditionally respectful mode of address to older

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people and, sometimes, to parents, and he avoids the familiar du. Avoiding pronouns altogether, he reverts to the appellative mame preceded by the definite article di and followed by the verb in the third person. This distinctive mode of expression replicates a highly formal, old-fashioned register in Russian and Polish, employed by commoners to address aristocrats or people of high rank. Generally preceded by a title, it usually includes indirect speech in the third person. Velvl deliberately mimics this kind of deferential, impersonal mode of address to his mother, but since he and his family are not aristocrats, his distanced speech is rendered pretentious and slightly ridiculous, revealing at the same time his uncertainty about his own social status. He stif les his natural feelings of infuriation at his mother’s uncouth remarks about Mirele under a veneer of forced decorum: Un nor demolt, ven klogndik [...] hot zi do genumen sheltn [...] hot er an umtsufridenem un etvos farkrimtn ponem bakumen un oyf ir ongeshrien beyz un laytish, vi beyz un laytish er f legt oyf ir onshrayen dortn baym foter in shtub: — Sha! Sha! Kuk zi nor on! (Y 97) [Only when, complaining [...] she began cursing [...] did his face become displeased and somewhat contorted. He rebuked her angrily but genteelly, as angrily and genteelly as he used to rebuke her in his father’s house: — Sh! Sh! Just look at her!] (E 5)

Since she inhabits the materialistic world of arrivistes, Velvl’s mother defines herself only in terms of money. Despite her plebeian manners, therefore, as the wife of a rich man she has no doubt about her own status in the community. Her son, however, aspires to acceptance into a higher social class as man of refinement, so he strives after behaviour that appears laytish, ‘genteel’ or ‘respectable’. His natural inclination to shout when displeased, and his ongoing efforts to control it, however, reveals his parvenu upbringing.19 Since indirectness is an all-encompassing compositional principle of the novel, the attentive reader is thus momentarily baff led here by a narrative intervention that goes out of its way to explain, in the first few pages, why Velvl addresses his mother in this convoluted, impersonal manner. Manifestly this fulsome explanation is not an instance of clarifying indirect speech but, on the contrary, an ironic characterization of Velvl himself. Bergelson was surely aware of the difficulty posed for his original Yiddish readers in distinguishing between the indirect style and an indirect address that highlights an important facet of the character’s inner life. Consequently he provides clues, underlining, as it were, the incongruity of what Velvl says in relation to the tone in which he says it. To make sure that the reader gets the point, he repeats the same scene three times. Bergelson’s innovative style undoubtedly placed a marked strain on the reader of Yiddish, used to the prose of contemporary authors like Sholem Aleichem whose literary Yiddish overf lows with the unrestrained vocality and the lively, sonorous gestures of the vernacular.20 By contrast, Bergelson demands from his reader continuous concentration on language that is at times difficult and alienating. In Nokh alemen, even direct speech, as presented in dialogue, becomes another instance of indirectness and ambiguity and therefore another potential area of confusion for the reader. The following conversation between Reb Gedalye,

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returning from the city having bought himself a new hat, and his wife Gitele, illustrates the point: Gitele iz denstmol mit ot dem hitl azoy nisht tsufridn geven. — Er klaybt zikh aleyn tsu a hitl, hot zi getaynet, un bamerkt nisht, az s’falt im ariber biz di oyern? Un bay im, dem tsetrogenem kop, hot denstmol a shmeykhl geton nisht mer, vi di ongeshtrengte shpitsike noz: — Gitele meynt, az der kop iz bay im dentstmol geven in krayz-shtot? Der kop iz bay im dentstmol geven in der heym. (Y 119) [Gitele at that time was not too pleased with this cap. — Does he himself pick out a cap — she argued — and not notice that it falls down on his head below his ears? And the man with the distraught mind then f lashed a smile only, as it were, with the tip of his nose. — Does Gitele think his head was in the county seat [provincial capital] at that time? His head was at home at that time.] (E 29)

A moment of direct speech between husband and wife is turned into indirect speech because both speakers use the third person. Instead of a dialogue, therefore, we have here two people speaking without any direct interlocutor. In and of itself, were this scene and the dialogue of which it is composed to be rendered in the conventional second person — with the use of the first person in Reb Gedalye’s case — it would simply dramatize a marginal tiff between two partners in a long-established marriage. Bergelson, however, through his use of the estranging indirect style, is able to make it emblematic of physically perceptible aloofness and alienation. Gitele’s words are not directed at anybody in particular; they seem to f loat in the air, for in reality she has no partner to whom to talk. Reb Gedalye’s weariness and confusion are evident in an excuse that is simultaneously ridiculous and tragic. The phrase der kop iz bay im dentstmol geven in der heym, ‘at that time, his head was here, at home’, becomes a metonym expanding in different directions: his ‘head’ simultaneously represents his personal physical presence and his thoughts, which remain at ‘home’, figuratively representing his family or literally defining the dwelling he has always occupied with his wife. These porous boundaries of utterance leave the reader in an indefinite space, slipping in and out of the characters’ subjective perceptions of reality. At the same time, the number of possibilities opened up by this mode of writing seems to increase the characters’ sense of isolation. The ‘atrophy of the person’ shut up in a situation without release, as it has been described,21 is a major characteristic of the novel. Even the term ‘dialogue’, when applied to verbal exchanges between the characters, is imprecise, if we take ‘dialogue’ to denote a colloquy between two or more persons.22 In this light, lexical items and phraseology acquire a different function: they divide; they cut up discourse and create an ‘intermission’, a void. Paradoxically, language no longer conveys meaning, but loss of meaning. Silence, like indirectness, is a stylistic device that Bergelson employs to great effect in exposing emptiness, uncertainty, and a deep-seated incapacity to express feelings: Er [Lipkis] hot zikh take in yener tsayt gefilt lebn ir moyredik shlekht un keyn diburim in moyl nisht gehat. (Y 121)

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[Indeed, at that time he [Lipkis] felt terribly bad near her and had no words in his mouth.] (E 30)

Fragmentary conversations underscored by descriptive yet impersonal notations add to the progressively growing silence in which the narrative unfolds. Not surprisingly, one notices a high frequency of adjectives and phrases denoting a lowered, and at times barely audible, tone of voice, so there is repeated use of the word shtil, ‘silent’. Other illustrations include such remarks as ire oyern hobn shoyn nisht gehert dos shtile sheptshn fun ire eygene lipn (145), ‘her ears no longer heard the silent murmuring of her own lips’, or Reb Gedalye [...] hot gezogt vegn Shmulikn shtil glaykh er volt moyre hobn, emetser zol unterhern (231), ‘Reb Gedalye [...] quietly remarked about Shmulik, as though he feared to be overheard’. Manifest silence itself, as demonstrated by Mirele’s mother, becomes meaningful, dense with connotations: di shvaygndike Gitele hot zikh keyn rir af der kanape nisht geton (152), ‘Gitele, silent, sat motionless on the sofa’; der iker, vos zi, di mame ire, shmeykhlt un shvaygt, vi emetsn oyf tselokhes (153), ‘particularly because her mother would smile and keep silent, as though to spite someone’; Gitele hot beshas-mayse a giftik shtile tayne fun an ekshnte, a shvaygerin, gehat (156–57), ‘Meanwhile, Gitele exhibited the malignant, silent reproach of a constitutionally stubborn and uncommunicative person’. Gitele’s inner atrophy is realized through an absolute renunciation of language; she communicates chief ly through a sounding silence that does not contemplate the possibility of interlocutory responses, leaving others isolated in feelings of inadequacy. In the final chapter of the novel, following Mirele’s disappearance, Bergelson presents an environment steeped in melancholic silence: In aynfor-hoyz zenen ale khadorim geven leydik, un keyn hayzer zenen noent nisht geven; hot zikh a shtile pustkeyt arum-un-arum tsu im in tsimer getsoygn, un di minutn zenen geven lenger un fartrakhter, vi in der heym. (377) [At the inn all the rooms were vacant, and there were no houses nearby. From all around, a silent emptiness drifted into the room towards him, and the minutes were longer and more drawn out than at home.]

Landscapes, interiors, and moods seem to partake of a single, unique mood of loss and silent emptiness; in a marked departure from Flaubert’s practice, Bergelson invests inanimate objects with a peculiar anthropomorphic quality: in veldl iz geven shtil. [...] un di shtile beymer hobn epes gevust (377), ‘the little wood was silent. [...] and the silent trees knew something’. Anthropomorphic descriptions, as well as the animalization of objects, and the merging of both, are repeatedly present in the novel, as in the following striking example, where a silent, dormant landscape conceals a restrained but furious vitality: Hayzer hoyern shver, vi di groyse khayes, unter zeyere shvere shneyike dekher un drimlen mit a driml vos hot nisht keyn sof. S’dakht zikh: oyern hobn ot di hayzer, farhoylene, ongeshtrengte oyern, hern zikh tomid ayn in der groyser svive-shtilkeyt [...]. Greyt zenen zey tsulib yedn mindstn un vaytn feld-geroysh fun di erter oyfshpringen un zikh lozn ahin yogn mit groys tsorn un aylenish, vi ot di hungerike hint, vos yogn zikh mekabl-ponem zayn zeyern a fremdn khaver, a nisht ongeleygtn gast. (128)

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Silence progressively enfolds Mirele’s story and the conclusion of the novel. In a sort of postscript, Lipkis finds Mirele’s final letter, unfinished and unsent, forgotten in a cupboard. Letters, a particularly feminine form of expression, offer the final, concluding parting of the ways in both Madame Bovary and in Nokh alemen. Both letters, fragmentary attempts at resuming an explanation, have no real addressee; they are merely traces of burned-out existences. The departure of the heroines of these two novels is marked by a similar wordlessness, a symptom of the malaise that leads Emma Bovary to an atrocious self-inf licted death by poison, and Mirele Hurvits to one of those trains whose unknown destination is a metaphor for transition and disappearance. Interestingly, in Flaubert’s novel, Emma’s death is described in detail, while her betrayal, discovered by chance after her death, is related in an almost casual manner, even with a light ironic touch: walking aimlessly in the loft of his house, Charles feels a small pellet of paper crumpled up under his slipper; he opens it and reads Rodolphe’s letter to Emma. — Ils se sont peut-être aimés platoniquement, se dit-il. D’ailleurs, Charles n’était pas de ceux qui descendent au fond des choses; il recula devant les preuves, et sa jalousie incertaine se perdit dans l’immensité de son chagrin. (Part 3: Chapter 11; 349) [— Perhaps they loved each other platonically, he said to himself. Besides, Charles was not one of those who go to the bottom of things; he shrank from the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity of his woe.] (E 242)

In Bergelson’s novel Mirele’s death is only vaguely hinted at, as if casually, through a single word, gebeyn. In this respect, the opening sentence of the novel’s last chapter, quoted earlier in another context, deserves further attention: Eynmol in a vokhedikn donershtik, ven ir gebeyn iz shoyn lang afn vokzal nisht geven, iz Velvl Burnes ahin [...]

The time of this visit, ‘once on a commonplace Thursday’, is almost too abrupt an opening, starkly emphasized by the adjective vokhedikn, when it is suddenly juxtaposed with the unexpected information that no longer to be found there was ir gebeyn, literally, ‘her bones, skeleton, remains’.23 In this context, gebeyn, a word of harsh connotation generally associated with death or with a derogatory idiom, seems to suggest both. The ambiguity is not cleared up, but the presence at the station inn of Velvl Burnes, Mirele’s first fiancé, seems to reinforce the hypothesis that she has died.24 Velvl’s indirect presence at the very beginning of the novel, and his sad pilgrimage to the last place where Mirele has been sighted, close a circle, leaving behind a mourning lover, as at the close of Madame Bovary.

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Flaubert’s inf luence on Bergelson is indirectly present on the surface of the text as well. In Nokh alemen, the liveliness that Flaubert enhanced by means of typographical marks identifying different shades of verisimilitude is achieved by Bergelson’s repeated recourse to inter-linguistic transferences. His Yiddish is richly interspersed with Russian and Polish words ref lecting the inter-cultural milieu of the tsarist empire. Moreover, these words provide clues about the form and extent of Jewish integration into non-Jewish society. The use of Russian and Polish should certainly be seen as an instance of partial cultural and linguistic transference, but at the same time the context in which they appear, and the intention with which they are uttered, signalize a wider complex of meanings. For example, the use of such formal Polish expressions as Pani, ‘Sir’, when Velvl addresses Tarabay, or Jasnovelmožna panna, ‘distinguished young lady’, when Tarabay addresses Mirele, and which recur more than once, generally designate social courtesy, just as the use of Polish words underlines the social aspirations of nouveaux riches like Velvl and Tarabay.25 Similarly, mention of the Birzhevye vedomosti, the Russian stock exchange gazette, points to the same desire to assimilate into wealthy Russian society. By contrast, the use by both Jews and non-Jews of the Russian term barishnye, ‘Miss’, is an integrated linguistic element employed in situations in which a social inferior addresses a person of a higher class or standing, as in the case of a Jewish student talking to a shopkeeper about Mirele (83) and by Burnes’s housekeeper addressing Mirele (63). When Mirele addresses Lipkis in Russian as milostivyi gosudar, ‘my honoured lord’, however, she is being heavily ironic by intentionally overstressing her formal politeness. Some expressions, as for instance, Tsi pan Burnes doma? — Polish-Ukrainian for ‘Is Master Burnes at home?’ — that Nokhem Tarabay uses to address Aleksei, the coachman (108), or Eto khorosho, Russian for ‘It’s quite all right’, when Mirele addresses the Lithuanian midwife Shats (190),26 define an exchange between persons of different social status and/or different national and religious affiliation. In some instances, however, such as zabastovka, Russian for ‘strike’ (270), or plemianik, Russian for ‘nephew’ (197), foreign forms are used by Jewish persons in a monocultural context, indicating a certain level of acceptance and regular use of Russian/Polish in everyday situations. In the case of Mirele’s note to Velvl Burnes, Ty khoroshii, Russian for ‘You are a good person’ (367), a Russian form is used by a Yiddish speaker to signalize both a compliment and a common closeness to a culture to which they both aspire to belong. A series of words from ‘low’ language, and such coarse expressions as shelma, Russian for ‘scoundrel’ (178), or durak, Russian for ‘stupid’ (177), are in common use among wealthy Jews,27 permitting the inference that ‘low’ and ‘high’ Russian forms constitute antithetical poles of an integration simultaneously aspired to and rejected. The few vulgarisms employed point on the one hand to the use of Russian typical of a non-native speaker who, in a foreign tongue, does not take possession of, or responsibility for, the utterance, and on the other hand to a reception of the foreign language chief ly conveyed by persons of a lower social class. Only one word — oshchushenie, Russian for ‘feeling’, uttered by a student discussing literature (105) — is drawn from the discourse of high cultivation. Significantly, in only few cases

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does Bergelson specify in his text the foreign language he is using,28 thus implying that his original Yiddish readers all possessed the requisite linguistic knowledge.29 The intermingling of Russian and Polish ref lects actual social stratification. At different periods, both Russian and Polish were official and thus ‘high’ languages in Ukraine, while Ukrainian itself was considered a ‘low’ language. The use by Jews of both official languages and, occasionally, of Ukrainian, functions as a foil to their partial integration, revealing at the same time the limits of their willingness to accept the surrounding non-Jewish languages and the degree of their linguistic competence. For this reason, two instances, in which the narrator comments on the linguistic proficiency respectively of Nosn Heller’s uncle and of Shmulik Zeydenovski, are noteworthy: the former ‘spoke Russian badly, like a dentist; he pronounced s instead of sh’ (197); the latter ‘spoke Russian badly’ when he tries to address the midwife Shats in that language (225). Furthermore, the expression ty khoroshii, used twice by Mirele, is an elementary, not to say incorrect, form.30 Indications of the linguistic presence of Christian culture are limited to a single Latin quotation, omnia felicitas mendacium est, ‘all happiness is false’, repeated by the Lithuanian midwife Shats while reading to Mirele from the Dicta Sapientum.31 The question of linguistic identity was obviously not a major issue in the French provincial setting of Madame Bovary. In Nokh alemen, however, linguistic identity as emotionally perceived and articulated by Russian Jews living in Ukraine is an element of great interest. Hence the multilingual verbal texturing of the novel’s narrative weave reveals a certain degree of social insecurity in the characters, and draws a distinction between those who live in the provincial shtetl, and those who live in the city. The latter — Montshik or Ida Spolianski, for example — do not mix languages; the former, who do, reveal their desire to escape provincialism by showing some command, however poor, of the languages of the governing classes. This is additionally apparent in the frequency with which individual characters use foreign words. Whereas the class of provincial nouveaux riches, represented by Tarabay, Velvl Burnes and his family, and Shmulik Zeydenovski’s father, account for five instances of single utterances of foreign words, Mirele’s use of foreign expressions — seven in all — is clearly most pronounced. This peculiarity evidences Mirele’s stronger desire to be someone and something other than her shtetl environment will permit, conduct that exposes her essential provincialism. Not surprisingly, in those sections of the novel that are played out mostly on the margins of a city or within the city proper, Mirele’s language does not show any linguistic transference. Flaubert’s treatment of his characters’ language, even though it is within a different frame of reference, does occasionally shows shades of ‘high’ and ‘low’ French to indicate social class as well as psychological reality. As Gothot-Mersch notes, Flaubert elegantly resolved the problem of ‘well written’ dialogue by giving M. Homais and the other provincial notables an exceedingly literary language that stands out markedly.32 But if Flaubert and Bergelson only sporadically employ language traits as indicators — trivial, familiar language or dialect are almost completely non-existent both in Madame Bovary and in Nokh alemen — recourse to linguistic transferences from foreign languages is an important marker of psycho-sociological motives in the Yiddish novel.

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A further suggestion of Flaubert’s inf luence on Bergelson lies in what could be called their ‘language of objects’. Flaubert’s obsession with detail is paralleled by Bergelson’s intensely realistic pictorial presentation of objects and their high degree of tropism. Like Flaubert, he connotes objects as transitional manifestations of culture and society. In a socio-anthropological analysis of Madame Bovary, Claude Duchet identifies the role of objects in the novel as signifiers of social class, and of social, economic, and industrial transformations. Moreover ‘literary objects’, objects present in the novel that are related to professional and domestic life, are more than mirror-images of petit-bourgeois everyday life; they epitomize customs, beliefs, yearnings; the end point of an historical process. Duchet also calls attention to the objet romanesque, the object as a literary sign, which he calls ‘a remnant of the language, a dead sign’, as for instance the blue glass bottle of arsenic, or Rodolphe’s letter to Emma, first hidden in a basket of apricots and then appearing as a crumpled ball of paper under Charles’s slipper. These kinds of objects, essentially deus ex machina devices, are extremely rare in Madame Bovary and function only to expedite the novel’s closure.33 Inevitably the range of linguistic items with which Bergelson denotes the realm of social and personal life in a Jewish shtetl differs from that employed by Flaubert in writing about nineteenth-century provincial life in France. Nevertheless, objects work in both novels more as bearers of emotions than as functional items of the culture they certainly signify. Their tropism is always dependent on the contexts in which they appear, and on the perspective of subjective emotional apprehension with which they are surrounded. So when the lamp with its blue shade throws light on the financial pages of the newspaper Velvl Burnes is reading, it participates in his dreams of a successful life in the new house (107). By contrast, looking through the window, Velvl perceives the blue-shaded lamp at the deathbed of Reb Gedalye Hurvits as a light redolent of medicines and of impending death (350). Physically the blue lights are similar, but their emotional impact and density are differently perceived. This ‘otherness’ of objects is a trait common to both Madame Bovary and Nokh alemen. To a high degree, Bergelson’s depiction of objects in Nokh alemen parallels Flaubert’s meticulous realism, but his literary ‘language of objects’ also transcends the limits of descriptive realism by continuously suggesting, reducing, increasing, and enlarging their semantic range through associations charged with symbolic functions and, as mentioned earlier, anthropomorphisms, like the successive images of trains that run through the novel from beginning to end. Since the narrative unfolds both in a traditional shtetl and in a big city, objects related to these different contexts define different forms of socio-cultural organization. To depict the culture of the shtetl, objects related to communal religious traditions are present everywhere in the narrative discourse. The physical composition of the shtetl is defined by the Burnes family’s dignified bourgeois home in the market square (17), the Jewish grocer’s store nearby, and the spacious aristocratic house of the Hurvits family on the opposite side of the street (17, 33). Topography includes the non-Jewish world, but is limited to a mention of the pharmacy and to Christian dwellings at the shtetl’s north-east margin. The houses, at times metonymically bodied forth with door and name-plate as recognizable

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signifiers of wealth, are exclusively Jewish upper class; Velvl’s small, aristocratic country house and Tarabay’s mansion outside the shtetl (88) belong to this category. An exception is Royzenboym’s little cottage, with its red f loor, the smell of rustic (peasant) food and its f lowers making a clearly emphasized difference: s’ar a reyn kristlekh oyszen s’iz bay ot der Royzenboymekhe geven (154), ‘what a manifestly Christian aspect the home of this Mrs Royzenboym had’. Wealthy Jewish homes are filled with objects that signalize a traditional, outmoded past, as in the Hurvits household: a pendulum clock (126), a dressing table edged with tulle (84, 187), silverware (184), pink curtains and velvet runners (147, 241). These objects, representing desires and memories, shape themselves into psychic realities and move beyond their original function to become archetypes of human existence: s’zenen dort oyf di fentster gehangen di roze gardinen, s’zenen gelegen oysgeshpreyt di sametene stezshkes un hobn aroysgerufn a benkshaft nokh fremdn glik. (241) [At the window hung the pink curtains, on the f loor lay spread out the velvet runners, and awakened a yearning for distant happiness.]

By comparison with the richness of Flaubert’s meticulously described household objects, Bergelson’s mention of everyday items is relatively scant, yet both serve related purposes. The objects in the house of the apothecary Homais, his fireplace, the empty teapot, and the lampshade oú étaient peints sur la gaze des pierrots dans des voitures et des danseuses de corde avec leur balanciers (Part 2; Chapter 4, 101–02), ‘on the gauze of which were painted clowns in carriages, and tightrope dancers with their balancing-poles’ (E 70), signalize a moribund, provincial environment totally without taste. The more sparing details in Nokh alemen are rendered more effective when those which are given emblematically signify entire realities composed of interrelated parts. Thus Velvl’s country house, furnished with expensive new furniture including a lomp mitn bloyen abazshur (107), ‘a lamp with a blue lampshade’, and Tarabay’s house with its green card table (171), are sites of modern, provincial riches, with neither history nor tradition but open to the future. Even the mention of champagne (172) and bottled wine (175) is set in contrast to the samovar and the tea at the Hurvitses. Commonplace objects are made to relate to one another, thus generating a wider subconscious set of contrasting life conceptions and meanings. The repetitional use of same lexical items points to established forms of social life but also, at times, to their instability. Thus, for instance, the pink curtains and velvet runners that vanish from the bankrupt Hurvits house appear again, first as a sign of wealth to impress the Zeydenovski family: di oyslendishe roze gardinen hot men funsnay oyf ale fentster oyfgehangen (147), ‘the foreign pink curtains were once again hung over all the windows’, and later as elegiac commentaries on Mirele’s marriage. The shtetl is further characterized by numerous mentions of modes of transport like coaches, carriages, and horse-drawn sledges, and of such items of winter clothing as fur coats and sheepskin jackets of varying shapes and degrees of costliness, deliberately calling to attention a rural setting in a winter Russian landscape, and allowing for inferences in regard to the social standing connected to these objects. Thus, for example, Velvl Burnes: ongeton in a breytn pritsishn tulup, a

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badektn mit a geln futer fun droysn, iz er tif inem opgepolirtn shlitn gezesn (134), ‘wearing a wide, sumptuous sheepskin coat, covered with yellow fur on the outside, he sat deep within the highly polished sledge’. On the other hand, even though present, modernity is barely perceptible in the shtetl. It appears only in the form of three items, respectively related to farming, quotidian existence, and medicine: the steam threshing machine on Velvl’s farm (100), the sewing machines of the tailors preparing Mirele’s trousseau (235–36), and the inhaler used by Reb Gedalye (181, 194). The novel’s main frame of reference is tradition and religious observance. Jewish life as marked by festivals, seasonal food and clothing, ritual, cult places and objects, and religious learning are both massively present in the text. The Jewish calendar and the liturgical cycle are introduced chief ly through the simple mention of their occurrence, as for example, in gikhn iz shoyn aza sheyner un zunendiker Ester-tones geven (191), ‘soon it was a beautiful and sunny day for the Fast of Esther’. Festivals and ritual are the time scansion of the story but also, occasionally, the place of identity, as when Yankl Zeydenovski is asked to lead the prayers in the synagogue: zey gedenken dokh nokh, minastam, zayn yomim-neroimdikn davnen in Sadagora (200) ‘they probably still remembered the way he led the prayers during the High Holy Days in Sadagora’. Despite his attenuated religious belief, Yankl consents to lead the prayers, un er aleyn hot gehat a shtarke, ongeneme shtim un hot gedavnt — vi gor di groyse khazonim hot er gedavnt (202) ‘and he himself had a strong, pleasant voice, and he led the prayers like the most famous cantors’. In contrast to this narcissistic exercise is Reb Gedalye’s genuine piety, concentrated in the practice of studying, praying in the besmedresh, and following the Halakhah, evidence of a more genuine religious identity. The Jewish tradition is evoked as a matter of course in the passing mention throughout the narrative of such signifiers as the sheytl or ritual wig of Yosl Zeydenovski’s wife (199), the almond-cinnamon pastries prepared for Mirele’s engagement and marriage party (193; 234), and the Hebrew calendar months of Shevat, Adar, and Nissan in the register of oxen purchases compiled by Shmulik Zeydenovski. The boundaries of the non-Jewish world are often loose, as if to imply another presence, though merely a marginal one, within the Jewish world. Actual signs of the existence of the Christian world are one church situated in the Jewish part of the shtetl (211), and another located close to the Zeydenovski house in the suburbs of the big city. An unexpected detail — a pig sleeping in the back yard of the Hurvits house (230) attracted by rinsing water thrown out of the kitchen — is a peculiar reminder of the vicinity of Christian neighbours. The landscape of the city is sketched through the frantic rhythm of its life (251), its paved streets and tramway (254), electric light (254–55), crowded cafés and a band playing modern music (289). Other signifiers of modernity are the repeated mention of new furniture of a particularly sensuous kind in the apartment of Ida Spolianski (283), and of the electric bell for summoning servants in the home of Shmulik and Mirele. Montshik’s office, with its massive desk supporting, among other things, photographs in leather frames of his father and Mirele (340), draws a visible and deliberate contrast between his modern commercial enterprises, and the fading workplaces of Reb Gedalye Hurvits and old Burnes, respectively representing

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an older, bankrupt generation and one provincially, though aggressively, more successful.(98). Both in the shtetl and in the city, among the most obvious signifiers of the new age are the all-pervading presence of cigarettes and cigarette smoke. Mentioned fifteen times, this element is presented both as evidence of a widespread modern habit and as a manifest marker of female emancipation. The Lithuanian midwife Shats, a working woman of twenty-seven who lives alone, is probably the most furious smoker in the novel, often portrayed either rolling her own cigarettes or chain-smoking: di akusherke Shats hot shoyn shtendik geroykhert [...] [zi hot] a nayem papiros baym kestl hilzn gemakht, farroykherndik [...] baym lomp (136; 140), ‘the midwife Shats smoked continuously [...][she] rolled another cigarette from her little box of cigarette papers, lighting [it] from the lamp f lame’. Significantly, the most critical moments of the plot take place in smoke-filled rooms in the Burnes and Zeydenovski residences.34 Tobacco is present also in its older forms, like the taking of snuff, a habit of the lower classes. By contrast, religious observance and a traditional lifestyle, as practised in the Hurvits household, are connoted by the total absence of smoke and liquor. Furthermore, all mention of books, otherwise absent in the novel, is restricted to old Reb Gedalye and to his daughter, Mirele. Reb Gedalye requires copies of the Kuzari by Yehudah ha-Levi and the first part of the commentaries of the fifteenth-century exegete, Isaac Abravanel, to be sent to him (126), while Mirele reads a book ‘on women in the Middle Ages and in modern times’ (315). Social standing is periodically related to clothing, even in so small a detail as Tarabay’s shirt cuffs. Attire, as part of nouveau riche self-presentation, is mostly a feminine attribute, chief ly of Mirele, whose silk dresses are described as costly and luxurious, enhancing her beauty (171). The modernization of Yiddish as a literary language developed for the most part through contact with European literature. Bergelson’s relationship with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and the lessons he clearly learned from its remarkable narrative and stylistic innovations, are clearly manifest in Nokh alemen, the first truly modern Yiddish novel, in which language is the chief agent of transition and change. Notes to Chapter 3 1. Nakhmen Mayzel, Forgeyer un mittsaytler [Predecessors and Contemporaries] (New York: YKUF, 1946), especially the two chapters, ‘Yorn mit Dovid Bergelson’, and ‘Dovid Bergelson’, pp. 304–41, written respectively in 1940 and 1941. 2. Yechiel Hofer, ‘David Bergelson’, Di goldene keyt, 25 (1956), 11–24; here p. 11. 3. In the first chapter of A Traveller Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Shocken Books, 1973), Dan Miron discusses at length the question of the ‘suitability’ of Yiddish as a literary medium, noticing that ‘of all nineteenth-century writers of consequence, only three wrote Yiddish from the start and never resorted to any other language for literary purposes’ (p.7); of these three (Y. Aksenfeld, M. Spektor, and S. Etinger), ‘only Etinger did not feel the need to explain or justify his choice of language’ (p. 12). 4. In regard to the question of the ‘abnormality’ of Yiddish as a literary medium in the twentieth century, Miron notes: Bergelson, in many respects the most accomplished and significant writer of Yiddish fiction after the three ‘classics’, started his literary apprenticeship just like them not in

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the language he was to bring to the pinnacle of its stylistic sophistication, but rather in Hebrew and Russian, particularly in the former. Miron infers Bergelson’s relationship to Yiddish, as opposed to Hebrew, in which he received the greater part of his education, from the thoughts ascribed to Penek, the protagonist of Bergelson’s quasi-autobiographical novel Baym Dnyepr: As far as Yiddish is concerned, Penek dejectedly realizes, such intimacy [as he has with Hebrew] is not to be hoped for. He may, indeed, learn how to use Yiddish words, but he will never enjoy the felicitous feeling of ‘being used by them’. He will have to learn to manipulate them, to write Yiddish ‘with difficulty’. Indeed, Bergelson intimates, it is precisely this realization that becomes the starting point for the development of Penek’s (that is, of Bergelson’s own) particular style and artistic mode as a Yiddish writer’. (Miron, pp. 21–22) 5. Hirsh Remenik, foreword to Dovid Bergelson (1884–1952): Oysgeveylte verk [Selected Works] (Moscow: Melukhe-farlag fun kinstlerishe literatur, 1961), p. 16; my translation. 6. Bergelson’s letter to Shmuel Niger, dated 30 December 1912, in Joseph Opatoshu and H. Leyvik (eds), Zamlbikher (New York: Zamlbikher, 1952), VIII, 100. 7. Nakhmen Mayzl, ‘David Bergelson’ in Forgeyer un mittsaytler, p. 315. 8. In an essay written on the occasion of Bergelson’s anniversary and published in 1940, Der Nister defined the role of the writer as that of a ‘leader’ and a ‘forerunner’. He defined the specificity of the literary profession as a process of ‘sharpening’ and ‘purifying’ through which language becomes literature. On Bergelson’s inf luence he wrote: Whoever came within your sphere of inf luence was obliged to oppose that jostling marketplace [the Warsaw Yiddish literary milieu], to place himself on your side, and to begin creating what was for those days a new literary tradition, a new literary school, at the head of which you stood, worthy and summoned by vocation to lead it. See Der Nister, ‘A briv tsu Dovid Bergelson’. Originally published in Forpost, 2–3 (1940), this essay was then included in the posthumous volume of Der Nister’s writngs, Dertseylungen un eseyen 1940–1948 (New York: YKUF, 1957), from which this quotation is taken (pp. 293–94). 9. In working on Flaubert’s style, I have benefited greatly from the excellent studies published in Gerard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov (eds), Travail de Flaubert (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1983). Since I am using Flaubert’s conception and praxis of literature as a comparative medium through which to read Bergelson’s work, I reformulate here, for the sake of my argument, some of the main concepts of Flaubert’s style delineated in the essay by Claudine Gothot-Mersch, ‘La parole des personnages’, in this volume (p. 209). All translations from French are my own. 10. Claudine Gothot-Mersch, Introduction to Madame Bovary (Paris: Édition Garnier Frères, 1971), p. lii. Hereafter, all page references to Madame Bovary are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text after the letter F. 11. All English translations are from Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. by Eleanor Marx Aveling (London: Viztelly, 1886; repr. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1996). Page references from this edition are given in parentheses after the letter E. 12. Gothot-Mersch, ‘La parole des personnages’, p. 209. 13. Other interesting elements are present in this quotation, like the reference in the dialogue to a cactus and, later, to a foot-coverlet; their ironic triviality should at least be pointed out, since similar elements are also present in Bergelson’s prose. 14. David Bergelson, Nokh alemen, vol. I of Ale verk (Buenos Aires: YKUF, 1961), p. 95. All subsequent Yiddish citations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text after the letter Y. 15. David Bergelson, When all is said and done, trans. with an introduction by Bernard Martin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1977), p. 3. Most subsequent English translations are from this version, and page references are cited parenthetically in the text after the letter E. Where there is no attribution, the translation is mine.

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16. As Claudine Gothot-Mersch notes, The treatment of the story’s chronology is not more rational; with Flaubert, time undergoes the same expansion and the same contraction as space. Even in that respect the writer pays attention first to the psychological necessities [of the story]: the age of the protagonists and the atmospheres to be created. Chapter 3, for instance, describes the ‘winter evenings’ which Emma, a young married woman, spends in loneliness, then it announces an ‘autumn ball’; the ball seems therefore to take place before the second winter in Tostes. [...] Certainly Flaubert never cared about it: it is an atmosphere, not temporal reference points, that he defines when he speaks about autumn or winter. (Gothot-Mersch, Introduction to Madame Bovary, p. xxxv) 17. Estimated by her own utterances, Mirele should be about twenty-one, since her engagement to Velvl Burnes began at the age of seventeen (Y 139) and lasted four years. She is said to be twenty-two shortly before the first Christmas mentioned in the novel (Y 150). Before Purim (March) she is twenty-three (Y 188), and by Tisha b’Av (August) at the end of the novel, she is twenty-four (Y 375). The chronology of the narrative, beginning with a late summer, evolves to the rhythm of the Jewish liturgical calendar, covering a time-span of eighteen months until the end — at the time of the festival of Purim — of the third part of the novel. The fourth and final part begins between Christmas and the Christian New Year; Mirele disappears by the following Tisha b’Av. If Bergelson had followed a strictly linear chronology, Mirele should be twenty-five years old by the end of the novel. 18. Lipkis delays his decision to study at the university because of his (wholly unrequited) feelings for Mirele (Y 36). 19. Velvl’s desire to belong to a higher social class is continually evident, as at the beginning of Chapter 3: sof kl-sof veln tsu im onheybn kumen sokhrim fun shtot, kumen laytish un bekovedik, vi laytish un bekovedik zey kumen ahin, tsu di arumike pritsim. (Y 106) [at last merchants from town would begin coming to him here, coming properly and honourably, as they come properly and honourably to the gentile squires in the neighbourhood.] (E 15) 20. The relationship of Sholem Aleichem’s literary style with the co-territorial Russian narrative tradition of the skaz, a digressive, meandering, written form of spoken language, is an area that deserves fuller exploration, as does the question of contemporary and traditional Russian literature’s inf luence on the expectations of the earliest readership of Bergelson’s innovative modern fiction. 21. Seth L. Wolitz, ‘Bergelson’s “Yordim” and I. B. Singer’s’, Prooftexts, 11.2 (1982), 313–21. 22. Even though the present essay discusses language in the novel Nokh alemen, this feature is equally characteristic of a number of Bergelson’s short stories. 23. The word is also used idiomatically, as in the phrase nit visn vu emetsns gebeyn iz ahingekumen, ‘not to know what has become of someone’. 24. Further support for the hypothesis that Mirele is dead is her ref lection on a way out of her married life: faran andere mentshn, vos zukhn oykh yornlang ot dem zelbn oysgang, un az zey gefinen im nisht, nemen zey zikh sof kl-sof dos lebn un lozn iber halb-narishe, halbkluge brivelekh. (Y271) [There are other people who spend years looking for the same way out, and when they do not find it, they take their own lives, leaving behind half clear-minded, half foolish little notes.] 25. The complete sentence is: dortn, bay ir foter in shtub, hot er zi farn avekforn, afn pritsishn shteyger, arumgenumen, ir gezogt ‘Jasnovelmožna panna’ un hot ir vegn im, Velvln, shtilerheyt a sod ayngeromt. (Y111)

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[There, in her father’s house, before he left he embraced her in the aristocratic manner, addressed her as ‘distinguished young lady’, and quietly whispered a secret about Velvl into her ear.] 26. Another example is ponimaete-li, Russian for ‘try to understand’, when Nosn Heller is speaking to a distinguished Christian person about his projected publication (Y252), or when a cantor asks Mirele about Shmulik Zeydenovski (Y274). 27. Other instances are: Kak eto smeshno, Russian for ‘It is so ridiculous’ (Safian speaking to Avrom Burnes’s daughter about Mirele’s search for a wedding dress, Y212); Ty glupyi, Russian for ‘You are foolish’ (Mirele talking to Lipkis, Y133); Ne smeete!, Russian for ‘How dare you!’ (Mirele to a drunken young man, Y177). The following expressions are probably used in a non-Jewish context: Sta! Russian for ‘Stop!’; Podavai! Russian for ‘Bring/serve it!’; Kuda poliz? Russian-Ukrainian for ‘Where the hell are you going?’ or, as translated in a footnote in the Yiddish text, ‘Vu krikhstu?’ (uttered by an old drunken man responsible for the distillery of Shmulik Zeydenovski, Y307). 28. For the most part, Bergelson refers to Rusish, ‘Russian’, although in one case, in a non-Jewish monocultural setting, he refers to the language as goyish, ‘Gentile’ (Y285). 29. An examination of all editions of the novel would probably clarify this issue; I have consulted three. In the YKUF reprint (Buenos Aires, 1961), the presence of eight footnotes translating Russian terms into Yiddish indicates the necessity on the part of the South American publisher to clarify the meaning of foreign words for new, non-Russian Yiddish readers. The Berlin edition of 1922 (Wostok) has only one footnote, which translates the Russian word vidle into Yiddish as a nokhgelozte frost (a frost left behind), and only one instance of a word set in Cyrillic type. A second Berlin edition (Wostok, 1923) carries only five footnotes that translate Russian terms into Yiddish, while the Russian words themselves are set in Cyrillic in the Yiddish text. 30. The question that obviously arises is whether Bergelson was making a point about Mirele’s competence in the Russian language, or whether his own knowledge of Russian was defective. This is difficult, if not impossible, to answer. Nakhmen Mayzel reports that Bergelson lived in di gaystraykhe veltn fun di groyse Rusishe klasiker, ‘the spiritually rich worlds of the great Russian classics’. Some of Bergelson’s earliest attempts at writing were in Russian and, Mayzel adds, di fremde Rusishe shprakh iz im lib un tayer geven, er bamit zikh zi goyver zayn in zayn shraybn oyf an eygnartikn oyfn, ‘the alien Russian language was dear and precious to him, and he took trouble to master it in an original way in his writing’. Later in the same essay, Mayzel points to the inf luence of Russian literature on Bergelson: er hot getrunken a durshtiker fun di shlogendike kvaln fun der Rusisher literatur — Tolstoi, Turgeniev, Dostoyevski — shpeter Tshekhov, Gorki, Andreyev. Glaykhtsaytik — fun di Rusishe ibersetsungen — zaynen far im oyfgedekt gevorn di oytsres fun der velt literatur — un gants bazunders di nay-antplekte Norvegishe shrayber. [he drank thirstily from the gushing springs of Russian literature — Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky — later Chekhov, Gorky, Andreyev. At the same time — through translations into Russian — the treasures of world literature were revealed to him — and in particular the newly discovered Norwegian writer [Knut Hamsun].] See Nakhman Mayzel, ‘Yorn mit Dovid Bergelson’ (1940), Forgeyer un mittsaytler (New York: YKUF, 1948), pp. 325; 338). Bergelson’s son, Lev, recalls that his father’s command of Russian was very good. However, the first chapters of Nokh alemen were published in 1911 in the literary miscellany Fun tsayt tsu tsayt (From time to time), when Bergelson was twenty-seven years old, and the complete work appeared in one volume in 1913, when his son had not yet been born. Even allowing for Bergelson’s excellent proficiency in Russian, which seems very possible, a curious detail — the narrative comment that Nosn Heller ‘spoke Russian badly, like a dentist’ — seems to suggest a further ambiguity. For a short while, Bergelson himself studied to become a dentist, although he did not complete his studies and abandoned the career. Is this then a private joke against himself, or against somebody he had known? 31. This book’s full title is Dicta septem sapientum Graeciae (Sayings of the Seven Sages of Greece), a collection of moral aphorisms from the classical world compiled in Latin by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536). For centuries, it was immensely popular as a source book of easily

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digested moral precepts. An English translation with commentary by Thomas Berthelet was published as early as 1525, during Erasmus’s lifetime. 32. Gothot-Mersch, ‘La parole des personnages’, p. 204, where she also remarks on a ‘style markedly “pompous” which is evident mainly in rhythmic effects’. 33. Claude Duchet, ‘Roman et objects’, in Genette and Todorov, eds, Travail de Flaubert, p. 19. 34. Bergelson himself was known to be a chain smoker.

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CHAPTER 4

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For Children and Adults Alike: Reading Bergelson’s ‘Children’s Stories’ (1914–1919) as Narratives of Identity Formation Kerstin Hoge 1. Introduction: ‘For Children and for Adults who are like Children’? The question of what identifies children’s literature as a genre has characterized much of its study. While there is no shortage of proposals about how to define children’s literature — ranging from thematic and narratological to stylistic and extra-literary approaches — the ‘dilemma of children’s fiction’, to borrow the title of a book by Barbara Wall,1 is that it eludes rigid categorization and description.2 Karín Lesnik-Oberstein suggests that ‘we cannot actually say clearly what makes a book a children’s book or not’,3 herself citing Peter Hunt’s view that ‘children’s books’ is a very curious classification, ‘a chaotic collection of texts that have in common nothing other than some undefined relationship to children’.4 Often, a text’s ‘undefined relationship to children’ is asserted in the paratext: a book may bear the designator ‘for children’ or ‘for young readers’, it may be published in a series of books explicitly aimed at children, or it may have received a children’s book prize, such as the Carnegie or John Newbery Medal, as proudly displayed on its front cover. We thus commonly let ourselves be guided by the reading of somebody else — the author, publisher, or reviewer — when constructing a text as a work of children’s literature. The paratexts supply what Gérard Genette defines as ‘thresholds of interpretation’5 and provide possible, if by no means exclusive, indicators of the intended readership. In the case of Yiddish literature, paratexts are notoriously deceptive, constituting thresholds that make available a point of entry into a text while at the same time tripping up the uninitiated reader. The conventionalized address to women, found on the title pages of pre-modern Yiddish literature, is generally taken to stand not for an intended but for a fictional audience behind which all readers, male and female alike, could hide.6 It afforded what Max Weinreich identifies as ‘a kind of permission for Yiddish in writing’7 and allowed the use of the vernacular in a highstatus function without simultaneously calling into question the privileged role of Hebrew-Aramaic in the Ashkenazic diglossic system.

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Given the unreliable status of the dedications to women in pre-modern Yiddish texts as indicators of the intended audience, it is thus also conceivable that the earmarking of a Yiddish text ‘for children’ may represent not a guideline for interpretation, but an attempt to hoodwink the reader and/or to legitimize the existence of the text itself. In short, the relationship to children heralded in a paratext may only seemingly provide a clue as to the text’s genre. A well-known example of Yiddish texts miscued by paratextual information is Sholem Aleichem’s Mayses far yidishe kinder (Stories for Jewish children), which in Shmuel Niger’s view constitute ‘literature about children rather than for children’,8 and which, as Chone Shmeruk argues, it is highly questionable that Sholem Aleichem himself found suitable for children.9 What is commonly called ‘Yiddish children’s literature’ is a recent phenomenon, dating back no more than a hundred years. Its beginnings are rooted in the Yiddish secular school movement, which evolved in the aftermath of World War I.10 Until that time, the boundaries between adult and children’s literature in the Ashkenazi community were ‘blurred’; that is, ‘the same texts were published for adults as for children’,11 and books ‘served the family as a whole’.12 Only the development of modern Yiddish-language schools, following the demise of the tsarist regime, created a demand for reading material that served the specific needs of young and emerging readers. Modern Yiddish education mandated and practised ‘formal initiation into Yiddish literacy’,13 turning the pupils’ native tongue into a proper school subject, akin to the role that a country’s national language would play in other European classrooms, rather than relegating Yiddish to the sole function of an oral medium for the study of Hebrew-language texts. With Yiddish as a focus of instruction, it became necessary to have Yiddish texts that were specifically written for and directed at school-age children. Moreover, the Yiddish school became ‘a site for enacting “national cultural autonomy”’.14 Reading literature that engages a child and enables the construction of meaning is an essential step in the process of fostering a new identity among the young, and as such it had to play a pivotal role in the Yiddishist school movement. Yiddish educators and ideologists (often combined in the same person) saw a need for Yiddish children’s books not simply as an aid to literacy, but also as a means through which to transmit the values and ideals of the new national movement. It is thus not surprising that Yiddish children’s literature distinguishes itself from other children’s literatures of the same period, whose origins date back earlier, ‘in being more often overtly political’, as Neil Zagorin notes.15 In the curriculum of the new Yiddish secular schools, reading Yiddish texts served both educational and ideological objectives. The indissoluble link between the Yiddish secular school system and Yiddish writing for children is most clearly seen in the area of children’s journals in Yiddish, which were largely subscribed to by schools rather than by individuals, and were read in the classroom.16 Almost exclusively edited by teachers and published by school organizations or educational publishers, these children’s journals saw themselves as part of the Yiddishist school movement and frequently made reference to their self-defined role. For example, on the occasion of the 100th issue of the children’s journal Grininke beymelekh (Little Green Trees), its editor, the Vilnius

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pedagogue Shloyme Bastomski (1891–1941), proudly wrote that umetum hobn di ‘grininke beymelekh’ gezeyt freyd un fargenign tsvishn di yidishe kinder, umetum dertseylt vegn der nayer yidisher shul, shtendik geholfn boyen di naye yidishe shul, shtendik geshtrebt tsu farbindn di kinder fun di yidishe shuln in der gorer velt. (May 1932: 236) [Grininke beymelekh has brought joy and pleasure to children everywhere, [it] has spread the news of the new Yiddish school everywhere, [it] has constantly helped to build the new Yiddish school [and] has always aimed to unite the children in Yiddish schools around the world.]

Grininke beymelekh, which took its name from Khaym Nakhmen Bialik’s Yiddish poem ‘Unter di grininke beymelekh’ (Under the little green trees), was one of the first and perhaps best-known periodicals for children. The period of its publication spanned the years 1914–39, making it coterminous with the eff lorescence of Yiddish secular culture in Central and Eastern Europe. Following two short-lived publishing attempts (1914–15 and 1919–22), the journal established itself in 1926 first as a monthly and from October 1927 also as a bimonthly. International in its reach and mission, Grininke beymelekh had subscribers in nearly twenty countries on five continents and attracted contributors from America to the Soviet Union. Even a cursory glance at the journal conveys a vivid picture of the inter-war Yiddish school milieu. On the pages of Grininke beymelekh, the pupils and teachers in the Yiddish schools, Yiddish writers, and Yiddish kulturtuer (cultural activists) all came together as partners in the collective endeavour to create a new, secular form of Jewish life in the diaspora. The journal comprised original contributions by Yiddish authors, translations of children’s stories into Yiddish, school plays, and operas complete with music, popular science pieces written by teachers in the Yiddish schools, news about YIVO and Jewish organizations such as OZE (Obshchestvo zdravookhraneniia evreev [Society for the Protection of Jewish Health]) and ORT (Obshchestvo remeslennogo i zemledelcheskogo truda [Society for Trades and Agricultural Labour]), and pictures, as well as collective and individual letters by pupils in the Yiddish schools in Poland, Lithuania, and places as far-f lung as Neopolis, Brazil. When Bastomski reminds his young readers that the fate of the journal is in their hands (April 1932: 128), one cannot help thinking that he was not merely concerned about the journal’s financial health. For him and other Yiddishists, the success of this journal became synonymous with the success of the Yiddishist movement as a whole: if the children in the Yiddish schools could not be enticed to ‘work tirelessly to find new subscribers’ (as Bastomski was fond of admonishing his readers), there was no guarantee that the young generation would not weary of the struggle to create a new Jewish society and identity. Crucial to the wide appeal of Grininke beymelekh was its inclusive view of Yiddishlanguage education, excluding neither mefitse haskole (propagators of enlightenment) schools, which devoted a number of hours to the teaching of traditional Jewish subjects and Hebrew,17 nor the schools of the Yiddishist and, in some cases, communist Kultur-lige (League for Culture). Grininke beymelekh reported on the activities of all secular Yiddish schools, and Bastomski himself was the guest of honour at numerous graduation ceremonies, irrespective of the school’s political affiliation. It is in Grininke beymelekh that David Bergelson published the first two of his

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three known children’s stories. ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ (The little golden ball) appeared in February 1914, followed by ‘A mayse mit zibn feygelekh’ (A story with seven little birds) in March 1915.18 Bergelson’s third children’s story — thirtynine pages in length — was published in book form under the title Mayse-bikhl (Little book of tales) by the Kultur-lige in Kiev in 1919. ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ and Mayse-bikhl were published more than once. ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ appeared as a separate book in 1916, under the imprint of the literary publisher Kiever farlag, and also, in a version rewritten by Sh. Gitelis, as the sixth story in the pamphlet series Far kleyne kinder: tsen mayselekh (For little children: ten little stories), which was published by the Farlag kultur-lige in Warsaw in 1921. In 1923, Bergelson’s Mayse-bikhl was republished in a signed and numbered ‘deluxe edition’ of 100 copies by the Berlin-based Yiddish publishing house Wostok. Wostok’s edition included eight illustrations, in the form of woodcuts and lithographs, by the Vilnius-born artist Lazar Segal (1891–1957) and was the most expensive title on the publisher’s list in that year.19 The paratextual information available for Bergelson’s children’s stories thus presents mixed evidence. On the one hand, his stories ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ and ‘A mayse mit zibn feygelekh’ appeared in one of the foremost Yiddish journals for children and — in the case of ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ — also in a series the very title of which designates small children as the intended readership; on the other hand, Bergelson’s Mayse-bikhl was reissued in a limited edition, clearly aimed at adult collectors with disposable income rather than at children saving their pocket money. The situation is further complicated by the reality that children’s books were (and are to this day) likely to be bought by adults; that is, the buyers to whom books are marketed might be neither the actual nor the intended readers. That there was a burgeoning market for illustrated Yiddish children’s books seems without question: as early as 1912, the Warsaw publisher Tsentral judged that a collection of selected stories from Sholem Aleichem’s Mayses far yidishe kinder would sell better as a ‘deluxe edition’ published specifically ‘for children’ than as chapbooks for adults.20 It follows then that the republication of Bergelson’s Mayse-bikhl in a signed and numbered edition does not a priori rule out that Mayse-bikhl truly was intended as a children’s book. Conversely, it would be reductive and simplistic to conclude merely on the basis of their publication in Grininke beymelekh that ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ and ‘A mayse mit zibn feygelekh’ are unambiguously children’s stories. Even Grininke beymelekh targeted an adult as well as a child readership, as suggested by the fact that numerous issues feature advertisements for the Warsaw literary journal Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages), what Ruth Wisse describes as ‘the most prestigious literary weekly ever published in Yiddish’.21 Clearly, these advertisements could not hope to interest fifth- and sixth-graders but must have been intended for teachers, parents, and librarians. Considering also that Grininke beymelekh provided material for communal reading in the classroom, we can assume awareness on the part of its authors that adults, too, would read the texts that appeared in the journal. In other words, the publication of Bergelson’s stories in Grininke beymelekh does not necessarily leave us any the wiser as to whether these stories were in fact written — either exclusively or at all — for children.

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Far from simply asserting even an ‘undefined relationship to children’, the packaging of Bergelson’s children’s stories suggests a multiplicity and f luidity of audiences, which is precisely what Jack Zipes deems to be characteristic of children’s literature. In Zipes’ view, ‘what distinguishes a children’s book is the fact that the writer must take into account many more audiences and censorships than a writer of work intended for adults does’. Moreover, for Zipes, children’s stories are not so much for children as about childhood in the sense that they involve a process in which ‘the writer conceptualizes childhood, perhaps seeks to recapture childhood or the child in herself, or wants to define what childhood should be’.22 Zipes’ conception of children’s literature relating to the ‘child in the writer’ evokes Jacqueline Rose’s analysis of childhood as something that is ‘never really left behind [...] something which we endlessly rework in our attempt to build an image of our history’.23 But if reworking our childhood is a necessary prerequisite for fashioning an account of our history and thus our identity, and if one way to rework our childhood is to construct stories about childhood, it is possible to read stories about childhood — that is, children’s stories in Zipes’ definition — as accounts of our personal and collective history and identity. In what follows, I shall pursue the idea that while we may never know who were the intended and actual readers of Bergelson’s stories, the very label ‘children’s story’, which became meaningful only in the context of the inter-war transformation of European Jewish society and the spread of Yiddishist ideas, is justified by, and in turn suggests, the possibility of constructing these texts as narratives of identity formation. Yiddish children’s literature became esteemed precisely at a time when Jewish collective identity was in f lux. Hence it may be argued that just as dedicating a pre-modern text to women served to legitimize the existence of the text itself, ‘packaging’ a modern Yiddish text as a children’s story fulfilled the function of signalling to the (adult) reader that the text explored issues of identity formation, that it provided a response to the challenge of secular modernity. Of necessity, the Yiddishist redefinition of Jewish collective identity required reciprocal ascription and avowal of this new identity among individuals, and thus also had an impact on personal identity. Quite feasibly, then, children’s stories can chart processes of both collective and personal identity formation, and Bergelson’s ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ and Mayse-bikhl may be seen to provide two examples of such narratives. 2. ‘Dos goldene kaykele’: The Unbreakable Bond with the Prophet Elijah ‘Dos goldene kaykele’, the first of Bergelson’s children’s stories to appear, reads at first glance like a straightforward Jewish fairy tale. Two small children, Moyshele and his sister Khanele, await the festival of Passover, but with a sick father at home, there is no money to buy them new clothes and shoes for the holiday. The saddened and disappointed children are comforted by the appearance of an old man mit a langer vayser bord, mit lange vayse bremen un mit oygn likhtike vi shtern, ‘with a long white beard, with long white eyebrows and with eyes shining like stars’ (11), who gives them each a little golden ball. The old man disappears, and the two balls start moving of their own accord, rolling uphill and downhill into a tifn, tifn vald, ‘deep,

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deep forest’ (12), with Moyshele and Khanele running after them until they reach a little house where they find two golden bedsteads with red silken bedclothes. In the morning, after spending the night in the house, Moyshele and Khanele find another room, in which is laid out a set of beautiful clothes for each of them: a golden dress with a red silk ribbon and a pair of golden shoes and silken socks for Khanele; and for Moyshele, red silk trousers with gold buttons, a pair of golden shoes, and a red silk hat with a golden tassel. The clothes fit the children perfectly. When Khanele voices the wish to go back to their parents, Moyshele asks the golden balls to show them the way, whereupon the balls start moving once again, leading the children back home. At first, the parents do not recognize Moyshele and Khanele because of the costly clothes the children are wearing; only when their mother looks into their eyes does she identify her son and daughter. The children tell their mother what has happened and general happiness ensues. The story ends with the assurance that none of them ever forgot Elijah the Prophet. ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ is a tale of departure and return. It unfolds with Moyshele and Khanele leaving their impoverished family home and closes with the reunion of children and parents. Instigating the children’s temporary separation from their parents is Elijah the Prophet, ‘just about the most popular character in Jewish folklore’.24 In fact, in both plot and structure, ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ follows the mould of many Elijah stories in the Jewish folkloric tradition. The story first introduces the reader to the protagonists whose sufferings attract Elijah the Prophet, protector of the virtuous poor and guarantor of justice.25 Then Elijah suddenly appears in disguise to the protagonists, giving out a magical item (the little golden balls). Thereafter, their benefactor promptly vanishes, without revealing his true identity. In consequence of the objects given them by the prophet, the protagonists’ fate is transformed; they find riches and are no longer needy and indigent. The story ends with the protagonists realizing that it was Elijah the Prophet who intervened in their lives. Given that Bergelson’s ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ emulates traditional Yiddish tales of the Prophet Elijah, it is perhaps to be expected that it fulfils Dov Noy’s criteria for a Jewish folk tale by creating a uniquely Jewish context. Time, characters, and place can serve as ‘guideposts for identifying a tale as Jewish’.26 In the case of ‘Dos goldene kaykele’, the story is set directly before Peysekh, at a time in the Jewish liturgical year that is most intimately associated with Elijah the Prophet, himself a stock character in Jewish storytelling. By centering the story on the upcoming holiday celebration, Bergelson unmistakably situates the story in a Jewish home and thus, in an identifiable Jewish locale. However, for Noy, a story qualifies as a Jewish folk tale only if it contains a ‘lesson — sometimes about life, but more often about man’s duty to God, to his fellow man and to his people’.27 The didactic purpose of the tales featuring Elijah the Prophet is immediately evident: he rewards the innocent and pious poor, but punishes and thereby leads back those who stray from the righteous path. Elijah consequently responds to man’s ‘eternal quest for justice’,28 and his stories may be seen as ‘an expression of social protest’,29 especially as it is invariably the rich and powerful who are portrayed as having abandoned Jewish values and morality. What could then be more suitable than a tale of Elijah

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the Prophet to inculcate an awareness of social justice and equity in the children in the new, secular Yiddish-language schools? Nevertheless, although it imitates and presents itself as an Elijah story, ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ contains elements not found in the traditional tales, reconfiguring the role of Elijah in the process. First, the tale’s chief characters — or at least Moyshele, as the male protagonist — are less passive and exert greater inf luence over their own destiny than many of the usual protagonists in the traditional Elijah stories. Thus, having been led by the little golden balls to the little house in the forest, the children encounter their designated clothes only because they enter through a door that Moyshele discovers after he wakes up in the morning. Rather than Elijah showing them directly to the new clothes by means of the golden balls, it is the children’s initiative and courage that leads to success: they have to find and open the door for themselves to discover their new-found fortunes. Moyshele displays similar initiative when he directs the golden balls to take him and his sister home. No longer does he entirely subordinate himself to their power by following them blindly and without knowing where they may lead him; it is now he who instructs and commands them, he who has become their master: kaykele, du sheyns | kaykele, du kleyns | fir undz funem veldele | tsu tate-mames shtibele, ‘little ball, you beautiful one | little ball, you little one | lead us out of the little forest | to our parents’ little house’ (15). While ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ still portrays Elijah as ‘the deliverer of hope’,30 it is also a story about an individual’s resourcefulness and achievements, which is incompatible with a view that ‘passivity is the highest attribute of man’,31 as often promoted in the classic Elijah tales. Moyshele is thus a character who does not entirely conform to traditional Jewish values, but instead represents a young generation that challenges acquiescence and received norms. The departure from home that is thematized in ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ may symbolize both the real and metaphorical voyages of Jewish youth away from the shtetl and their parents’ home at the time of Bergelson’s writing. The quest for a better life and the creation of new forms of Jewish identity, which characterized Eastern European Jewish life in the early twentieth century, necessitated severing the constricting bonds with the past and taking leave — often quite literally — of the previous generation. In ‘Dos goldene kaykele’, the children’s journey away from home ends in an empty little house. In its size, this dwelling in which the fortunes of Moyshele and Khanele change seems adequately proportioned for the children’s own size, and indeed, they seem to be expected — fully made-up beds and clothes await them. The clothes, which are punkt nokh zeyer mos, ‘exactly to their measure’ (14), are red and gold in colour, as are the bed sheets. If Bergelson merely wanted the colours to signal wealth and opulence, purple and gold would have been a more established choice. His use of red as the predominant colour of the children’s new clothes clearly alludes to red as ‘the universal symbol of the revolution and a general call for change’.32 In this way, Elijah the Prophet emerges as a more radical character in Bergelson’s story, transcending his traditional role as helper of people in distress to become a more direct advocate for social change. He guides the children to the colours of the socialist revolutionary movement, which in the story are synonymous with prosperity. Thus, Bergelson’s ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ reinvents the Elijah story

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to serve a new, politicized agenda. It uses familiar motifs and narrative structures only to present an alternative to traditional, fatalist resignation, where justice and dignity are bestowed upon the people by a magical figure, rather than an enforceable right attained by active struggle. However, to read the story with hindsight simply as a revolutionary parable would be to ignore its ending. Happy to be wearing their new clothes, the children return home and fail to be recognized by their parents, who ask, ver iz der prints mit der printsesin? ‘Who are this prince and princess?’ (16). It is their mother who finally recognizes them, looking not at the children’s clothes but into their eyes. Here, Bergelson introduces an ambivalent note into what at first seems a wholehearted endorsement of revolutionary ideology. The new clothes, which fit the children so well, also alienate them from their parents, making them unrecognizable to their closest family, without whom it is doubtful that the children can survive outside of the magical forest. Only the eyes, the ‘windows to the soul’, reveal the children’s true identity to their mother, which prompts the happy ending of the story. The children’s well-being is contingent not on the new clothes but on inter-generational harmony; and harmony is achieved by children and parents alike remembering Elijah the Prophet: zey hobn getrunken, gegesn und Eliyahu hanovi nit fargesn, ‘they drank, ate, and didn’t forget Elijah the Prophet’ (16). The very last sentence of the story recalls the phrase zeykher letov, ‘may he be remembered for good’, which is traditionally applied to Elijah in Jewish lore.33 The story’s happy ending depends on the recognition and transmission of traditional Jewish concepts and tropes. Writing ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ in Kiev in 1914, Bergelson was part of a circle of writers and artists whose goal, among other things, ‘was the creation of a suitable Yiddish children’s literature’.34 As Roskies notes further, what was deemed suitable largely derived from Jewish folk iconography, commended as being perfectly matched to the sensibilities of children. The large stock of traditional Jewish tales could be raided and appropriated for the construction of a new, secular Jewish identity. When the curricula of the new Yiddish secular schools asked for children’s fiction that outlined and reinforced the new vision of Jewish life, the writers of the Kiev circle (and others) responded by providing recast folk tales. ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ may thus be read as a narrative of collective identity formation. It appears, though, that for Bergelson the stock character of Elijah the Prophet did not merely function as a convenient peg on which to hang a piece of proletarian propaganda. True, in ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ the life of Jewish children is bettered by adopting the revolutionary red banner, but the story clearly suggests that revolutionary ideology is not a viable model of Jewish existence if it is not paired with Jewish traditionalism and an appreciation of the Jewish past. Bergelson, who professed to support the revolution and welcomed it when it came, maps out a form of collective Jewish identity in which Elijah the Prophet is to be remembered for good rather than discarded on the heap of religious superstitions — hardly a viewpoint which is easily reconcilable with the revolutionary ideology of the Bolsheviks. Regardless of whether or not children were the intended readership of Bergelson’s ‘Dos goldene kaykele’, writing the story as a tale for children allowed its author to explore issues of collective identity formation while incorporating

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into the story elements from traditional Jewish folklore, as this was the accepted mode of literature designed to be read in the emerging Yiddish schools. If ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ is ambivalent and inconclusive in regard to the direction of Jewish collective identity and affiliation, it mirrors Bergelson’s own uncertainty and doubt. In ‘Dos goldene kaykele’, Bergelson sharpens the social criticism that is inherent in the traditional Elijah tales, but he leaves the bond itself intact, adding a link to the chain of tradition rather than breaking free. 3. Mayse-bikhl: The Art of Becoming a Storyteller Bergelson’s Mayse-bikhl, the last of his writings to be regarded as a ‘children’s story’, consists of eight chapters, in which the narrator relates the growth of his enchantment with storytelling and his development as a storyteller. Subtitled ‘Fayvls mayses’ (Fayvl’s stories), Mayse-bikhl may have been intended as a book made up of several parts. In its first edition of 1919, the book ends with the sentence, ikh her zikh on mit a sakh mayses, nor vegn zey vayter inem tsveytn bikhl, ‘I listen to a lot of stories, but more about them in the second book’ (39), which possibly suggests that another part was planned. However, this sentence no longer appears in the 1923 edition, and there is no evidence of Bergelson having made any further foray into children’s literature after the initial publication of Mayse-bikhl. Indeed, the subtitle of Mayse-bikhl will initially baff le the reader, because Fayvl, the young boy whom the main protagonist and first-person child narrator befriends in the second chapter, is not the only storyteller, let alone the narrative’s principal narrator. Moreover, Fayvl’s stories do not feature until the third chapter, entitled ‘Fayvl kon mayses’ (Fayvl knows stories), which stands out less for Fayvl’s stories than for the fact that it is the first and only time that the narrator’s name, Syome, is mentioned in the book. But then most of what we encounter in the Mayse-bikhl is baff ling and strange. The story opens with the narrator recalling the departure of his mother, who is taken away from their family home by two men in order that she can seek a cure for her failing eyesight. The mother’s destination, the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, provides the only concrete reference point in the story. Neither the town in which the story takes place, nor the birthplace of the narrator, nor any other place referred to in the text is named or otherwise specified; the topography of the story remains elusive: geboyrn bin ikh oykh nisht do, nor ergets andersh-vu, in a groyser shtot, ‘I was also not born here, but somewhere else, in a big city’ (6); do bay undz in shtot hobn zey gevoynt, tsi ergets vu in an ander shtot, ‘they lived here in our town, or somewhere else in another town’ (22). The mother, too, is only a vague memory, a shadowy figure whose face the narrator cannot recall, as though her blindness has somehow been projected on to him; he is not even sure whether or not she was younger than Aunt Tsharne, in whose care she left him. The departure of the mother has arrested time in much of the house, fun demolt on zaynen in zal un in di vayterdike khadorim gantse teg farmakht di lodn, ‘from then on the shutters in the parlour and in the other rooms remained closed for days on end’ (6). The only lively place in the narrator’s home is the

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kitchen, which serves as meeting place for the four adult characters presented in the tale: Aunt Tsharne, who has six fingers on her right hand; Buntsye the servant; Nekhe, the neighbour who has a cleft lip; and Yosl the Strong, a dwarf, who is the local handyman. A visit to Yosl the Strong to engage his services for a job at the house provides the occasion for the introduction of Fayvl, the Mayse-bikhl’s other child character. Dressed in his holiday best, the narrator is too shy to follow his aunt inside Yosl’s house and so comes to strike up a conversation with a boy sitting on a front porch and petting a goat. Fayvl lives in di ekste shtub fun shtot, ‘the last house in town’ (10), which looks abandoned and desolate — the front door is filled in with loam and, instead of panes, the windows are covered with old sheets. Fayvl, shver-fisiker, ‘heavy on his feet’ (12), shares in common with the narrator the fact that he does not live with his mother, as both the narrator and the reader learn later. Although Fayvl refers to the existence of a stepmother, there is no evidence that he lives with anybody else, and doubt is cast on his story by the uninhabitable state of the house, both outside and inside, where it is unfinished and unfurnished, and the air is thick with der reyekh fun sharfn tshad un fun opgeloshener sreyfe, ‘the sharp smell of fumes and extinguished fire’ (30). In fact, there are grounds to suspect that Fayvl is nothing but a figment of the narrator’s imagination. First, in the description the narrator gives, Fayvl’s house seems to be part of an unreal world in which the laws of nature are suspended. When the narrator tries to enter from the front porch, he finds that it is too dark to see into the house and he cannot find any ground on which to step; once inside, he is in a room groys un breyt vi a feld, ‘as big and wide as a field’ (30); and in ergets iz di shayn nit azoy hel un nit azoy goldn, vi do bay Fayvlen in der heym ‘nowhere does the light shine as bright and golden as in Fayvl’s home’ (31). Furthermore, when the narrator asks Yosl the Strong — ostensibly Yosl’s next-door neighbour — about Fayvl, the handyman, who always has a joke up his sleeve, reacts with surprise and struggles to find something to say: — Fayvl zitst dort oyfn pidashik? Demolt tut oyf mir Yosl der shtarker a kuk. Er makht a farvundert ponem un shtekt mir aroys dem shpits fun zayn langn roytn tsingl. — Er zitst, — zogt er, — vi ikh bin a yid, er zitst. A poyze. — Er glet di tsig? Nor Yosl kukt zikh shoyn mer nit um. Er iz farnumen mit oysrekhenen dem shtof, vos er shnaydt tsu. — Er glet, — zogt er un heybt on shnaydn dem shtof mit zayn sher, — er glet ... nokh a min gletn. A tsveyte poyze. — Az ir vet geyn aheym, vet ir mikh mitnemen tsu Fayvlen? — Mitnemen? — fregt er, beshas er heybt on oyf mir farvundert tsu kukn. — Nu, un di mume Tsharne? vos vet deroyf zogn di mume Tsharne? (26) [— Does Fayvl sit on his front porch? Yosl the Strong looks at me. He makes an astonished face and pokes out the tip of his long red tongue at me.

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— He sits — he says — as I’m a Jew, he sits. Silence. — Does he pet the goat? But Yosl doesn’t pay attention to me anymore. He is busy measuring how much fabric to cut. — He pets the goat, he says, while starting to cut the fabric with his scissors. — He pets the goat ... kind of. A second silence. — When you go home, will you take me to Fayvl? — Take you? — he asks, starting to look at me weirdly. — And Aunt Tsharne? What will Aunt Tsharne say about this?]

Yosl’s bewilderment at the narrator’s questions may have its explanation in the unlikely nature of the friendship between Fayvl and the narrator. Fayvl, barefoot, puffy and dirty, deposited on the front porch by his stepmother when she leaves for work in the morning, differs strikingly from the narrator, who grows up in a house with separate living, dining, and reception rooms and who dresses up in his holiday best when venturing outside his home with his aunt. Fayvl is friendly, selfassured, and a masterful storyteller, whereas the narrator is shy, fearful, and inept at expressing himself: ikh vil vegn dem dertseyln mayn khaver Fayvlen, nor ikh veys nit vi azoy, ‘I want to tell my friend Fayvl about this, but I don’t know how’ (16). Yet Yosl’s reaction also seems entirely congruous with a situation in which the narrator has asked about an imaginary friend, and the adult does not want to dispel the child’s belief but is not sure how to respond. Looking astonished and somewhat uneasy, Yosl busies himself with his upholstering job and answers the narrator’s questions by repeating the same words back at him: ‘Does Fayvl sit on his front porch?’ ... ‘He sits’; ‘Does he pet the goat?’ ... ‘He pets the goat’. Yosl’s assertions are undercut by hedging and tentative language (‘as I’m a Jew’; ‘kind of ’); and when the narrator makes a direct request to be taken to Fayvl, Yosl appeals to the higher authority in the house: ‘What will Aunt Tsharne say about this?’ Aunt Tsharne, the mother surrogate, seemingly plays along, for she is the only adult character in the tale who has any interaction with Fayvl. What’s more, she encourages the narrator to pursue a friendship with Fayvl, asking Fayvl his name and inviting him to their house after the boys’ initial meeting. This behaviour is in line with her clear affection for the narrator. Notwithstanding her gruff demeanour and her repeated reproofs that the narrator is a biter kind, ‘a miserable child’, she goes out of her way to comply with his wishes and defends him in sharp words against Buntsye the servant’s charge that he will end up a good-for-nothing because he has his every whim indulged: du bebest [...] altsding vos s’kumt dir aroyf der tsung, bebestu, ‘you’re jabbering [...] everything that comes into your head, you blabber out’ (34). Given Bergelson’s characterization of the narrator, it is difficult not to perceive a resemblance between this child and Bergelson himself, not to view the narrator as an autobiographical ref lection of the author. Bergelson, the balebatisher poet, ‘genteel poet’,35 raised in an aff luent Hasidic home where separate living, dining, and reception rooms would have been the norm, embraced the Russian Jewish bourgeoisie as his natural milieu. Coming to Yiddish from writing in Hebrew and Russian, he did not initially feel at home either with the Yiddish language or

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with Yiddish storytelling.36 Similarly, when asked by Moyshe Katz, the literary columnist at the New York Yiddish newspaper Morgn-frayhayt, why the upwardly mobile characters in his writings only rarely addressed each other directly, Bergelson replied that they did not know ‘how to express themselves and their sensibilities in Yiddish’.37 The difficulties experienced by the narrator in the Mayse-bikhl in articulating his thoughts and feelings, in constructing a narrative — ‘I want to tell my friend Fayvl about this, but I don’t know how’ (16) — mirror Bergelson’s own experience and his interaction with the Russian Jews of his class and generation. And just as Bergelson’s works testify to his having found a Yiddish voice, the Maysebikhl shows the narrator growing into a Yiddish storyteller who, at the very end of the book, sneaks in and takes up a place among the Jewish conscripts in the old synagogue, who pass the time by telling each other stories throughout the night: dort farblayb ikh a gantse nakht nebn Mikhlen mit zayne khaveyrim. Ikh her zikh on mit a sakh mayses, nor vegn zey vayter inem tsveytn bikhl, ‘I spend an entire night there, next to Mikhl and his friends. I listen to a lot of stories, but more about them in the second book’ (39). The narrator of the Mayse-bikhl is guided by Fayvl in his journey towards becoming a storyteller. Fayvl’s stories offer models for the narrator to emulate and provide powerful emotional experiences. Thus Fayvl’s story about a succubus who falls in love with a young man makes the narrator wonder whether he can see this story unfold before his own eyes: s’dakht zikh: ot-ot veln zikh dort aroysshtekn a por hent, yunge un sheyne, zey veln tsvey mol a patsh ton in der luft, un a kol vet dort nemen oysshrayen un klogn: nishto mayner! ... nishto mayner!, ‘it seems to me that soon, very soon, a pair of young and beautiful hands will stretch out of the water there, they will clap twice in the air, and a voice will cry out in sorrow, “Mine isn’t here ... Mine isn’t here” ’ (19f.). Reliving the story, the narrator retells the story to himself and to the reader, thereby practising his storytelling skills. At the same time, Fayvl’s stories create an awareness of, and awaken an interest in, the stories that the narrator hears from the women around him, from Aunt Tsharne, Buntsye the servant, and the neighbour Nekhe. The diet of stories on which the narrator of the Mayse-bikhl is reared is made up of precisely those stories criticized as harmful to children by the earliest Yiddish writers interested in children’s literature. Thus, Mordechai Spektor (1858–1925), editor of the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Der hoysfraynd (The House Friend), wrote in the introduction to his Bikhl yontevdiker ertseylungen (Little book of festive stories), published in Warsaw in 1898: A yidish kind az er hot kheyshek tsum lezn, leyent er take oykh di mayses fun sheydim mit rukhes oder romanen glaykh mit dervaksene lezer. Far yunge kinder zenen azoyne bikher nokh shedlekher vi far dervaksene [...] [If a Yiddish-speaking child has the desire to read, he will surely, just like adult readers, read stories about demons and ghosts or novels. Such books are even more harmful for young children than for adults [...]]38

Spektor’s critique echoes the comments made even earlier by the playwright Yoel Berish Falkovitsh in the introduction to his 1867 play Reb Khayml der kotsn (Reb Khayml the leader):

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me muz di kinder tsu ersht ophitn di nyankes zoln zey nit dertseyln mayses fun nit-gute, fun leytsim, fun upyors, fun a farsholtener bas-malke, fun a farf lukhtn ben-meylekh, vorem fun azoyne mayses vern di kinder obergleybish, un az zey vern groys, gleybn zey in ale narishkeytn, un shrekn zikh far zeyer eygenem shotn. [First of all, one has to prevent nursemaids from telling the children stories about demons, sprites, ghosts, a cursed princess, a damned prince, because from such stories children become superstitious and when they grow up, they will believe all kinds of nonsense and be frightened by their own shadow.]39

In the Mayse-bikhl, however, tales of Jewish fantasy seem to empower the narrator rather than make him fearful of his own shadow. Of course he is also scared by stories about corpses (meysim) who roam the synagogue at night, sprites (leytsim) who frighten girls out of their wits, and succubae (shedikhes) who lure young men into the depths of the river, not to mention Fayvl’s descriptions of hellfire based on what he has observed through his gehenem-shpaktiv, ‘Gehenna telescope’, a piece of coloured glass. But at the same time, projecting his fears on to the supernatural allows the narrator to gain in confidence, and as the story progresses he increasingly braves the world outside his home. The stories also make him f luent in the discourse of his community where a parallel world of supernatural creatures exists alongside the daily reality: Aunt Tsharne was nearly tricked into the river, Buntsye the servant has no doubt that the local tailor will burn in hell, and Nekhe’s own sister died from hiccuping when pursued by a sprite. A fantastical world presents itself to the narrator, from which he can draw strength — just like the young Jewish conscripts waiting to be called up, for whom storytelling may be the only mechanism for coping with the knowledge that they will have to serve twenty-five years or more in the tsar’s army. The narrator, if he is an autobiographical ref lection of the author, will remain an outsider; he is born into the wrong time and family to be an authentic teller of traditional lore, and his curiosity regarding the group of Jewish conscripts might foreshadow that he, like them, will leave the town and his family. Fayvl, the narrator’s friend, imaginary friend, or alter ego, on the other hand, is ‘heavy on his feet’. It is difficult for him to walk even a couple of steps, and thus, he is forever bound to the shtetl and to a world inhabited by ghosts. As in ‘Dos goldene kaykele’, Bergelson uses the existing imagery and language of Jewish storytelling to explore the role of Jewish tradition in the formation of identity. For him, as for many other modern Yiddish writers, the shtetl is rooted in superstition, but rather than attacking superstition, Bergelson recognizes it to be the tradition that made him a writer. Accordingly, his Mayse-bikhl can be read as a narrative of personal identity formation. The author’s development as a writer is intimately linked to his familiarity with the fantastical tales that were an integral component of shtetl life; and part of him will stay in this ghostlike world of childhood no matter what distance he might travel as a writer. 4. Conclusion: Viewing Childhood as a Point of Departure and Return Having observed at the outset that children’s literature is at best a heterogeneous category, it seems nevertheless possible to identify common themes in the two

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children’s stories by Bergelson considered here. Both ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ and Mayse-bikhl negotiate the terrain between secular modernity and Jewish tradition. Both, unusually for texts to be read in the new secular Yiddish schools, seem sceptical that the Yiddish language alone can define a homeland. Instead, they affirm the importance of the old traditional stories — not as a stock of tales to be raided and recast, but as an integral part of Jewish collective and personal identity. The two texts also share the fact that they both feature narratives of departure. In ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ the children are lured away from their home by the little golden balls, without the intervention of which their situation would not have improved. In Mayse-bikhl, the theme of departure enters the story in the form of the mother, and of the conscripts whose nights of storytelling must soon come to an end. While departure is then thematized in both texts, only ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ is straightforwardly a tale of return. By contrast with Moyshele and Khanele, the narrator in Mayse-bikhl has not yet left his home and, in any case, the story’s topography is too shadowy and murky for there to be a clear path along which he can travel. Whereas the happy ending of ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ is contingent on the children’s return, the rather more neutral ending of Mayse-bikhl hints at the possibility that the narrator will leave. However, the very act of Bergelson’s storytelling in Mayse-bikhl suggests that childhood is a point that the writer can revisit. If ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ is a story about what childhood should be, about the possible directions for Jewish education and identity at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mayse-bikhl is a story about the individual childhood of a professional storyteller. For Bergelson, writing children’s stories in the early years of Yiddish children’s literature afforded him the possibility of openly turning to the world of Jewish folklore without having to identify himself as traditionalist or ‘nationalist’, given the Yiddishist belief that folklore was the key to reaching the Yiddish child. As such, ‘Dos goldene kaykele’ and Mayse-bikhl may provide yet further testimony for Bergelson’s ambiguous attitude towards the progressive endeavours of Yiddishists and communists alike. Notes to Chapter 4 1. Barbara Wall, The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). 2. For a recent comprehensive overview of approaches and issues in the criticism of children’s literature, see Peter Hunt (ed.), International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 2004). 3. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 4. 4. Peter Hunt, Criticism and Children’s Literature: Theory and Practice (Cardiff: University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology, Department of English, 1985), p. 48. 5. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 6. As Naomi Seidman notes, title-page dedications were most commonly to women and uneducated men; that is ‘men who are like women’. See Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 16. For an analysis of the social and symbolic aspects of gender definitions in early modern Yiddish

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religious literature, see Chava Weissler, ‘For Women and for Men Who Are Like Women’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 5 (1989), 7–24. 7. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. by Shlomo Noble (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 277. 8. Cited in Dina Abramowicz, ‘Jiddische Kinder- und Jugendliteratur [Yiddish Literature for Children and Adolescents]’, in Lexikon der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Personen-, Länder- und Sachartikel zu Geschichte und Gegenwart der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur, II, ed. by Klaus Doderer (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1977), pp. 69–73; here p. 69. The original quotation is from Shmuel Niger’s article ‘Kinder-literatur [Children’s Literature]’, which appeared in Di yudishe velt, September 1913, p. 143–46. 9. Chone Shmeruk, ‘Sholem Aleykhem un di onheybn fun der yidisher literatur far kinder’, Di goldene keyt, 112 (1984), 39–53. Shmeruk points out that Sholem Aleichem substantially revised ‘Der zeyger’ (The watch) for publication as a Hebrew-language children’s story, eliminating its ‘clearly frightening and grotesque’ features, which suggests that the author did not consider the original Yiddish version to be suitable for children (47). Shmeruk also observes that Sholem Aleichem’s contemporaries voiced similar doubts as to the appropriateness of the volume Mayses far yidishe kinder for children. Thus, Sholem Aleichem’s son-in-law, Y. D. Berkovitsh, suggested to the author that they ‘plough through’ the stories, taking out the passages not accessible to children, before republishing them as children’s stories under the imprint of the Warsaw publisher Tsentral (48). The proposal was favourably received by Sholem Aleichem, who answered Berkovitsh in a letter of 23 August 1912, agreeing that the stories should be simplified and shortened to the highest degree ‘in the spirit of true children’s stories’ (49). 10. Abramowicz, ‘Jidische Kinder- und Jugendliteratur’, p. 69 ff.; Chone Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Adaptations of Children’s Stories from World Literature’, in Art and its Uses: The Visual Image and Modern Jewish Society, ed. by Ezra Mendelsohn, Studies in Contemporary Jewry: An Annual, 6 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 186–200. 11. Yael Darr and Zohar Shavit, ‘Jewish-Hebrew, Hebrew and Israeli Children’s Literature’, in International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, II, ed. by Peter Hunt (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 1115–23; here p. 1116. 12. Shlomo Berger, ‘An Invitation to Buy and Read: Paratexts of Yiddish Books in Amsterdam, 1650–1800’, Book History, 7 (2004), 32–61; here p. 39. 13. Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 66. 14. Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, p. 68. 15. Introduction to Catherine Madsen and Neil Zagorin (eds), Annotated Bibliography of the Noah Cotsen Library of Yiddish Children’s Literature from the Collections of the YIVO Institute and the National Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA: National Yiddish Book Center, 2003). 16. For example, the Yiddish children’s journal Grininke beymelekh — on which more below — repeatedly appealed to children to urge their schools and classes to subscribe to the journal (and did not refrain from naming and shaming schools that had not yet taken out a subscription). Esfir Abramson-Alpertienė, a librarian at the National Library of Lithuania, recalls, with fondness, reading the Yiddish children’s journal Grininke beymelekh both in primary school and in the Sholem Aleykhem Gymnazium in Kovno (Kaunas). 17. Hirsz Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War II, trans. by Eva Zeitlin Dobkin, ed. by Dina Abramowicz and Jeffrey Shandler (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), p. 316. 18. The full references, as given in Roberta Saltzman’s bibliography of Bergelson’s works in the present volume, are ‘Dos goldene kaykele’, Grininke beymelekh, February 1914: 11–16; and ‘A mayse mit zibn feygelekh’, Grininke beymelekh, March 1915: 135–42. 19. David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 193. The Wostok edition of Bergelson’s Mayse-bikhl is available as a facsimile reprint, published by the department of Yiddish at the Hebrew University’s Institute of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, 1983. 20. Shmeruk, ‘Sholem Aleykhem’, p. 48.

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21. Ruth Wisse, ‘Singer’s Paradoxical Progress’, Commentary, Feb. 1979, pp. 33–38; here p. 34. 22. Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), p. 44. 23. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 12. 24. Joachim Neugroschel (ed. and trans.), The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1989), p. 2. 25. As guarantor of justice, Elijah’s task is not only to reward the virtuous poor but also to mete out punishment to the greedy, uncompassionate, and arrogant. Thus, two types of Elijah tales may be distinguished; note, however, that reward and punishment stories can overlap, both juxtaposing a poor, honest character with a rich and devious figure. 26. Peninnah Schram, ‘The Voice is the Messenger of the Heart: Shared Stories Still Work Best’, Tradition, 37.4 (2003), 5–37; here p. 7. 27. Dov Noy, ‘Foreword’ in Miriam’s Tambourine: Jewish Folktales from around the World, ed. by Howard Schwartz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. xi–xix; here p. xviii. 28. Elie Wiesel, Five Biblical Portraits (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 42. 29. Neugroschel, The Shtetl, p. 2. 30. Schram, ‘The Voice is the Messenger’, p. 19. 31. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, p. 197. 32. Christoph Neidhart, review of Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917, by Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Journal of Cold War Studies, 2 (2000), 122–25; here p. 122. While the red f lag, and thus the red colour itself, is often identified with the Bolshevik revolution, Figes and Kolonitskii argue that it served as a polyvalent symbol, whose use indicated support for revolutionary reform but not necessarily for the Bolshevik cause. See Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 33. Peninnah Schram, Tales of Elijah the Prophet (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1997), p. xxvi. The phrase also accompanies the mention of Elijah’s name in the Haggadot for Passover and the brit milah (circumcision) liturgy. 34. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, p. 201. The Kiev circle, another member of which was Der Nister (himself a writer of children’s stories), also included Yiddish pedagogues. 35. Yitskhok Bashevis (Isaac Bashevis Singer), ‘Dovid Bergelsons onheyb un sof ’, in Dovid Bergelson: oysgeklibene shriftn, ed. by Shmuel Rozhansky (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1971), pp. 311–15; here p. 312. 36. Joseph Sherman, ‘Bergelson and Chekhov: Convergences and Departures’, in The Yiddish Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Ritchie Robertson, Studies in Yiddish, 5 (London: Legenda, 2005), pp. 117–33; here p. 117. 37. Moyshe Katz reported his conversation with Bergelson in an article in the Literature and Arts section of Morgn-frayhayt, 2 August 1959; it is cited in Robert Adler Peckerar, ‘Dovid Bergelson’: http://yiddishbookcenter.org/+10280. 38. Cited in Shmeruk, ‘Sholem Aleykhem’, p. 43. 39. Cited. in Shmeruk, ‘Sholem Aleykhem’, p. 41.

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CHAPTER 5

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Yoysef Shor (1922): Between Two Worlds Seth L. Wolitz The novella Yoysef Shor (1922) underwent a long period of gestation during which its text was structured through various levels of signification to create a profoundly pessimistic picture of the upper-class Jewish world of late tsarist Russia, caught in the transition from traditional observance to modern secularism. I shall argue that this is no fragment of a lost larger whole, but a fully integrated work of art in its own right.1 The Genealogy of the Work The tortuous stages of this work’s composition have been traced and analyzed by Ruth Wisse and Avrom Novershtern.2 Originally conceived as a novel provisionally entitled In goles: Ravrebe, its chief character was to be Yone Ravrebe, an estranged Shor uncle living in Switzerland. All that remains of this character is a single, passing allusion in the extant novella (ch. 6, 121–22).3 Conceived about 1909, the first fragment of this planned work was published under the title ‘Tsvey vegn’ (Two roads) in Kiev’s Yidisher almanakh in 1910 with the note, an onheyb fun a dertseylung, ‘a beginning of a story’; some of this early draft was incorporated into the extant text of Yoysef Shor.4 Both Wisse and Novershtern also note that another fragment of significance, entitled ‘Yankev-Nosn Viderpolier’, appeared in the March 1915 issue of the Vilna journal Di yidishe velt, with the gloss, a kapitl fun a greserer zakh, ‘a chapter of something larger’.5 Although this extract eventually formed the first chapter of the novella as we now have it, it was heavily reworked and, in its penultimate form, appeared in the Kiev Kultur-lige’s journal Eygns in 1918, under the title, ‘In fartunklte tsaytn’ (In darkened times) with a concluding comment, ende ershter teyl, ‘end of the first part’.6 If the author did write more, the manuscript pages were lost during the pogroms of 1919,7 and new socio-political realities convinced Bergelson that no further development of this work was possible. Yoysef Shor thus found its final form in volume III of the first edition of his collected writings, published in Berlin in 1922. In 1926, in a letter to Niger, Bergelson stated that in Yoysef Shor his intention was ‘to offer a broad picture of the Jewish middle class in Russia together with the so-called “Jewish haute bourgeoisie” [its upper class]’.8

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If we set the text’s long gestation alongside Bergelson’s 1926 ‘reorientation’ towards Moscow, this remark seems merely to offer a contemporary Bolshevik reading of what is a far richer text. Under its new title, the 1922 text must be recognized as the final state of the work as its author wished it to be read. I conjecture that in 1918 Bergelson chose the title ‘In fartunklte tsaytn’ to encapsulate the last days of the tsarist regime, when nascent hopes of a constitutional monarchy had been disappointed and conditions for the Jewish masses had worsened. These ‘dark times’ are also set in contrast with 1918, the first year of the successful revolution, conceived as the ‘dawn’ of a new era, a metaphor that appeared constantly in Yiddish verse and propaganda.9 But the civil war pogroms of 1919 inf licted appalling destruction on Jewish life, and by 1922 Bergelson had emigrated to Berlin with no further plans to complete his grand project, for history had overtaken the story, its personages, and their class. The Title Bergelson’s decision to permit the completed eight chapters to form a self-contained whole was artistically sound. Since he apparently did not feel that a new dawn had in truth appeared, he chose to embody earlier fartunklte tsaytn in the essentially passive character of Yoysef Shor, their perfect ‘objective correlative’, who mirrors those bourgeois Jewish rentiers that by 1922 had become both otiose and déclassé in the new Bolshevik order. In his very name, Shor balances the extremes of provincial traditionalism and secular accommodationism. At the age of twenty-three, he is der Yoysef Shor mit di laytish gezetste mides un mit di gerotene yidish-veltlikhe kentenishn, ‘that Yoysef Shor with respectable, sober manners and with a fine Jewish and secular education’ (Ch.4, 109). A decidedly non-transgressive figure, he treads carefully between the extremes he encounters, trusting his own judgement and mindful of his dignity. His eligibility as a son-in-law is widely recognized (Ch. 4, 107), but his name is partially compromised by the posthumous reputation of Itsik-Meyer, his miserly and fanatically observant father. His mother was his father’s second wife, and though she stemmed from the Ravrebes, a good family, she was a grushe, vos iz bay im oysn geven nisht mer, vi ‘popraven zikh’ un zikh oyskleydn, ‘a divorcée who intended no more with him than to “better herself ” and to provide herself with clothing’ (Ch. 4, 109), attributes which added little to her son’s standing. With Bergelson’s customary ironic care in choosing onomastics, the surname Shor is rendered subtly pejorative. In Hebrew the word shor means ‘ox’, 10 here carried over into a depreciatory surname that defines one half of Yoysef ’s lineage. Balanced against this, his personal name evokes the intelligent, diplomatic Joseph of the Bible who rises to high status. Thus the name ‘Yoysef Shor’ is an oxymoron summing up the conf licting realities of a crumbling social order. The Central Theme and its Development in the Plot In ‘the mating game’, Bergelson found the ideal situation through which to depict the clash of two antithetical worlds. Traditional Jewish patriarchy predicated its

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survival on the institution of the shatkhn, the matchmaker, who maintained the shtetl’s social order through meticulous observance of the hierarchical taxonomy of yikhes (pedigree), takhles (wealth), and learning. Urban, secular Jews overtly threatened this tradition through the operation of free-market capitalism, open to all ambitious types. This precipitated a social restructuring based no longer on yikhes and learning but on the predominance of wealth, while in socio-political terms, radical new ideologies legitimated the right of individuals to free association in the choice of a mate. Yekhezkel Dobrushin, among other ideologically driven Marxist critics, felt that in this novella Bergelson had paid insufficient attention to politish-gezelshaftlekhe fragn, ‘socio-political questions’, and that the work lacked fartifte sotsiale balaykhtung, ‘profound social awareness’.11 More recently, Mikhail Krutikov, while noting the central role played by money and the ruinous effects of city capitalism on the shtetl economy,12 lays no stress on the fact that Bergelson was not seeking to portray yet again the destruction of the old economic order, as he had done earlier in ‘Arum vokzal’ and Nokh alemen. Instead he created a man caught between the old world and the new, belonging psychologically to neither. In principle, Shor may wish to be an emancipated modern man, but the only practice he understands is traditional. Knowing nothing of the modes of modern courtship, he consequently employs an old-fashioned shatkhn and fails. In the world depicted here, the women, rather than the men, are most liberated. Shor’s aunt Reyzl escapes from patriarchal restrictions to seek love affairs in Paris; the self-reliant Mine Moreynes lives a loose life abroad; and Sorele, the object of Shor’s desire, is emancipated enough to have a lover outside Russia.13 Such women reject a tradition that treats them as commodities. Bergelson’s precise stylistics ensure that Sorele’s calculated absence from the Saturday night soirée, at which Shor intends formally to make an offer for her, defines her assertive independence: Sorele hot dokh geshmeykhlt, beshas m’hot ir gezogt, az er [Yoysef Shor] vet zi kumen zen. Zi iz oyfn gantsn ovnt avekgegangen mit ir bakantn [...] (Ch. 7, 131) [Sorele, however, smiled when she was told that he [Yoysef Shor] would come to see her. She went off for the whole evening with her friend [...]]

The sentence structure turns zi, ‘her’, an accusative, into an object on display, a commodity, rather than identifying ir, ‘her’, a dative, as a living subject who can be met and spoken with, in this way making clear that her absence is wilful, not frivolous. The freedom to choose one’s own mate is the essential issue of this novella, a point noted by Dobrushin, who remarks that der shidekh [iz] di hoypt teme funem verk, ‘the match is the main theme of the work’.14 In his timidity and provincial gaucherie, Yoysef Shor personifies the distress of a divided generation. His failure to obtain not merely an engagement contract, but even a moment’s conversation with the bride he has chosen, has roots in a Russian literary tradition of male timidity that Bergelson reworks to depict a self-defeating adherence to obsolete social usages.15 Against his intuitive judgement, since er hot nit iberik gegloybt Yankev-Nosnen, ‘he did not have excessive trust in Yankev-Nosn’ (Ch. 5, 117), he accepts Viderpolier as his shatkhn and opens himself to a painful

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defeat that exposes the gulf separating an aspiring shtetl provincial from the selfassured city sophisticate. Through the intrigue of the marriage contract, the novella reveals the reciprocal blindness of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie, whether in the shtetl or in the city, to the objective reality of their condition. The Art of Recounting Manipulating the plot to convey the clash of the two antithetical Jewish worlds, Bergelson employs a tripartite structure — (a) in medias res; (b) the recapitulation of the origins of the story; and (c) the dénouement — which, although considerably disrupting the story’s temporal and spatial chronology, intensifies its dramatic effect. In the first three chapters, by throwing the reader directly into the external action — the machinations to bring about the desired shidekh — the narrative focuses attention upon the fault line dividing tradition from individualism through Viderpolier, the matchmaker. Since money dominates all values in this society, there is no human warmth; merely the reification of individuals according to their economic standing. Viderpolier’s greedy anticipation of earning a handsome commission is brazenly manifested in a moment of seeming nonchalance: er [Yoysef Shor] iz gezesn antkegn gayvedik un shvaygndik-shtayf, gekukt vi Yankev-Nosn shpilt vi mit a poshet shtikl papir mitn hunderter, vos er hot nor vos bay im genumen oyf hetsoes [...] (Ch. 5, 117) [Prideful and stiff ly silent he [Yoysef Shor] sat opposite, watching the way Yankev-Nosn toyed with the hundred-rouble note he had just taken from him for expenses, as though toying with a commonplace scrap of paper.]

Viderpolier’s dubious morality is identified on two occasions by his antithesis, Moykher Tov (good merchant), the sole admirable, if old-fashioned, businessman in the novella, who alone can face down, with the traditional skills of a yeshive education, Viderpolier’s effrontery in pumping him for confidential information. First Yankev-Nosn’s prying letter receives an evasive reply on a kartl, a postcard.16 Then, confronting Moykher Tov in person, Viderpolier is slapped down in terms of the traditional values he himself is supposedly upholding when Moykher Tov tartly notes that az oyb er, Yankev-Nosn, iz oykh gefaln oyf yenem shatkhns gedank, iz dos krum, modne krum, ‘if he, Yankev-Nosn, had chanced upon the same thought as that other matchmaker, this would be wrong, extraordinarily wrong’ (Ch. 1, 94). This confrontation sets up the two perspectives on human conduct which clash throughout the novella. Viderpolier, a talmid khokhem and a follower of the Hasidic rebbe of Skvir,17 believes that people can be manipulated and forced to conform, whereas Moykher Tov, a maskil, believes in the individual’s right to choose and not be imposed upon.18 Bergelson’s intention is not so much to scorn the heritage of the shtetl as to show how even the best representatives of this world are relics whose moral uprightness is no longer potent in modern life. Moykher Tov’s time has passed. Similarly, with the collapse of the shtetl hierarchy, Viderpolier joins the dying rebbe of Groys Setrenits and his ineffectual son Itsikl in social, economic, and moral attenuation. Even those

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who live in the shtetl pay only lip-service to its passé mores. Thus the bohemian Mina Moreynes, strongly attracted to Yoysef Shor, tries to betroth herself to him through an inversion of male-dominated tradition by employing her own shatkhn (Ch. 4, 108). The decayed tradition of matchmaking, the pivot on which the entire action of the novella turns, links Chapters 4–5 and the beginning of Chapter 6 with the first three chapters: Nor ot iz Yankev-Nosn um khalemoyed peysekh avekgeforn keyn Brashek un hot im fun dortn tsugeshikt a briv, az er zol zayn greyt un az mit gots hilf, der shidekh mit Moyshele Levins meydl vet zayn a shidekh. (Ch. 5, 117) [But then, during the intermediate days of Passover, Yankev-Nosn went off to Brashek from where he sent him [Yoysef Shor] a letter indicating that he should hold himself in readiness, and that with God’s help the match with Moyshele Levin’s daughter would be concluded.]

Bergelson foreshortens time by making Viderpolier’s second letter reach Shor from Kiev (Ch. 5, 118) because there, he misleadingly encourages him to infer, heyst es, az m’hot shoyn geredt vegn dem bay Avrom Rapoportn in hoyz un az dos meydl iz oykh derbay geven un hot deroyf maskem geven, ‘it would appear that the topic had been broached in his home with Avrom Rapoport and that the young woman had also been present and had also consented’ (Ch. 5, 118). In all this, no one remains untouched by material considerations. For a moment, Shor himself appreciates the economic advantages of marriage to Moyshele Levin’s heiress, only to recoil in distaste from such acquisitiveness: s’iz geven krum, zeyer krum, ot dos vos er hot hanoe gehat fun raykhn farmegn, vos zi kon im arayntrogn, ‘It was wrong, extraordinarily wrong, for him to take pleasure from the wealth that she could bring him’ (Ch. 5, 118). This deliberate echo of Moykher Tov’s perception that attempts to make this match are krum, modne krum (Ch. 1, 94) points to a seamless blending of plot and style, since the cited passage concludes with a proleptic piece of self-consolation19 that resonates in the novella’s final, pitiful sentence. The finale (Chapters 6–8) is divided into two parts. In chapter 6 Shor meets Mina Moreynes and her father on the train to Kiev on a Tuesday, in Jewish tradition a mazldiker tog, ‘a lucky day’, which turns out to be the opposite for all of them. By contrast with the opening two chapters, which depict the decay of shtetl life, the last two chapters (7–8) pinpoint fragmenting Jewish identity in the city. Overwhelmed by its size, its Christian bells, and its unfamiliar modes of conduct, bemused by its public lectures and intense salon discussions, Shor feels himself de trop. The eagerly anticipated soirée in the Rapoport salon, peopled with acculturated rich Jews, is a farcical non-event that exposes irreconcilable contradictions within Shor himself. With no engagement contract to sign, Shor’s humiliation makes an instructive comment on the nature of Jewish identity at the beginning of the twentieth century.20

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Onomastics, Personages, and Myth Bergelson’s Jewish upper-middle-class characters are defined by their different generations, their dwelling places, and their socio-political outlook. They are divided into two large family groupings: the Rapoports of Kiev and the Shors of Groys Setrenits, each with various dependants and connections. Within this broad division, for comic and ironic purposes Bergelson draws on the mythic, historical, and psychological associations of the names he bestows on them. Onomastics provide a vast semantic and semiotic field that he richly exploits.21 Bergelson’s Kiev is home to super-rich Jews like Brodsky, the great sugar manufacturer,22 who live in mansions surrounded by all the conveniences of ultra-modern life like telephones, domestic electricity, streetlights, automobiles and telegrams, with access to sophisticated banking arrangements and cultural institutions like theatres, art galleries and newspapers, all of which Bergelson notes with precision. For all their wealth, the Rapoports are a divided family. The deceased patriarch, Yeshue-Hershl Rapoport, a Litvak and a misnaged, built the family fortune from sugar mills (Ch. 1, 86). His personal name, Yeshue ( Joshua), suggests his leadership in opening up the Promised Land of new wealth. His son, Avrom, wearing a ‘sculpted’ beard (Ch. 3, 101) and mumbling a kurtse kries-shma, an abridgement of the morning prayers (Ch. 3, 99), is a transitional figure lost in Zionist reveries. Though he supports the return to the Holy Land, he is hardly a father of his people like his biblical namesake (Genesis 12). Vague and superstitious, he lacks the drive needful to be a successful businessman. His wife Eta — a diminutive form of the name Esther — blonde, like all the novella’s upper-class women, stems from an eminent family. Although she was an orphan united to her husband by arrangement, their marriage became a love match between social equals (Ch. 3, 102).23 Their only child is named Nesi, a diminutive form of Gnesye, a popular Jewish name derived from the Middle High German noun g(es)nanne, meaning ‘one with the same name; comrade’, and from the Latin agnes via Greek, hagnos, meaning ‘chaste, sacred’.24 The fusion of both ‘chaste’ and ‘comrade’ define Nesi’s role: when she appears in her father’s salon, she is among friends who love her and treat her like a china doll. A hunchbacked sculptress unable to create life herself, Nesi produces images that in the Jewish tradition are associated with the golem, a dead object without ruekh, the divine spirit. The distance between Nesi and her parents is as great as the distance between her father and her grandfather. Those westernized secularists who surround her, for whom orthodox prohibitions against making graven images no longer hold any force, include the arrogant blond painter Yoel Vayntroyb, who exemplifies Bergelson’s irony in pinning a name rich in biblical associations on a character who functions in a morally dubious way. His personal name, in Hebrew that both of a prophet and of God himself, is linked to the surname Vayntroyb, ‘grape cluster’, a symbol of fertility,25 yet Yoel is totally self-absorbed, gehaltn in eyn dertseyln vegn zikh, ‘continually speaking only about himself ’ (Ch. 8, 137). Sorele — a diminutive of Sarah, meaning ‘princess’ — almost twenty years old (Ch. 1, 93), having lost her father and been more or less abandoned by her

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mother, is the antithesis of her biblical namesake, Abraham’s obedient wife. After her husband’s death, her mother, Avrom Rapoport’s sister Khanele — a diminutive of Khane, meaning ‘grace [of God]’ — returns to marry a former lover in Riga before the end of the formal mourning period, bringing with her an inheritance of millions to a bachelor who already possesses three million roubles of his own (Ch. 1, 93). In this novella, even relationships of passion rest on the solid foundations of class and money. Moyshe Levin, the learned husband her father chose for her, wore a blond, carefully shaped beard, suggesting his drift away from strict observance, and his inclination to worldliness is implied in his fondness for quoting German poets. Another converse of a biblical namesake, he is an incompetent kept af loat by his wife’s dowry (Ch. 1, 86). From the Rapoports, with their high-caste family name and city houses, the Shors and their hangers-on are separated as much by their dubious surname as by the shtetlekh in which they live. Groys Setrenits, Koslove, and Brashek are outposts of the traditional world where, in the face of creeping modernity, orthodox Jewish life continues at f luctuating levels of observance. The Shor dynasty is founded by an unnamed grandfather, an alter gayvenik, a shoyte, un nokh an amorets a groyser, ‘an arrogant old fool and an ignoramus to boot’, according to Viderpolier (Ch. 1, 92), whose urgent competitiveness, coupled with a quest for status, drove him to imitate Yeshue-Hershl Rapoport by building sugar mills. His belligerent and inf lexible son, Itsik-Meyer, belies his second name, Meyer — in Hebrew, ‘giving light’ — since he is lost in moral darkness, and is the converse of his gullible biblical namesake, the patriarch Isaac, unlike whom he is denied a peaceful death. A karger yid, a kaysn, a barimer un a bal-gayve, ‘an irascible miser and an arrogant braggart’, on his deathbed he cried out that er hot opgelebt a mies lebn, ‘he had lived an ugly life’ (Ch. 4, 109). He has alienated his two older sisters, Esther (star) and Hodl (glory), who join the town’s social élite only by cutting off all contact with their reciprocally scornful brother. The decay of religious traditionalism is pointed in the conduct of two contrasting personalities whose former status was assured. In a shtetl world of religious traditionalism, the learned Yankev-Nosn Viderpolier occupies a highly respected rank. However, his surname defines him as stemming from a town named vidra which, in Belorussian dialect, figuratively denotes an impudent man,26 so the adjective Bergelson frequently attaches to him is azesdik, ‘insolent’ (Ch. 5, 116). To all appearances a devout Hasid, Viderpolier espouses tradition out of rancour against a modernity he neither understands nor likes: Yankev-Nosn iz adayem farblibn a Skvire khosed, iz shoyn mer nisht vi der velt oyf tsulokhes, ‘the fact that to this day Yankev-Nosn had remained a Skvir Hasid was for no reason other than to spite the world’s opinion’ (Ch. 1, 90). His scorn of secularity is absolute, since by devaluing the expertise in Talmud for which he was once esteemed, it demeans him into a superf luous being with no raison d’être. His only interest in modern life is financial: er [Viderpolier] hot faynt dos vort ‘kabtsn’ [...] er, Yankev-Nosn, redt mekoyekh gvirim, ‘he detested the word “pauper” [...] he, Yankev-Nosn arranged marriages only for the rich’ (Ch. 1, 91). His mastery of Talmud gives him great status among the religiously observant rich whom he scorns and mocks behind their backs

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(Ch. 1, 92). An intriguer and an accomplished shnorer, he shares with his biblical namesake Jacob only the quality of duplicity, while his impeccable Hasidic dress, carriage, and verbal dexterity offer a virtually foolproof disguise for moral turpitude: tsurik mit etlekhe yorn hot der khsidish oysgeputster yid gelozt ergets in a kleyn shtetl zayn orem vayb un shikt ir nit di gantse tsayt keyn prute nit, ‘some years before, this Jew tricked out in fine Hasidic dress had abandoned his poor wife somewhere in a small shtetl and in all the intervening time had never sent her a single cent’ (Ch. 5, 117). Ostensibly active, dynamic, and bustling, he is merely a luftmentsh whose scheming comes to naught because he is out of step with modernity. As soon as he realizes that he cannot make the match on which his profit depends, he vanishes, leaving the passive and inept Shor to manage on his own as best he can. Sadder is the position of the honest believer, the rebbe of Groys Setrenits, who lives in poverty, unaware that his wife is obliged to solicit charitable donations from his former followers in order for her family to survive. Terminally ill, the rebbe embodies the impending demise of Hasidism in particular, and religious observance in general. No longer able to hold court, he will hand over his doomed dynasty to his chain-smoking son, Itsikl, whose thoughts are preoccupied with erotic images. One is a memory, during a wedding in the rebbe’s court, of when a shtayfer parfumen-shmekndiker meydlsher hant [...] hot zikh dortn in der finster tsu im [...] tsugetuliet, ‘a firm, perfumed young woman’s hand [...] had nestled into his own there in the darkness’. Another is a more recent image seen from the window of a train passing over desolate open mud f lats — a visual metaphor for the condition of Jews in the tsarist Pale of Settlement — of a hertl genz [vos] griblt dortn mit di shnoblen, ‘a f lock of geese probing there with their beaks’ and a meydl in vaysn, ‘ a young woman in white’, who appears among them, an image identical to Shor’s imagined vision of Sorele Levin at home, where zi prest zikh itst oys a vays koftl oyf peysekh, ‘she was pressing a white blouse for Passover’ (Ch. 4–5, 113–15). The eroticism here is palpable: these white geese and women in white garments suggest the masturbatory fantasies of the men who visualize them, just as the eating of chocolates by both Mina Moreynes and the painter Vayntroyb suggest sexual cravings. Locked into a religious system that regards romantic attachments as irrelevant, even irreverent, Itsikl’s sexual needs mirror his friend Shor’s desires as well as his inadequacies, which is why Shor wants to escape his former close contact with so atavistic a failure: er is nokh zayn meynung geven a farfalener, ot der Itsikl; er hot shoyn gornisht geton afile tselibn Groys-Setrenitser rabones, ‘in his [Shor’s] opinion, this Itsikl was a lost soul; he had now accomplished nothing even to help save the Groys Setrenits rabbinate’ (Ch. 5, 116). Within the Shor orbit are also what are left of the Moreynes family, formerly the old money of Groys Setrenits, deriving its surname from the Hebrew honorific moreynu, ‘our teacher’, generally bestowed on rabbis. Now, through poor financial management and sybaritic indulgence, they are impoverished, part of the hollow shell of the old Jewish world. Nevertheless, old Moreynes clings to his superior yikhes, his lineage: finding himself sharing the same train to Kiev as Shor, he embarrasses the younger man by unexpectedly mentioning his mother’s brother, Yone Ravrebe. This individual, bearing the personal name of the prophet who

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attempted to f lee from duties imposed by God and a surname meaning ‘great rabbi’, is the black sheep who f led to Europe seeking a life far from doomed shtetl patriarchy (Ch. 6, 122). The Moreyneses, father and daughter, serve the function of narrative counterpoint. The situation old Moreynes sets up on the train to Kiev (Ch. 6, 119–22) parallels the scene created by Yoel Vayntroyb on the train back to Kiev (Chapter 8, 135–37); his daughter Mina sends a shatkhn to Yoysef Shor, just as Shor sends one to Sorele; Shor remains as oblivious to Mine’s attentions (Ch. 4, 113; Ch. 6, 122) as Sorele is unmindful of his (Ch. 8, 140). Mine’s ironically chosen name, derived from the old German Minne, meaning love, here signals unrequited desire (Ch. 6, 122). The narrative takes pains to show that the first generation of Jews to take advantage of worldly opportunities were assertive figures with drive, virility, and a clear moral vision that brought them success.. The second generation has lost this vitality and sense of purpose. In the city they fall to squabbling over inheritance, making accommodations with Russian culture, and indulging in political idealism and airy aestheticism; in the country they lead a cramped existence of social reticence and intellectual deprivation. By the third generation, all in the city have become acculturated secularists, rejecting Jewishness in everything but externals and held back only by Gentile anti-Semitism from full assimilation. In the country, they remain trapped in a static round of rote repetition. Spatial Configurations The novella operates on a number of spatial levels. The one-sided love story starts in Warsaw and ends in Kiev, with a fulcrum in Groys Setrenits. The fact that this amour manqué is initiated in a train compartment emphasizes both the peripatetic existence of modern Jews and their delimited spatial compass: their only escape from the Pale is train travel ‘abroad’, the locus of individual freedom throughout the text. This spatial dimension also uncovers the tensions between Judaism’s religious heritage and the demands of modernity: the radically sundered world views of shtetl and city emerge clearly in their contrasting attitudes to travel. The Shors find their needs adequately supplied in their small towns and travel only for business or religious duty. The Rapoports, on the other hand, make frequent visits to Europe that define their adherence to secularism, cultural enrichment, and hedonistic pleasure. Train travel is shown to expand social and intellectual interaction; by contrast, as the Jewish landscape of tsarist Russia changes under the press of economic circumstances, it physically manifests the extent to which the old order is dying. The almost obliterated route that Viderpolier’s horse-drawn cart follows, ostensibly to visit the rebbe in Skvir, along a dirt road littered with the bones of dead dogs, runs past a ruined brick factory, one of the many casualties of an inefficient economic system that now threatens the closure of Moreynes’s dated foundry as well (Ch. 6. 119). But since we learn that a train now runs from Groys Setrenits past Skvir (Ch. 1, 87), Viderpolier’s determination to take a more circuitous route with less efficient transport is exposed as a mere ploy to enable him to pay a business call on Moykher Tov in Brashek. The would-be shatkhn masks worldly ends behind

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spiritual proprieties. This decay of religious faith finds its physical correlative in such deserted backwaters as Koslove and Brashek, formerly religious and economic hubs but now sustained by barely viable commercial enterprises like the ill-run sugar mill jointly owned by Moshe Levin and Avrom Rapoport (Ch. 1, 88–89). Only Groys Setrenits holds its own because it is served by good transport: it has a railway station, whereas Koslove has none, and Brashek’s lies eight versts outside the town (Ch. 2, 95). As the economic order transforms itself, the religious order decays; the moral absolutism of the shtetl yields to the materialistic relativism of the city. The further subversion of traditional faith is evident in changing perceptions of Jerusalem. Where Jewish religious tradition perceives Jerusalem not as a geographical reality but as a metaphysical space to be filled with the coming of the Messiah, ideologically committed Zionists like Avrom Rapoport embrace its physical presence as a political alternative to St Petersburg, and work for its restoration as the seat of an independent Jewish polity (Ch. 3, 100; Ch. 7, 126). As the presence in his salon of a Hebrew poet and a Zionist propagandist indicate, Zionism offers Jews a national alternative to virulent Russian anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, Shor finds his first encounter with the city and with Zion as a political-cultural rather than a spiritual concept dislocating, particularly since virtually everyone he meets has gone abroad for reasons other than business. Everyone travels in the novella, movement suggesting more than an economic, cultural, or leisure-time activity. It seems rather to bespeak the deep psychological unease of society in general and Jews in particular; their sense of standing on radically unstable ground. Though people continually move about physically, however, they never get anywhere psychically: Different types of conveyance define the differences between old world and new, as between ostensible and actual motivation. Viderpolier’s initial choice of cart over train is designed to deceive (Ch. 1, 87), yet when he finds it necessary for his purposes, he does not hesitate to take the train (Ch. 2, 95). The financially overextended Rapoport sets off to his meeting at the bank in his phaeton (Ch. 3, 104); his fellow board member, Madame Bernshteyn, a shrewd modern businesswoman from whom he has already borrowed money, joins him there in her automobile (Ch. 3, 104). With no one to meet him when he arrives in Kiev, Shor takes a droshky to a hotel to further his nuptial plans (Ch. 5, 123), echoing Viderpolier’s wagon ride to Moykher Tov’s araynfirhoyz with similar aims (Ch. 1, 88). All leave the Rapoports’ house, imagining they are moving in a linear direction towards a meaningful goal, unaware that they are all trapped in a gyre. The Temporal Structure The novella’s temporal structure falls into three interrelated parts. The abortive love plot begins a few weeks before the festival of Passover (Ch. 4, 110) and concludes approximately one week after it has ended, on the eve of Easter Sunday (Ch. 7, 127). This comparatively short period of time represents a secular fait divers in which linear time is distorted for aesthetic effect. Beneath Bergelson’s representation of current Jewish reality lie allusions to parallel events in Jewish history. Onomastics

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drawn from the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus evoke the founders of the Jewish religion specifically to make pointed contrasts with the inferior, modern bearers of their venerated names. Bergelson’s burlesque is directed not at the ancient history-makers of Israel, but at their twentieth-century descendants. The key biblical text to which Bergelson alludes is the Exodus story. The characters of this novella are mythically conceived as bondsmen in Russia, figured as a reconstituted version of pharaonic Egypt; they are a decentred people in liminal time seeking to change their condition while wandering in a contemporary desert devoid of any clear ethical vision, teleology, leader, or Promised Land. The traditionalists are enmeshed in otiose religious rituals, while the secularists are either mired in conf licting political and socio-cultural squabbles over the nature of modern Jewish identity, or are preparing to surrender to the hegemonic culture and assimilate. In a public lecture, Shor encounters for the first time Jewish suffering discussed not as a theological or metaphysical condition, but as a daily reality, yet it seems utterly remote from his own experience or concerns: az Yoysef Shor hot gemakht an onshtrengung, hot er derhert, vi der student redt vegn di tsores, vos yidn hobn oystushteyn in Rusland un in ale andere lender. Altsding, vos der student zogt, iz emes. [...] nor im, Yoysef Shorn, geyt es azoy vintsik on, un a fremder iz er do [...] (Ch. 7, 125–26) [When Yoysef Shor made an effort, he heard the student speaking about the tribulations Jews were obliged to endure in Russia and in other countries. Everything the student said was true. [...] but it concerned him, Yoysef Shor, very little, and he was a stranger here [...]]

The third division of the novella’s temporal structure — a corollary of its biblical substructure — is built on the ritual celebration of Passover, that complex Jewish festival which fuses the mythical creation of a new people, chosen by God to receive a unique ethical constitution, with the springtime renewal of life. Bergelson exploits this festival for all its temporal, spatial, and ethical implications. The fact that Passover in intimately connected with, and f lows into, its Christian theological interpretation also carries serious extra-religious and socio-political implications in the text. Mentions of Passover regularly mark the novella’s temporal f low. During the festival’s intermediate days, Viderpolier leaves for Skvir (Ch. 1, 87), investigates the possibilities for making a match in Brashek (Ch. 1, 94), and is shocked by the irreligious conduct of some small-time Jewish businessmen on a train to Kiev (Ch. 2, 95–96). In Kiev, he enjoys motse-yontev, the last night of the festival, with a Skvir compatriot (Ch. 2, 98), while Avrom Rapoport returns late by train from BrestLitovsk and discovers that his niece Sorele has returned just prior to the festival, but that his daughter Nesi will arrive only at the end of the week (Ch. 3, 101). Still strictly observant, Shor departs for Kiev only on the Tuesday after the festival, when kristn hobn zikh umgekert aheym mit brenendike likht in di hent, un arum un arum hobn gehudert lepishe ful-glekerdike kloysters, ‘Christians were returning home with burning candles in their hands and the air all around reverberated with churches sluggishly tolling all their bells’ (Ch. 6, 123).27 These Gentile religious signifiers are linked to rumours of an impending pogrom (Ch. 7, 127), so that both Passover and Easter are

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jointly developed as motifs of cultural-religious identity the spiritual significance of which is wholly enfeebled. Passover and Easter Both Passover and Easter have teleological intent. Easter calls on believing Christians to renew their faith, while Passover requires all Jews to regard themselves individually as participants in the miraculous Exodus from Egypt. Passover is thus a communal event that has no place for personal feelings, and is not a propitious time to pursue personal interests. By using the Passover period as his novella’s temporal grid, Bergelson satirizes the love story as both limited and spatially ungrounded. It is merely an encounter on a moving train — a one-sided love affair en passage indeed — which exists entirely as a fantasy in Shor’s mind. Its essential foreignness to his experience is counterpointed in his confrontation with the Christian commemoration of Easter, through both of which he discovers his limitations. The end of Passover is a return to the banal norm. The traditional observances of Passover are obscured in a multiplicity of selfserving or ignored activities. For example, it is the quintessential time of family renewal and the ingathering of scattered relatives. Thus as Eta Rapoport awaits the return of her husband from a business trip, and their daughter from the art academy in St Petersburg, Sorele Levin returns to her uncle’s home in Kiev and Mina Moreynes to her father in Groys Setrenits. Yet none of these returnees is either observant or particularly family-oriented. For the Zionists, the season’s religious significance is displaced in favour of an ideology that converts a mystical concept into a political objective, while in the shtetlekh of Groys Setrenits, Koslove, and Brashek there is only rote observance without innovation or renewal. Whether traditional or modern, the Jewish world of this novella is in a state of irremediable stasis. Nevertheless, several of the observances of Passover are used to give insight into characters and situations, notably khalemoyed peysekh, the intermediate days of the Passover week. A distinctive period in the Jewish calendar, these are regarded as sacred days during which the prohibition against eating leaven remains in force and the special prayers of the season must be recited, but unlike the first two and last two days, to which many of the strictures of Sabbath observance apply, these khol days permit normal work and travel. During this period, the opportunist Viderpolier inappropriately sets in motion his matchmaking plans, but outside the confines of the shtetl, he is out of his depth, as emerges in his total alienation from the clean-shaven young traders on the train to Kiev: Er hot zikh glaykh derfilt tsvishn zey elnt [...]. Tsvishn zey, di [yidn-] galokhim, vos esn khomets um khalemoyed-peysekh, iz er geven der eyntsiker yid in der shvartser kapote un inem zaydenem hitl, vos er kon lernen. Forzikhtik hot er zikh tsu zey tsugezetst, gemakht mit zey a shmues, un beshas-mayse zikh alts arumgekukt in di zaytn mit aza vunder, glaykh er volt zikh khideshn: ‘Ze nor: s’hot a moyl?! ... S’redt Yidish, vi ale mentshn...’ (Ch. 2, 95–96) [He immediately felt isolated among them [...]. Among these clean-shaven [secular] Jews who were eating forbidden foods during the intermediate days

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of Passover, he was the only one in a black capote and silk hat who was learned in Jewish law. Gingerly he settled down next to them, fell into conversation with them, and as he did so, continually stared about him in wonderment, as though he were amazed: ‘Just look, it has a mouth?! ... It speaks Yiddish, like all human beings ...].

Viderpolier’s reaction shows how far he is from modern reality, for he is confronting young men of the same generation as those for whom he is matchmaking, without the slightest recognition that times have changed, and that his function no longer has meaning. Since in his value system these people are sinners, he scornfully reduces them to objects, oblivious to the moral dubiousness of his own motives. Discovering from them that Avrom Rapoport, the lynchpin of his enterprise, is himself more than a little worldly, fartrakhtendik hot er zikh genumen kratsn in peye, ‘lost in thought, he took to scratching his sidelock’ (Ch. 2, 96). This narrative stage direction ironically makes an abstracted physical tic, developed in the course of holy study, manifest a wholly materialistic concern. As the celebration of Easter fills the streets of the city with Christians, the first to appear is the Russian Orthodox priest Viderpolier encounters on the Brashek station platform. The comedy of his startled reaction highlights the segregated provincialism of the Jewish religious élite: un dos heyst bay zey a heyliker, mishteyns-gezogt, a min rov, lehavdl [...] un [er] hot badoyert di umes-hooylem, ‘And this they call a holy man? Some kind of rabbi, may the comparison be forgiven me [...] and [he] took pity on the Gentiles’ (Ch. 2, 95). As Viderpolier’s orthodox locale in the first part of the novella is replaced by Avrom Rapoport’s worldly milieu in the second part, Passover, a function of the shtetl, is superseded by Easter, the hegemonic signifier of the city. Its bells and candles make Yoysef Shor physically and psychologically uneasy (Ch. 6, 125), driving him into a theatre where he hears a Zionist deploring the plight of modern Jewry in Russian. Though in itself an outlandish experience for Shor, this harangue has at least some tangential connection with Jews, providing escape from the ubiquity of the city’s even more foreign Christian ethos; it supplies a shtile yidishe bahaltenish in ot dem ovnt fun fremdn, shvern gleker-klang un fun heln kristlekhn likht, ‘a quiet Jewish hiding place in this evening of alien, ponderous clanging of bells and glaring Christian candles’ (Ch. 7, 125). The celebration of Easter is moreover alive with the menace of pogroms. As Shor enters the Rapoport home, redt men vegn dem, vos itst tsu groys khoge tsu shmuest men shoyn in shtot vegn a nayem tsugegreytn pogrom, s’iz a fakt, ‘they were discussing the fact that now, at the very time of this major festival, the city was buzzing with rumours about a new pogrom that had been planned’ (Ch. 7, 127). Eta Rapoport’s reaction to a Christian passing her window is feeble and indolent, however: [zi] hot [...] derzen durkhn fenster dos ongetsundene likht, vos a farshpetikter krist trogt nokh opgehit tsu zikh aheym. — Kh’hob gebetn, hot zi a zog geton, nit rirndik zikh fun ort, vi a kimpetorin, — lozt arop di shtorn, ‘through the window, she glimpsed a lighted candle that a Christian latecomer was protecting as he carried it home. — I’ve already asked, she interjected, not stirring from her place, like a woman who has just given birth, — Pull down the blinds’ (Ch. 7, 127). The reasoning behind her demand is

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absurd, as though drawing down a blind could remove the impending danger, but her passivity bespeaks a general yielding to a presumed inevitability. The Uses of the Comic Plot, characters, and situations are developed with liberal use of the comic, chief ly through a free indirect style that undercuts all utterances and attitudes.28 Each chapter of the novella, constructed like a theatrical act, is composed of four scenes that conclude with a coup de théâtre, a peripeteia, or a melodramatic suspension of the action (Chs. 2, 4, 5, 7), or else with a closing statement in direct discourse that exposes comic self-blindness (Chs. 1, 3, 8). For example, Shor may be a victim in his own eyes, but from the perspective of Sorele and her lover, he and his matchmaker are absurd shadows from an incomprehensible past. In turn, Sorele exists merely as an idealized love object that hovers silently before us only as a figment of Shor’s imagination. Functioning outside contemporary realities and thus rendered hors de combat, Shor is ridiculous in his provincial self-absorption. Ironic def lation of pretentiousness, the chief goal of this novella’s comedy, is accomplished, as always in Bergelson’s work, through the manipulation of different kinds of discourse, most obviously in Viderpolier’s preening attempt to overbear Moykher Tov’s objections. Employing the well-tried rhetorical device of anaphora, he lays claim to his own importance in unmediated direct speech: Yakh for itst fun Brashek glaykh keyn Kiev. Yakh vel forshteln di zakh [...] Yakh, Yankev-Nosn Viderpolier, ‘I am now leaving Brashek and travelling straight to Kiev. I shall present the case [...] I, Yankev-Nosn Viderpolier’ (Ch. 1, 95). His grandiloquent self-aggrandizement is undermined, however, by his use of a provincial dialect form of the first-person singular and its emphatic repetition. By contrast, Eta Rapoport’s pitiful attempts to cling to some remnants of her lost youth are cruelly undermined by the dry narrative tone that presents them: Dertseylndik, hot zi zikh un im tey ongegosn un hot derbay ale mol aroysgerukt fun untern shal a shlankn naketn elnboygn. Zi hot zey gemuzt dreyst bavayzn, ot di nakete elnboygns; yednfals zaynen zey geven dos eyntsike, vos iz bay ir geblibn yung un frish, vi meydelvayz. (Ch. 3, 101–02) [While talking, she poured tea for him [her husband] and herself, and each time she did so, she drew out from under her shawl a slender bare elbow. She showed them off boldly, these bare elbows; in any case, they were the only thing of hers that had remained young and fresh, as in the days of her maidenhood.]

The comic absurdity of taking pride in the youthful appearance of her elbows is intensified by her husband’s unspoken reaction to the sight of them: itlekhs mol, ven zayn gezetster blik iz gefaln oyf irn an antplektn elnboygn, hot er gedenkt, az er hot zi amol lib gehat, ‘several times, when his staid glance fell on one of her uncovered elbows, he remembered that he had once loved her’ (Ch. 3, 102). In the contest of wills between Viderpolier and Moykher Tov, the weapons are a skilful play of language by two shrewd and knowledgeable operators. The letters that pass between them as the novella opens satirize both inf lated rabbinic Hebrew and the period’s maskilic attempts to revive Hebrew as a language of

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contemporary communication. Viderpolier makes the first move in a missive of f lowery pomposity: dokh bin ikh zikh soymekh afn laytishkeyt fun mayn har un fraynt un gloyb, az er vet mikh, kholile, nit farfirn un vet aroyzogn dem gantsn emes unter zayn harts, ‘Nevertheless I can build my trust upon the noblesse of my gentleman and friend and believe that he will not, God forbid, mislead me and will unburden to me the entire truth hidden in his heart’ (Ch. 1, 85). The sharp-witted maskil Moykher Tov, instantly alert to chicanery, ripostes with a mirror-image reply: farvos den zol ikh nit kenen aroysreydn dem gantsn emes fun unter mayn harts? Tsi kon ikh den fardekn fun mayn libhober a zakh? ‘Why then should I not be able to speak forth the entire truth hidden in my heart? Could I then possibly conceal anything from my esteemed friend?’ (Ch. 1, 85). This comedy is double-edged. At the same time that it develops both character and plot, it permits an ironic narrative intervention that mocks the ostentatious stylistics of Viderpolier, appreciates the stylistic talents of an evasive Moykher Tov, and is amused that both use the dated diction of a long dead language: in gantsn iz dos geven geshribn kimat inem zelbn melitse-ton, vos Rab-shake, der sar fun Ashur, hot tsurik mit a por toyznt yor aroysgeredt tsu di yidn oyf di moyern fun Yerusholayim, ‘All in all, it was composed in virtually the same f lorid style that Rabshakeh, the prince of Assyria, employed in declaiming to the Jews on the walls of Jerusalem a few thousand years ago’ (Ch. 1, 86). The explicit biblical comparison (2 Kings 18:17–37) slyly insinuates that Hebrew — as opposed to the Yiddish vernacular — is a lifeless language, suitable only for erudite verbal games. Behind all their verbosity, however, Moykher Tov’s replies — even when directly pressed for information — are evasively non-committal, yielding a double-edged comment that is a perfect illustration of how Bergelson’s free indirect style works: geheysn hot es, az Moykher Tov, der maskil, iz oykh nit keyn frits, ‘This meant that Moykher Tov, the maskil, was also no fool’ (Ch. 1, 87). What is on one level a narratorial comment, is on another Viderpolier admitting to himself that he has been bested. The narrative moves easily from high to low comedy. At the door of the Rapoport house, Shor and the older Hebrew poet clumsily jostle each other as each raises a hand to press the electric buzzer, and Shor startles the poet with his highly formal apology (Ch. 7, 126). This minor piece of slapstick exposes Shor’s social insecurity, from which he takes refuge in hyper-correctness, to the astonishment of its recipient. Yet on the Rapoports’ scale of social significance, both these callers are utterly inconsequential, an insulting dismissal later driven home in Eta Rapoport’s absurdly strenuous efforts to avoid meeting Yoysef Shor’s eyes by attracting the attention of Madame Koyre (Ch. 7, 129–30). Avrom Rapoport himself is far from the authoritative director of major financial enterprises the reader has been led to expect. He wanders vaguely around his house desultorily trying to order a variety of business dealings he can hardly remember, yet at the same time drawing comfort from this disorientation: er hot dokh gehat farshidene ibergloybike simonim fun baglikn, un ot der nepl iz geven eyner fun zey, ‘He held to certain superstitious signs of good luck and this fogginess was one of them’ (Ch. 3, 103). By transforming this ‘fogginess’ into a consolatory notion that it is a harbinger of prosperity, he can evade facing up to the fact that his business affairs are failing and that he is overwhelmed by unwanted and unwelcome responsibilities.

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Art, Empathy, and Unfulfilment One of Yoel Vayntroyb’s paintings, reproductions of which Nesi Rapoport draws from her reticule, offers a pictorial summary of what the narrative has been illustrating:29 oyf eynem fun zey zenen geven oysgemolt fir blinde ferd. Der iker zenen ober nisht geven di ferd aleyn, nor di mayse, vos hot zikh, kukndik oyf zey, gedenkt, ‘on one of them four blind horses were depicted. The central point about it, however, was not simply the horses, but the narrative that was awakened by looking at them’ (Ch. 8, 134–35). This ‘narrative’ centres on a moment in the painter’s unhappy childhood when he was moved by the sight of four blind horses endlessly walking round in the circle imposed by the treadmill they are turning. Nesi’s implied commentary30 suggests that this work, derisively called the four blind yidishe ferd, ‘Jewish horses’, by one of Vayntroyb’s detractors, depicts the artist’s effort to escape the treadmill of religious tradition, scorning der kheyder, der rebe, un talmidim vos khazern on oyfher di peysekhdike nudne parshe khumesh, ‘the elementary religious school, the rabbi, and students who unendingly repeat the boring Passover section of the Pentateuch’ (Ch. 8, 134). Vayntroyb has now returned from abroad as a famous artist, but the subject matter of his work still appears to ref lect the irresolvable conf lict of his emotional existence, the clash between tradition and modernity: For his father he was a pustun-pastnik, ‘a worthless good-for-nothing’ (Ch. 8, 138), but in the judgement of a fellow artist like Nesi, er iz a groyser, gor a groyser, ‘he’s a great man, truly great’ (Ch. 8, 135). The broken-backed horses that move endlessly on in the belief that they are climbing high mountains, nor zey blaybn dokh oyf eyn ort, ‘but remain fixed in the same place’, allegorically define the predicament of the Jews assembled in Rapoport’s salon. The Jewish world they occupy, whether rural or urban, is in terminal decay: families are dysfunctional, individuals are isolated, old traditions are dead letters, and monetary prices replace ethical values. But Vayntroyb, the creator of this painting, is certainly no superior moral being. On the contrary, reports depict him as boorish, overbearing, and something of a fool. Sharing the same compartment with the redhaired student and a young woman to whom the student is attracted, Vayntroyb hot aroysgevizn alerley shtik fun a kleynshtetldikn kloymersht klugetshkn amorets, a gush. [...] [er] hot dortn dem gantsn veg gegesn dem meydls marantsn mitn meydls shokolad un [...] hot dortn gehaltn in eyn dertseyln vegn zikh, ‘displayed all the antics of a provincial ignoramus trying to be smart, a lout. [...] [He] spent the whole journey eating the girl’s oranges and chocolate and [...] continually spoke only about himself ’ (Ch. 8, 136). It is never clear whether or not Vayntroyb is genuinely talented. Nesi, herself a mediocre sculptor, insists that she recognizes greatness in him, whereas the redhaired student, his rival in love, predictably argues that he lacks the ‘substance’ to become a true master (Ch. 8, 135). All he really seems to possess are the carefully studied appearance and bohemian manners that supposedly distinguish ‘artists’ from ordinary people: [...] der moler Vayntroyb, vos trogt lange blonde hor mit a kurts sametn rekl [...] misht zikh ale vayle arayn mit puste diburim un lozt nisht firn dem shmues; er hoydert zikh, zitsndik hin un tsurik, shoklt mit di fis un knakt tsu mitn tsung

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[...] un firt zikh, vi a yunger gliklekher klezmer, vos iz gevoynt oystsunemen oyf khasenes [...]. (Ch. 8, 137) [...] the painter Vayntroyb, who wore long blond hair with a short velvet jacket [...] continually interposed with idle chatter and prevented all other conversation; he continually swayed back and forth, shuff led his feet and clacked his tongue [...] and behaved like a breezy young musician who was used to dazzling the girls at weddings [...]

Eschewing a final judgement, the narrative offers, through the voices of others, a comic salon scene that self-consciously highlights the function of art as a general ref lector of society, and the decentred role of the artist in the Jewish branch of it. In depicting this gathering, an imitation of Gentile upper-class practices, with its unsubtle aesthetic discussions barely concealing professional and sexual rivalries and conducted in a polylingual babble of Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, Bergelson subtly raises the question of whether this ‘modern’ encounter is not itself simply one more empty ritual, as devoid of meaning as rote prayers in the synagogue. For Shor, however, this encounter is profoundly disturbing. Though he has arrived with the determination az keyner fun di arumike zol keyn trakht nisht ton, az er, Yoysef Shor, bamerkt do epes nayes [...] un is lakhlutn nisht gekumen aher zikh epes lernen, ‘that none of those standing around should imagine that he, Yoysef Shor, had noticed anything new here [...] and had absolutely not come here to learn anything’, he is painfully aware of being a parvenu wholly out of his depth: ergets tif in zikh iz er geven punkt azoy glaykh arumgeshoyren un reyn oysgezeyft, vi in droysn; s’hot zikh gedakht, az ven er tut zikh a rir, volt zikh in zayn naykayt gelozt hern a skrip, ‘inwardly, somewhere deep within himself, he was exactly as smoothly shaved and spotlessly scrubbed as he was outwardly; it seemed as though whenever he moved, his very newness would cause him to squeak’ (Ch. 7, 129). As he soon discovers, much is happening here that he needs to learn. While the discussion moves over an entire range of knowledge far outside his experience, [hot er] funsnay bay zikh aropgefaln, ‘he once again lost heart in himself ’ and attempts to compensate by bringing habitual conscientiousness in study to his aid: Vegn azelkhe zakhn, vi m’redt do bay Avrom Rapoport in hoyz, hot men shoyn keyn mol nisht geredt nisht bay zayn foter un nisht bay zayne beyde raykhe mumes. Kedey tsu dergeyn, in vos bashteyt der vikuekh hot er zikh ibergezetst oyf a noent benkl un hot khsidish tsugeboygn dos oyer. (Ch. 8, 135) [Such things as were being discussed here in Avrom Rapoport’s house had never ever been mentioned either in his father’s home or in that of his two wealthy aunts. In order to comprehend what the debate was about, he moved over to a nearby chair and listened attentively, like a Hasid.]

The narratorial wit that presents Shor absorbing a secular discussion like a Hasid attending to the discourses of a rebbe skilfully heightens the comic gulf between tradition and modernity, shtetl and city. But Shor’s first encounter with urban sophistication ironically occurs at the very moment at which he understands that the traditional values in which he has placed his trust have no validity here. Exploiting his celebrity, Vayntroyb, as the angry red-haired student makes clear, is a practised interloper, and Shor is abruptly made to understand that Sorele,

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heedless of convention, has ignored the shatkhn to choose the peripatetic, posturing bohemian over the settled, aff luent bachelor. bay Yoysef Shor vert derfun vi farshtorbn dos harts, skhakl oyf eyn rege vert es vi farshtorbn un mer gornisht. Nor bald kumt er tsurik tsu zikh un farkrimt koym-koym di lipn, azoy nisht tsufridn iz er shoyn mit zikh aleyn, mit dem, vos im art. (Ch. 8, 136) [Yoysef Shor’s overwhelmed heart gave way; in fact for a moment, it died and was naught. But he immediately pulled himself together and grimaced barely noticeably, so dissatisfied was he now with himself, and with the matter that was troubling him.]

A f lash of insight reveals that in this modish urban Jewish salon, greater value is placed on celebrity and aesthetics than on wealth and religious observance. Shor’s conformist reliance on a shatkhn has made him look foolish even to himself, and his attempt to marry Sorele is exposed as an idle daydream. In his distress, he inevitably turns to Nesi Rapaport, the first woman outside his tight family circle to whom he feels an instinctive closeness derived partly from her childlike stature, and partly from the patronizing story told, half in derision, by one of the guests, about her cab drive home from the station late the night before: di nakht iz kalt, der veg barg-aroyf gedoyert, un zi hot nokh rakhmones oyfn ferd, vos varft tsufil mit di dare klubes un bet zikh baym izvoztshik, der altn goy: — Nite, tayerinker, trayb nisht azoy. (Ch. 7, 129) [The night was cold, the road a long way uphill, and she had compassion only for the horse, the lean f lanks of which were shuddering too greatly, and she pleaded with the old Gentile cab driver: — No, my dear, don’t drive like that.]

Stemming from her personal defencelessness, Nesi’s compassion for this horse deftly links her to the image and thematic significance of the blind horses in Vayntroyb’s painting. She pities the horses because she recognizes herself as one of them. Where her acquaintances are insensible to the paradigmatic implications of their plight, Nesi’s personal pain gives her both compassion and insight into the vulnerabilities of others (Ch. 7, 128). Although she is well aware that her studies both in Berne and St Petersburg have been tolerated nor derfar vos zi iz geven a hoykerin, ‘only because she was a hunchback’, as a patronizing indulgence of a person who cannot expect to live a normal life, dokh hot zikh in ir gefilt epes mer dervaksns, vi in ale arumike (Ch. 7, 128), ‘yet there was something more adult about her than in all those about her’. Nesi empathizes with others because she has little self-esteem, is mindful that in art she is a posheter bal-melokhe, ‘a humble artisan’ (Ch. 8, 139), and feels a stranger in her father’s house because she has been a disappointment to him. Rendered vulnerable himself, Shor, in a mirror image, instantly responds to the vulnerability in her: Yoysef Shor kukt, vi umetik un elnt di kindersh gringe Nesi iz geblibn zitsn do baym kleynem helish-roytn fayer, un keyner geyt tsu ir nisht tsu. S’iz shoyn afile a rakhmones oyf ir tsu kukn. (Ch. 8, 138) [Yoysef Shor noticed how solitary and forlorn the frail, childlike Nesi looked,

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left sitting here by the small, bright red fire, with no one coming up to her. It moved him to compassion even to look at her.]

But even the consolation of shared misery is denied him. Wishing to speak with Nesi a while longer, he finds that it is late and all the other guests are leaving (Ch. 8, 139). Out in the street, he is obliged to play out the final act of his humiliation by seeing not his fantasy but the all too real figure of Sorele animatedly walking home with his victorious rival, Vayntroyb. Since Shor does not regard himself as a failure, his momentary vulnerability is instantly dissipated, and his family pride reasserts itself: un plutsem hot zikh in im farshtarkt der gayvediker benyokhed, vos iz oysgevaksn in Groys-Setrenits bay Itsik-Meyer Shor inem opgeshlosenem meyukhesdikn hoyz. (Ch. 8, 140) [And suddenly there surged up in him the overweening pride of an only son who had grown up in Groys-Setrenits in Itsik-Meyer Shor’s close-shuttered, well-to-do house.]

There will be no escape for him from the treadmill of traditional conformity. He will return home, happier to be important in a small shtetl than inept in a great city. Rejecting the lesson of his experience, Shor retreats back into the security of his possessions, away from the deceptively emotional to the seeming solidity of the material. Lacking the aggressiveness modernity demands, he defines his own inadequacy: er iz gegangen mit gikhe trit un hot gedenkt di eygene hayzer, vos er hot in Groys-Setrenits, mit der geyarshnter mil: — Akh yo, di groyse eygene mil, zi iz nokh oykh epes vert. (Ch. 8, 141) [He walked quickly on and remembered the two houses he owned in Groys Setrenits, and the mill he had inherited: — Yes, indeed, the great mill, my very own, it’s still worth something, after all.]

Here bitter comedy mocks an attempt to compensate for humiliated pride by embracing wealth and possessions rather than an ethical sense of being. Conclusion By the time Bergelson left this novella to stand on its own merits as a completed whole in 1922, he knew well that Shor’s material possessions had proved worthless, and that the entire world he had depicted with such skill, irony, and insight had been swept away in the maelstrom of the revolution. He evidently realized that he could add nothing further to the multi-faceted picture he had already painted. The novella’s complex structural patterns depict the decaying, late tsarist Jewish world from every angle. By constructing the narrative around a marriage proposal initiated by a rich young man from a shtetl for the hand of an equally rich heiress from the city, Bergelson dramatized a crucial collision between the accepted traditional mode of communal functioning, and the modern secular belief in individual freedom of choice. Trapped between the two, Shor embodies the

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psychological and emotional tensions of a bourgeois Jewish world poised on the cusp of extinction. Notes to Chapter 5 1. All quotations refer to the text of Yoysef Shor in volume II of David Bergelson, Ale verk (Buenos Aires: YKUF, 1961), pp. 85–141. Chapter and page numbers are cited parenthetically in the body of the essay. English translations are my own. 2. See Ruth Wisse, ‘Vegn Dovid Bergelsons dertseylung, “Yoysef Shor” ’, Di goldene keyt 77 (1972), 133–44; and Avrom Novershtern, ‘Hundert yor Dovid Bergelson: materialn tsu zayn lebn un shafn’, Di goldene keyt, 115 (1985), 44–58. 3. See Novershtern, ‘Hundert yor’, p. 46, quoting from Bergelson’s letter (not dated but supposedly written at the end of 1912 or the beginning of 1913) to Shmuel Niger: ‘Ikh vil shraybn: In goles — Ravrebe.’ Novershtern follows this lead and conjectures (pp. 49–51) who the personages might develop into and appear in Yoysef Shor. 4. Novershtern, ‘Hundert yor’, pp. 50–51. 5. Wisse, ‘Vegn Dovid Bergelsons dertseylung’, p. 133. 6. Yekheskel Dobrushin, Dovid Bergelson (Moscow: Der Emes, 1947), p. 149. As late as 1947, Dobrushin insists that the 1918 version ‘In fartunklte tsaytn’ is the title of Yoysef Shor, for he is either unaware of, or refuses to recognize, the 1922 Wostok edition or the later Kletskin edition of 1927. Rather he insists the work is a teyl fun a roman, ‘part of a novel’, with the title created during World War I. In short, he views the chapters we have as a fragment of a larger, unfinished work which he then interprets as poor vintage Bergelson. Mikhail Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) admits Yoysef Shor as a novella, but even he regards it as a fragment, offering ‘a brief look at this unfinished text’ (p. 48). 7. Novershtern, ‘Hundert yor’, p. 53. 8. Novershtern, ‘Hundert yor’, p. 52 and p. 54 n. 8. The open letter was entitled, ‘An entfer Sh. Niger’ [An Answer to Sh. Niger], Frayhayt, 22 August 1926. 9. As for example the early Kiev Yiddish journals Oyfgang (Sunrise) and Baginen (Dawn), both launched and discontinued in 1919, or the earliest poetry of Peretz Markish. 10. In Yiddish the pronunciation of the word depends on the dialect. In Ukraine, even without the marked long vowel sign, it was pronounced shor, but in the north-eastern areas, Byelorussia, and Poland it was pronounced shur, with or without the shuruq. But even when pronounced as shur, the Hebrew meaning adds a negative note, for the word shur means ‘enemy’ and ‘high wall’. See Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (Teaneck, NJ: Avotaynu, 1993), pp. 531, 541; see also Ben Yehuda’s Pocket English–Hebrew/Hebrew–English Dictionary (New York: Pocket Book, 1961), p. 292, shur. As an added resonance, it is worth nothing also that shor, ‘ox’ or ‘bull’, was the symbol of the biblical Joseph (Deuteronomy 33. 17). 11. Dobrushin, Dovid Bergelson, pp. 151–52. 12. Krutikov, Crisis of Modernity, pp. 48–49. 13. The text’s rare deployment of Sorele’s personal name stresses the fact that the shatkhn Viderpolier, a traditionalist and something of a misanthrope, regards marriage strictly as a contractual undertaking in which the woman is a commodity. Her given name is used only in the Rapoport household, where she is treated as an individual (Ch. 3, 106). Yoysef Shor himself rarely speaks of ‘Sorele’. More usually, he too refers to her as ‘Moyshe Levin’s meydl’ (Ch. 4, 111–12), but in his case, this mode is respectful, cautious, and old-fashioned. 14. Dobrushin, Dovid Bergelson, p. 150. 15. Examples are Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Lopakhin in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. 16. A kartl becomes an emblem of the entire failed match, since the whole of Chapter 6 revolves around the sending and receiving of Avrom Rapoport’s kartl or calling-card. 17. Historically, the Skvirer rebbe at this period was R. Dovidl Twersky (1848–1919), a close relative

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of the rebbes of Chernobyl and Talnye. His followers were drawn chief ly from among the wealthy, which is almost certainly why Viderpolier is one of them. 18. Moykher Tov had in fact once helped a young couple in love to get married by overcoming their respective parents’ objections through learned argument and citation from holy books (Ch. 1, 91). 19. ‘And another thing: he, Yoysef Shor, was in any case rich enough without her; he had enough money of his own.’ 20. The exact period of the setting is not clear; it is either in 1905 at the time of the pogroms in Kiev that caused Sholem Aleichem to f lee abroad, or in 1910, a period of deep pessimism when the Duma had failed and the tsarist regime was at its most repressive. 21. I wish to thank Joseph Sherman, Mikhail Krutikov, Nathan Snyder, and especially Robert Friedman, Director, Center for Jewish History (Genealogy Institute), for their help with these onomastics. 22. It is entirely possible that Bergelson modelled the history of Yoysef Shor’s family on what he knew of the Brodskys. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a Jew named Meyer Schor came to Russia from Brody in Austrian Galicia and moved to Zlatopol, in Kiev province, where he changed his name to Mark Brodsky and prospered in business. His five sons in turn all became wealthy and prominent themselves. One of them, Izrail Brodsky (1823–88), relocated to the city of Kiev in the 1870s and founded the Alexander sugar refinery, which came to control about one quarter of Imperial Russia’s sugar production. All his wealth passed to his sons, one of whom, Lazar, owned three houses in Kiev. During the 1905 pogrom, two of the Brodsky family homes were plundered. See Michael Hamm, Kiev, a Portrait, 1800–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 129–30. 23. This explains her dismay that Yoysef Shor, a member of the lower-status Shor family, might want the hand of her niece, Sorele, who belongs, in her view, to a superior caste. 24. The Eastern Slavic Christian form of this name is Agnesa. See Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names: Their Origins, Structures, Pronunciations and Migrations (Bergenfeld, NJ: Avotaynu, 2001), pp. 508–09. 25. This meaning derives from its allusion to the cluster of grapes brought back by the twelve spies sent out by Moses (Numbers 13. 17–23) as proof of the richness of the Promised Land. That is where Yoel’s father, Khayml, ‘little life’, a Zionist and a Hasid, has settled (Ch. 8, 137). 26. See Beider, Ashkenazic Given Names, p. 624. Bergelson creates this neologistic and typological onomastic by following the well-established practice, derived from Gogol, of Mendele and Sholem Aleichem. 27. Bergelson’s chronology does not clearly identify Holy Week, the last week of Lent immediately preceding Good Friday, Easter Saturday, or Easter Sunday’s midnight Mass. Shor and the Moreyneses depart on a ‘lucky’ Tuesday and arrive in Kiev the same night. Shor goes to his hotel and stays there until Saturday evening when he leaves for the soirée at the Rapoports’ home. The candles Bergelson describes in the streets on Tuesday should strictly speaking appear only after the Easter Mass at midnight on Easter Sunday morning and not before, but Bergelson has either unconsciously conf lated these Christian religious days, or uses allusions to Christian candles and bells for the dramatic effect of contrasting their theological symbolism, which proclaims that Christ has risen to bring light into the world, with the monitory reality that they portend a pogrom planned for that same Easter night. 28. For a good definition and illustrations of the term ‘free indirect discourse/style’, see Gerald Prince, Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), pp. 34–35. 29. This early example of ekphrasis in Yiddish literature was first noted by Wisse, ‘Vegn Dovid Bergelsons dertseylung’, p. 143. 30. Since this commentary is delivered in the indirect style, the origin and speaker of these remarks is deliberately left unclear.

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CHAPTER 6

❖

In Search of Readership: Bergelson among the Refugees (1928) Sasha Senderovich Kein Ostjude geht freiwillig nach Berlin. Wer in aller Welt kommt freiwillig nach Berlin? Berlin ist eine Durchgangstation, in der man aus zwingenden Gründen länger verweilt. JOSEPH ROTH 1

In a diary entry dated 8 July 1922 and published in his memoir Kniga zhizni (A book of life), historian Shimon Dubnov notes: Worries about relocating to Berlin, about moving there everything necessary for work from Russia, Kovno, and Danzig. Difficult, worrisome thoughts given contemporary economic collapse, borders, and visas. The catastrophic condition of Germany is embarrassing, too: the political confusion after [Walter] Rathenau’s murder, unchecked decline of the Deutschmark, and costs that grow daily. And I am going up on a volcano and I must go, for there is a printing press, and I must fulfil the vow of my life [...]2

Dubnov’s confession betrays part of the reason for the emigration of numerous intellectuals from Russia to Berlin in the years following the October Revolution. The same unrestrained inf lation that gave Dubnov cause for concern about his new abode in Germany also made printing costs negligible in relation to the rate of economic collapse, and a great number of publishing houses sprouted as a result.3 Berlin was a publishing paradise not only for Dubnov, whose memoirs of the time are filled with minute details about the publication of his monographs on Jewish history in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish translation as well as in their original Russian. Émigré publishing activity of all stripes was booming in a city that hosted thousands driven into exile from post-Great War and post-revolution Eastern Europe. In the Russian literary imagination, Berlin became known as the ‘stepmother’ of Russian cities. As numerous publishing opportunities in Yiddish also existed there, Berlin became a favoured destination for many Yiddish writers as well.4 Yiddish-language publishing occupied a markedly different niche from any other in Berlin, and in Dubnov’s memoirs we are allowed a fascinating glimpse into how one writer — albeit a writer of history whose work was published in several languages — viewed the attempts of another, one of many aspiring Yiddish literati

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in Berlin, to compete for success in the same geographical locale. Dubnov writes: At the beginning of 1926, I was still completing additions to the third volume [on ‘The Eastern Period’ in his History of the Jews] and was reading proof pages, but by March I had already switched from the East to the West and had begun the revisions of the fourth volume [...]. Between this volume and the next, I allowed myself only one week’s rest in the environs of Berlin, in Fichtergrund, where in the period between winter and spring I communed with the forest. A young belletrist Samuil [Shmuel] Lewin (1890–1959) accompanied me on my walks there and read me his dramas and novels about Hasidic life [byt] in Yiddish with a Polish accent. This poor emigrant had a natural [samorodnyi] uncultivated talent and was consumed by a writer’s fever; he had already been granted time to publish a couple of novels in Yiddish and in German translation, but his bitter lot [gor´kaia dolia] in a foreign land [na chuzhbine] did not give him an opportunity to develop his talent and to occupy a place that befits him in literature.5

The author of this paragraph is a successful professional historian engaged in multiple projects for assured publication who permits himself to make somewhat condescending remarks about a younger writer who, as seems evident, reads his works to the well-established Dubnov in hopes of advancing them toward public recognition. As a writer of history, of course, Dubnov’s principal language could continue to serve him even ‘in a foreign land’, a place that supposedly thwarts the development of a belletrist whose allegiance is to a language that can truly thrive only in its native milieu. The linguistic chuzhbina — foreign land — to which Dubnov consigns this struggling Yiddish writer is a barren space where, despite ample opportunities to publish, any creative endeavour exudes a whiff of something ‘with an accent’, of something provincial, of something that prevents a ‘foreign’ author from full-f ledged participation in literary life. In his famous analysis of any given speech act, the linguist Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) distinguishes the necessary presence of the following six factors: (1) an addresser who conveys (2) a message to (3) an addressee; (4) a context to which the message refers, (5) a code shared by the two parties involved in a speech act, and (6) a contact — a channel of mental or physical connection between them.6 William Todd reinterprets the Jakobsonian model of language as a model of the literary process thus: In a modern literary situation these terms translate into familiar roles and situations [...] the addresser, a professional author whose addressee is some segment of the reading public, contacts it through the medium of the printed page. The modern author’s context spans a seemingly inexhaustible range of subject matter (including, of course, literature itself ), selected and shaped, however, according to the relatively enduring codes of language, genre, and culture together with the temporary codes of fashion, codes which the author and the competent reader will share, if not always respect.7

In the context of Yiddish-language literary activity in Berlin, the matter of the addressee is the most crucial in this literary equation. The addressee is connected to the addresser through context, message, contact, and code — that is to say, the four central aspects of the literary process that actually involve the written and published text depend on the presence of the reading public. In a situation in which

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all elements are present, but in which the presence of the addressee (the reading public) is in doubt, the entire literary process stands on shaky ground. Writing about Milgroym (Pomegranate), the Berlin-based literary journal for which, together with Der Nister, Bergelson worked brief ly as a literary editor, Arthur Tilo Alt notes that ‘there was no market sufficiently large to support a Yiddish intellectual journal in Germany despite an overall Yiddish-speaking population of about 100,000. The marketplace for Yiddish publications emanating from Berlin was the United States and Eastern Europe’.8 There was insufficient local readership for much of the Yiddish literary output that found a temporary home in Berlin during the inter-war years. Delphine Bechtel is right to point out that a modified version of this readership could — and did, in fact — exist among German Jews who could no longer read Yiddish itself, but who read Yiddish works in translation. However, as Bechtel adds, most of these translations were of poor quality that actually diminished the value of the original works: [German translators from the Yiddish] had in fact committed the crime of a misreading, a misprision of the text, dictated [to them] by prejudices about Yiddish literature that were widespread among most German Jews. They looked back to the world of Yiddish literature and culture as to a place of origin tinged with sentimentalism and nostalgia, because they needed to romanticize it in order to define their identity. They did not want to make the effort of really understanding its modernist, avant-garde aspects. No wonder, then, that they ignored the uprooted, modernist Yiddish writers who lived among them.9

A number of literati who made Berlin their home in the 1920s recalled the Romanisches Café, near the Berlin Zoo, as a place where the city’s émigré Yiddish writers occupied a few tables in a sea of tables occupied by others. This café functioned as a literary institution of sorts — a place for those who were considered writers by vocation — but it provided no real connection to any readership, and, in turn, did not stimulate much productivity among the writers who frequented it. Israel Rubin, for example, has given a glimpse of what went on there in a series of sketches published in Literarishe bleter: Hot men shoyn bay di yidishe shriftshteler-tishlekh in Romanishn oysgenishtert ale meglekhe temes [...] oysgekibetst un durkhgerekhilest alemen, alemen, mamesh loytn alef-beys-seyder fun Zalmen Reyzens ‘Leksikon’, oysgeshtelt ale literarish-gezelshaftlekhe dialogn un prognozn, un es kumt shoyn oys onkumen amol tsu iberkhazerung.10 [At the tables of the Yiddish writers in the Romanisches Café all possible topics have already been exhausted [...] everyone has been denigrated and slandered, all, quite literally in the alphabetical order of Zalmen Reyzen’s Lexicon [of Yiddish Literature, Press and Philology, 1928–29]. All literary and social dialogues and prognoses have been outlined, and matters are now approaching the point of repetition.]

Though the café was a microcosm of the literary sphere, in 1920s Berlin it was reduced to little more than a mockery of the literary process. The space of the café — and, in a larger sense, the space of Berlin — was infused with that sense of futility in the course of a literary exile during which writers felt that they had been com-

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pletely separated from their natural readership: ‘Although Berlin became the home of the most important Hebrew and Yiddish writers and publishers, their audience remained in the East, or had emigrated to Palestine and the United States’.11 This essay seeks to examine the self-creation and subsequent self-refashioning of one writer, David Bergelson, in the context of the émigré Yiddish literary scene in Weimar Berlin, bearing in mind Bergelson’s status as a professional writer. One way to define writing as a profession is to consider it as a vocation that is pursued ‘as a principal means of livelihood’, in addition to the author’s participation in the ‘institutions’ of literature, such as, for example, addressing a specific readership.12 By the time Bergelson left Moscow for Berlin in 1921, he was already a recognized and respected professional author, who had published a number of major works, the importance of which was recognized when the Berlin-based publishing house Wostok issued his collected writing to date in six elegant volumes in 1922.13 In one of his first meetings with Soviet readers and critics during his return trip to the Soviet Union in 1926, Bergelson reportedly demanded respect in a speech defending himself against doctrinaire criticism, asserting, Ikh bin Bergelson, nisht keyn onfanger, ‘I am Bergelson, not some beginner!’14 Since an immediately recognizable authorial name is itself one of the ‘institutions’ of literary process, Bergelson’s self-presentation to his new Soviet reading public is an important marker of professionalism. A number of critics have commented on Bergelson’s reorientation towards Moscow, most of them sceptical of Bergelson’s affirmations of allegiance to the Soviet literary cause, made most explicitly in his 1926 essay ‘Dray tsentren’ (Three Centres). Joseph Sherman, for example, offers a nuanced reading of the way in which Bergelson’s decision to tout the Soviet ‘Party line’ in his works was perceived by his contemporaries on different sides of the political divide.15 Other critics wonder whether Bergelson’s ideological preachments were matched by his fictional practice. I seek an explanation for Bergelson’s return to the Soviet Union not in his journalistic writing alone but also in reading so programmatic an essay as ‘Dray tsentren’ in conjunction with some of his Berlin fiction. I wish to follow the direction suggested by ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ (Among refugees), arguably the most interesting story of Bergelson’s Berlin period, in order to uncover a possible source of inner conf lict that Bergelson might have experienced in Berlin, and to which his fiction might bear witness. Beneath the surface of ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ lurks the author’s concern with his non-existent readership. ‘Dray tsentren’, along with Bergelson’s other doctrinaire pronouncements, is not so much an ideological statement as an element in what I would call the ‘narrative space’ of texts concerned with self-retooling for the sake of relocation to an environment in which the idealized reading audience is thought to exist. Of all Bergelson’s stories in which the city of Berlin functions as a setting, ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ has received the most critical attention.16 This is not surprising because, of the seven Berlin stories, ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ offers, in the words of Dafna Clifford, ‘a study of different forms of existential crisis precipitated by exile’. Such a study, in turn, draws on Bergelson’s ability to illuminate difficult facets of human character and results in a narrative more refined than most stories of the Berlin period which, as Clifford argues, ‘are strangely f lat and uncompelling’.17

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Simply summarized, the story concerns a Yiddish writer in Berlin — the tale’s frame narrator — who is visited one day by a young man who introduces himself as a Jewish terrorist. This young man proceeds to tell the writer of his longing to assassinate his boarding-house neighbour, a notorious pogromist responsible for the murder of the young man’s family in Ukraine.18 Acting alone, the young man is primarily concerned with finding a weapon to do away with the murderer, and he describes his approach to his landsman, Berel Zhum, with pleas for help to find such a weapon. Instead of keeping his promise to help, however, Berel brings the would-be terrorist before a panel of prominent members of the émigré community. Unwilling to permit the vengeful youth to compromise their hardearned standing in the German community, the members of this panel offer to pay for his psychological treatment in a sanatorium, and in desperation he comes to the writer to relate his story and to seek help. In part, the young man’s plea sounds like an accusation: Shrayber, hob ikh getrakht, zaynen vi der gevisn fun folk. Zey zaynen zayne nervn, zey shteln for zeyer folk far der velt [...] un vibald ikh hob aykh alts oysdertseylt, zayt ir shoyn farantvortlekh tsuglaykh mit mir un nokh mer fun mir, vayl ir zayt a shrayber [...] (Y 198) [Writers, I thought, were the conscience of the nation. They are its nerves. They present their nation to the world [...] And now that I’ve told you everything, you are as responsible as I am, and even more than I am, because you’re a writer [...]] (E 42)

The tale ends with the writer’s discovery of the young man’s suicide note, which concludes: Ikh hob farshtanen di gantse zakh: ikh bin an emigrant ... tsvishn emigrantn ... ikh vil es mer nisht ... (Y 199), ‘I understand everything now: I’m a refugee ... among refugees ... I don’t want to be one anymore...’ (E 43). In this way, as Heather Valencia has noted, Bergelson spares his narrator the need to choose whether ‘to align himself either with the old world, by acceding to the ideas and demands of the stranger, or with his role in the assimilated Jewish society of Berlin, by rejecting the stranger’s plea’.19 The young man’s assertion that the writer is ‘the conscience of the nation’ has prompted most comment from scholars who have written about ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’. It is the very uncertainty of the writer’s status in the aftermath of the violent civil war pogroms in Ukraine that David Roskies draws out of this passage when he suggests that [t]he elite group of Jewish intellectuals [...] had no one to attack and no one to lead. And since their own identities were none too secure, these dangling men caught between tradition and a thousand versions of modernity, between loyalty to parents and past and an unfulfilled craving for love and life, could barely hope to save themselves, let alone any larger constituency.20

Roskies sees the narrator of the story as a talush, a ‘dangling’ man incapable of making choices. Delphine Bechtel offers a more far-reaching reading in which Bergelson himself is identified with his narrator’s inability to fulfil the task: When the writer is reminded of his function as the conscience of the people,

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the gloomy terrorist can also be interpreted as a shadow figure [Schattenfigur] (in a Jungian sense) or as a bad conscience of the writer (Bergelson’s alter-ego) that reminds him of the tragedy of his people in Eastern Europe.21

Using these two comments, I propose a further re-reading of the story that seeks to unearth the implication of Bergelson’s identification both with the narrator of the story and with the figure of the young terrorist, as well as his concern with the nature of the relationship between the two. ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ is a powerful example of meta-fiction, in which the projected indecision and uncertainty about the writer’s professional standing are very much Bergelson’s own. At the beginning of the story, the frame narrator’s professional status is established: he is a writer, returning to his home from an afternoon stroll around Berlin, informed by his family that an unknown young man is waiting for him in his study. The writer’s living conditions are comfortable by contrast with those of the young man who, like many Berlin exiles, is renting a room in a boardinghouse.22 This relationship — an established literary figure visited by someone asking him for advice — is a commonplace device in Yiddish literature. In Sholem Aleichem’s ‘Di eytse’ (Advice), for example, a nervous young man comes to consult the writer-narrator about whether or not he should divorce his pretty, rich, and f lirtatious young wife.23 The narrative details imparted suggest the comfortable lifestyle of a highly successful professional writer: for example, he learns from his family about his visitor’s importunate visits beshas ikh bin gekumen eynmol tsu forn fun veg aheym, ‘upon arrival once from one of my trips away’ (Y 73/E 59); when he finally receives his garrulous caller, their one-sided conversation takes place in a separate study where bay mir oyfn shraybtish shteyen oysgeshtelt farsheydene zakhelekh, raritetn, tsatskes (Y 80), ‘I keep a collection of handsome objets and pretty little curios set out on display on my writing table’ (E 64). Details of this kind deliberately suggest a relationship between a worldly, practised littérateur and an unsophisticated guest about whom his reluctant host condescendingly concludes: A tip fun a kleynshtetldikn maskil, a mekhaber. A yungerman mit a blas ponem, mit groyse shvartse rakhmones-oygn, dos heyst, azelkhe oygn, vos betn zikh: ‘Hot rakhmones oyf an elnte, a farblondzhete neshome’. Ikh hob nisht lib azelkhe oygn. (Y 74) [Your very type of a provincial Jewish gentleman of letters. Your author. Your pale sort of young person, with great saucer-like [beseeching] black eyes, always begging compassion, pleading with you: ‘Oh, please, please, kind sir, take pity on a poor lost soul’. I do not like eyes of that sort.] (E 59)

In another Yiddish story, from a later period, Isaac Bashevis Singer shows his Jewish émigrés in New York preoccupied with concerns akin to those raised by Bergelson. In ‘The Cafeteria’,24 the writer-narrator encounters Esther, a woman who has survived both Nazi and Soviet concentration camps, who tells him that she has seen Hitler and his henchmen alive and meeting in one of New York’s cafeterias. Here, too, the writer-narrator enjoys a comfortable and established lifestyle, asserted in the tale’s opening words: Even though I have reached the point where a great part of my earnings is

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SASHA SENDEROVICH given away in taxes, I still have the habit of eating in cafeterias when I am by myself [...] I meet there the landsleit from Poland, as well as all kinds of literary beginners and readers who know Yiddish.

If this were not enough to set the narrator worlds apart from his displaced countrymen, he continues: I cannot spend too long with these Yiddishists, because I am always busy. I am writing a novel, a story, an article. I have to lecture today or tomorrow; my datebook is crowded with all kinds of appointments for weeks and months in advance. [...] But meanwhile we converse in the mother tongue and I hear of intrigues and pettiness about which, from moral point of view, it would be better not to be informed. (E 287)

The remarkable feature common to all these stories is the way the writer-narrator undermines his interlocutor from the very beginning, making each visitor who comes to tell a personal tale an unreliable raconteur. In each case, the writer’s professionalism is asserted as a weighty assurance of his own credibility that allows him to discredit the trustworthiness of the one speaking to him. In Bashevis’s ‘The Cafeteria’, Esther’s story is called in doubt because of her apparent madness. In Sholem Aleichem’s ‘An eytse’, the caller’s question is so petty and so vague that, losing all patience, the narrator yells at his visitor to silence him. In the same way, the narrator in Bergelson’s ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ draws a disconcerting picture of his interlocutor: Un zayn linke bak iz geven a krume; zi iz geven vi zayne un nisht zayne. Zi hot oysgezen vi a bak vos iz tsekrigt mit der velt — dos lebn hot gevorfn oyf ir an umkheyn, hot zi deriber gevorfn an umkheyn oyfn lebn. A dank der linker bak hot der yungerman oysgezen heslekh, nor, vi mir hot zikh gedakht, iz er geven daf ke oyf der zayt fun der linker bak [...] (Y 175) [His left cheek, however, was crooked; it looked as though it were his and yet ... It was like a cheek at war with the world — it had fallen out of favour with life, and therefore life had fallen out of favour with it. The left cheek made the young man look ugly, but apparently he had sided with it.] (E 22)

But there seems to be another clue in all these stories. Sholem Aleichem identifies his visitor as a kleynshtetldik, ‘provincial’, writer, even though this visitor’s story is narrated in precisely the same way — with many digressions, and with the gist delivered only in a single punch line — as any typical monologue written by Sholem Aleichem himself. Is ‘An eytse’ then a kind of comment by Sholem Aleichem on the possibility of his own ‘provincialism’ as a writer? Bashevis’s Esther is not identified as a writer, but the writer-narrator encounters her and hears her story in the context of what he calls ‘petty Yiddishists’, to whose stories he is averse from the start. But her tale is more gripping than the usual sort: even her madness is somehow justified by the fact that she is a survivor. This, in turn, might speak to Bashevis’s own moral qualms about having made a timely escape from Europe shortly before the war, and to his own lack of credibility as a writer when the subject at hand is the psychology of a survivor of both the Holocaust and of the gulag. I propose that Bergelson’s story contains a similar clue to re-reading. Though the young man in ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ is not identified as a writer, at the heart of his

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conversation with the narrator lies a story that he [hot] fartrakht [...] nisht vegn mir, nor vegn an andern (Y 182), ‘thought up [...] not about me, but about someone else’ (E 28). This story within a story concerns a Jewish pauper in his home town who goes begging for alms at the houses of rich Jews who live in the Gentile neighbourhood. A Jewish pauper is an unwelcome intrusion into the assimilated lifestyles of these rich Jews, and his frequent appearances threaten to expose the insecurity of their status in the town’s wider, non-Jewish society. The pauper’s arrival is a theatrical affair: instead of knocking on the door of each Jewish house, blaybt er deriber shteyn in mitn gas un heybt on tsu hustn, kedey di shkotsimlekh zoln im derzen un onreytsn oyf im di hint (Y 183), ‘he halts in the middle of the street and starts to cough so that the children will see him and set their dogs on him’ (E 29). After the young man has interpreted this anecdote as a story about himself, and the beggar’s quest for alms as his own personal desire to indulge his spite, the following narrative interpolation slips virtually seamlessly into his description of encountering the Ukrainian pogromist in his Berlin boarding house: Un ot in yener tsayt, ven ikh hob azoy getrakht (ikh bin nisht geshlofn a nakht nokh a nakht), hob ikh in eynem a frimorgn derhert a kleynem geroysh in koridor fun mayn pansyon — der geroysh iz oysgemisht mit a sharfn Ukraynish. Ikh hob in koridor derzen frier a dinst fun pansyon, vi zi trogt tsvey shvere tshemodanes, un nokh dem hob ikh derzen ‘im’ aleyn mit di freylekh fardreyte vontses. Im iz mit derekh-erets nokhgegangen nokh eyner a yungerer. — A yak? — hot er gefregt bay ot dem yungern un hot gegebn a shmek di luft mit di noz, — a tut tovo ... zhidiv-to nima? Ikh bin geshtanen lebn mayn tir. Ikh hob gekukt, vi men firt im punkt akegn in tsimer num. 5. Ikh bin geven vi fartshadet. In tshad iz tsu mir plutsem gekumen aza laykht gefil, glaykh ikh bin mer nisht eynzam. Tsu mir iz tsugekumen epes a shtik. Mir iz gevorn fil gringer, khotsh in vos bashteyt di dozike gringkayt hob ikh nokh alts nisht gevust. Ersht shpeter hob ikh zikh gefregt: In vos iz do di simkhe? ... Ha? (Y 183–84) [And in those days, when I’d thought such things (I couldn’t sleep night after night), I’d heard a faint noise in the rooming house corridor early one morning, and the noise was mixed with the sharp sounds of Ukrainian. I looked out into the corridor, and first I saw a chambermaid. She was carrying two heavy valises; and then I saw him in the f lesh, with his cheerfully twirled moustache. He was respectfully followed by some younger man. ‘Oh, yes?’ he asked the younger man in Ukrainian, and he sniffed the air, ‘Aren’t there any Jews here?’ I was standing by my door. I watched the chambermaid take him right across from me, to room number five. I was stupefied. And suddenly a feeling of lightness came to me in my daze, as though I weren’t alone anymore. Some portion of me had arrived. I felt so much lighter, though I still didn’t know what this lightness was. It wasn’t till later that I asked myself: ‘Just why do I feel so joyous? Why?’] (E 29)

The story that the young man thinks up in ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ functions, in Viktor Shklovsky’s formalist terms, as obnazhenie priema, the ‘laying bare of the device’: the story-in-miniature contains elements of the larger narrative, suggesting the way in which the whole is to be read. The pauper, whom the young man feels he

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has invented in his own likeness, is concerned not so much with receiving alms as with embarrassing the assimilated Jews of his home town by forcibly reminding them of the pariah status they have only recently (and tentatively) transcended. The killing of the pogromist, which the young man ‘thinks up’ out of the parable that he also invents, is less an act of revenge for the murderer’s crimes than an act of spite against the would-be terrorist’s former landslayt. He wants to mortify these former countrymen — exemplified by the wealthy Pinsky family, one of whose daughters he had unsuccessfully attempted to court while they all still lived in Ukraine — and, in a larger sense, all those wealthy Russian Jews who enjoy a far more comfortable Berlin exile than he does. Spite drives the young man: his displacement in the alien city of Berlin intensifies this spite even as those towards whom it could justifiably be directed grow fewer in number as he increasingly finds himself isolated from any community. Thus, when the pogromist appears, a raison d’être is swiftly provided: a murder is now contemplated not so much for its own sake as for the sake of those Jews whom the young man perceives as having wronged him in the past. Still toying with the idea that this deed might be regarded as heroic, the young man summarizes both his narratives — the one about the Jewish beggar and the other about his own intentions — to the frame-narrator: Er hot gezogt: — Akegn vos-zhe ikh hob es aykh ongehoybn tsu dertseylen? Kedey aykh zol zayn farshtendlekh ver ikh bin ... Itst vet ir mir gloybn, vayl aza geshikhte trakht men nisht oys fun kop. Ikh hob, dakht zikh, gornisht nisht durkhgelozt, a? ... Vegn Zorakh Pinski un vegn zayn meydl hob ikh aykh dertseylt? ... Yo, ikh hob aykh dertseylt ... Dos iz alts, alts, vos mit mir hot pasirt biz yener tsayt, biz ikh hob derfilt, az ikh vel ‘im’ hargenen. Ir farshteyt? Fun tsvishn azoy fil yidn daf ke ikh, mit vemen es hot pasirt di gantse geshikhte. Trakht zikh ayn: ver den, az nisht ikh? (Y 184–85) [The young man] said: ‘What was my purpose in telling you these things? I want you to understand who I am .... Now you’ll believe me, because no one could make up such a story out of thin air. I don’t sense I’ve left anything out, have I? I’ve told you about Zorah Pinsky and about his daughter, haven’t I? Yes, I have. That was everything, everything that happened to me back then, until I felt I was going to kill him. You understand? Among so many Jews, I, of all people, I, to whom the entire story happened. Just think: Who else if not I? (E 30)

Which of these stories could not have been made ‘out of thin air’, as the young man claims? The story of the beggar certainly has. What about the supposed meeting with the infamous pogromist? Heather Valencia rightly suggests that in the young man’s narrative, the figure of the pogromist is seen only through the eyes of the unsuccessful terrorist, that ‘it is never clear to either reader or narrator whether his identity is purely a figment of the obsessed man’s imagination’.25 What if, after all, the pogromist is not only a figment of the young man’s imagination, but also an element in the story that he admits to having made up? The figure of the pogromist has clear narrative worth in the young man’s story: he is his excuse for articulating long-felt and well-described resentment. Is then the story itself not a kind of fiction,

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and the young man a hapless writer who comes to consult an established author about the plot he has crafted? Moreover, the young man’s concluding phrase in the above admission — ‘Who else if not I?’ — does not appear to conform to everything else he has said. Is this not perhaps a clue that he has written himself into the plot of a story that might earn its protagonist — himself — the title of hero for the sake of the community? The way in which the young man in ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ comes to write himself into his narrative resembles the way in which the poet Max Wentzl in Bergelson’s story ‘Mit eyn nakht veyniker’ (One night less)26 writes himself into the poem that he is composing. As Wentzl — another of many refugees in Berlin and a poor poet whose work is not recognized by critics — wanders the dark streets of the city, the loneliness of his displacement and that of the other solitary figures towards whom he gravitates, conjures up poetic thoughts in him: Er iz farnakht antdremelt gevorn mit groys tsar, mit groys benkshaft tsu epes an umbasheydn hartsik lid, vos zol mit zikh oysgisn dem gantsn tsar un di gantse benkshaft funem dikhter Maks Ventsl; — eynmol farnakht bay zun-untergang, ven fun tsvishn di zayln, vos untern hoykhn Brandeburger toyer zenen in fil rayen eyns nokh eyns, vi oysgeshosene, gelofn di yontevdiker avtomobiln, hot er dort baym ershtn groysn denkmol gezen, vi a blas meydl shteyt tsugetuliet tsum kaltn marmor un brekht fun nokh trinken oder fun nokh a greserer aveyre, vos vakst bay ir ineveynik untern hartsn — zi brekht, vi far der gantser umgehayer-groyser shtot Berlin ... Iz ot: ... mit dem, eygntlekh, zoln onheybn di ershte ferzn fun zayn lid ... (Y 192) [In the evening, he dozed off amid great sorrow, amid great yearning for an immodest, sentimental poem that would pour out all the sorrow and all the yearning of the poet Max Wentzl. One evening, at sunset, when, amid the columns under the high Brandenburg Gate, the holiday buses came shooting out, one by one, in rows, Wentzl, at the first large monument, sighted a pale young girl standing there, hugging the cold marble and vomiting after drinking or after a greater sin that was growing inside her, under her heart — she was vomiting as if for the tremendous metropolis of Berlin... And that should actually form the opening lines of his poem ...] (E 106)

This image gradually transforms itself into Wentzl’s idée fixe, exposing both the way in which he internalizes Berlin’s landscapes and his own poetic limitations which, in the course of his nocturnal wanderings, do not permit any other inspired thoughts to enter his mind. As Wentzl meets a prostitute on the street, he regurgitates the image, this time in the first person: — Ot aza meydl, vi du, — zogt er tsu ir, — vel ikh itst moln in mayn groyser poeme ‘Berlin’. Ikh hob eynmol farnakht, bay zun-untergang gezen punkt aza blas meydl, vi du. Zi iz geshtanen tsugeshpart tsum ershtn groysn denkmol, vos tsvishn Ziges-alee un Brandeburger toyer, un hot gebrokhn mit neshome, mit harts, gebrokhn far gants Berlin ... ot azoy vet zikh onheybn mayn poeme ... (Y 199) [‘I’m now going to depict a girl like you,’ he says, ‘in my great poem “Berlin”.

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SASHA SENDEROVICH Once, during sunset, I saw a girl as pale as you. She was leaning against the first big monument between Siegesallee and the Brandenburg Gate and she was vomiting with her soul, with her heart, vomiting as if for the whole of Berlin ... That’s how my poem will begin ...’] (E 113)

The prostitute notices that Wentzl cites only the beginning of an unwritten poem; when she asks him about how the poem ends, he replies: — Der sof [...] iz nisht interesant, ekelhaft, mies. [...] Der sof iz keynmol nishto un deriber iz er an oysgetrakhter, a lign. Mayne lider, zogt men mir, toygn nisht, vayl zey hobn keyn sof nisht. M’vil, ikh zol zogn lign, vet men mikh onerkenen. Nor Ventsl zogt keyn lign nisht far keyn prayz in der velt, afile nisht far onerkenung. (Y 200) ‘The end [...] the end isn’t interesting, it’s ugly, disgusting [...] The end doesn’t exist, and that’s why it’s an invention, a lie. My poems, people say, are worthless because they have no end. People say that if I tell lies, I’ll be recognized. But Wentzl won’t lie for all the money in the world. Not even for recognition.’ (E 113–14)

On the other hand, however, does the poem have no end because the poet is incapable of bringing this work — or any other work — to completion? In moralistic language, Wentzl comes to regard his unfinished poems as the only truthful ones and to think that er aleyn, Ventsl, onem palto, mit di hent farrukt in di hoyzn-tashn iz der emes fun Berlin — er aleyn iz yents meydl, vos brekht oys dem lign fun ot der shtot [...] (Y 200),‘He himself, Wentzl, with no overcoat, with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, is the Truth of Berlin, he himself is that girl who vomited the lie of that city [...]’ (E 114). Bergelson’s hallmark style of repetition here, much as with the terrorist in ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’, exposes the level of obsession that both young men have with a limited number of vivid images that assume a life of their own. By rehearsing the ideas that lead them to understand themselves as something much larger than they are — ‘the Truth’ of Berlin and the self-appointed judge of Ukrainian pogromists — the poet and the terrorist respectively appear primarily as unsuccessful weavers of literary tales in which one grand idea dominates but nothing else is present that could facilitate any notion of a successfully executed plot. Both — Wentzl explicitly so, and the terrorist by implication — stand for similar unsuccessful models of authorship that exist outside the framework of the institutions of communal and literary life. Wentzl’s status as a poet is very much in doubt because he is neither known to an established readership nor published in literary journals. He goes so far as to admit to himself that he, indeed, is not a poet, but ale frimorgn faln im banays arayn in di hent frishe tsaytungen un zhurnaln un er zet: di lider, vos m’drukt in zey, zenen hundert mol erger fun zayne, toyznt mol erger fun zayne (Y 195), ‘every morning, fresh newspapers and journals fall into his hands again and he sees: the poems they publish are a hundred times worse than his, a thousand times worse than his’ (E 109). In part, Wentzl’s thoughts are self-aware and not always delusional — when he speaks of newspapers and journals, he is clearly mindful that to be a recognized poet one needs to be a participant in those institutions of literary life. Only two people respect Wentzl’s

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work — der horiker moler, ‘the hairy painter’, Babo, who is Wentzl’s neighbour, and the critic Dr Mer who praised them as geoynish, ‘brilliant’. While a model of readership is set up in this story, it is a mockery of what is usually understood by ‘readership’: Nor der horiker moler Babo iz aleyn oykh, punkt vi Ventsl, nisht onerkent nisht fun kolegn moler un nisht fun kritiker; er hot keynmol gornisht oysgeshtelt un gornisht farkoyft. Ale zayne bilder hengen oyf zayn boydem, vi meysim, vos viln nokhn toyt esn... Anshtot tsu gebn zey esn, shmirt zey Babo ale mol iber mit naye farbn. Un der kritiker, doktor Mer, iz nokh tsurik mit a yor dray geshtorbn fun a poplektsye. Akhuts dem, vos er hot zikh fun tsayt tsu tsayt basheftikt mit kritik, hot er nokh gehat a bakteriologishn kabinet un iz in lebn geven a filosof. (Y 196) [But Babo the hairy painter is also alone, just like Wentzl. Babo is not recognized — not by his fellow painters and not by critics. He has never exhibited his work and never sold anything. All his paintings are in his garret, like corpses that want to eat after death... Instead of feeding them, Babo keeps smearing more pigments over them. And the critic, Dr Mer, died of a stroke some three years ago. Aside from writing criticism every now and then, he’d had a bacteriological lab and he’d been a philosopher in life.] (E 109–10)

Wentzl is, as a Russian saying has it, famous in narrow circles, which provide nothing that is necessary for one to be recognized as a writer. Though not stated in terms as strictly literary as in ‘Mit eyn nakht veyniker’, the young terrorist’s struggles to achieve what is usually meant by recognition are as clearly implied in ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’. There, Berel Zhum, the terrorist’s landsman, serves as a kind of reader for the young man’s tale about the pogromist.27 As the young man sees it, he needs something that can only be provided by a like-minded person, someone with whom he shares a language as well as a history of living in the same geographical locale, far from hostile and inhospitable Berlin. But Berel, on to whom the young man initially projects these expectations of faithfulness and understanding, ends up more closely resembling the wealthy Jews in the young man’s parable, betraying his trust and trying to screen him from the eyes of others so that he does not become a threat to Jews like himself and the Pinskys who are rapidly acculturating to German society. Translated into the terms of literary institutions, the young man’s authorial intentions are not met by his readership: the Berlin reader is no longer the same reader known to the author back home. On foreign soil, accepted communication codes between author and reader break down to the extent that the former no longer produces any work meaningful to the latter; the reader, once familiarly imagined and sound of understanding, is simply no longer there. Read this way, ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ permits us to see Bergelson’s Berlin as a space of uncertainty in which familiar models of interaction between displaced persons — and between displaced writers and readers — fail. On the surface, the frame narrator is the figure that appears most identifiable with Bergelson himself, who dispassionately observes the disintegration of these relations but remains unwilling

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to engage with the task of reintegrating them. In reality, however, the frame narrator’s fear — and the fear of Bergelson himself — is that this story is driven by identification with the figure of the terrorist. The fact that only such unreceptive people as Berel Zhum are left of his once-familiar familiar readership must have been disconcerting to Bergelson, who had always been acutely aware of wishing for a certain kind of public to engage with his texts. Lurking beneath the surface of the story is Bergelson’s own dread, projected on to his protagonist, of one day slipping from his hard-won status as a successful professional author to the level of a mad vagabond who creates stories that he foolishly believes to be useful to people. Above all else, the suicide of the young man in the story is the artistic suicide of a writer who realizes that his language no longer serves him, that his works are no longer read, that he has been left isolated and alone. But while Bergelson’s frame narrator in ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ can impassively observe this kind of termination of an implied literary career and a literary imagination, Bergelson himself seeks other creative ways out of the mire of interminable displacement. At the end of Viktor Shklovsky’s experimental epistolary novel Zoo, ili pis’ma ne o liubvi (Zoo, or letters not about love), written in Berlin in 1923, comes a dramatic break in the pattern of letters exchanged between the narrator and Alya, the woman he is in love with. The addressee is no longer Alya, the disguised Elsa Triolet — Shklovsky’s love interest during the time of his Berlin exile — but the Central Committee of the Communist Party: Don’t be surprised that this letter follows some letters written to a woman. I’m not getting a love affair involved in this matter. The woman I was writing to never existed [...] Alya is the actualization of a metaphor. I invented a woman and love in order to make a book about misunderstanding, about alien people, about an alien land. I want to go back to Russia [...] I raise my arm and surrender.28

Doubting that Shklovsky’s letter should be taken at face value as a direct appeal to the Party for forgiveness and permission to return, Peter Steiner none the less notes that ‘if from the aesthetic standpoint Zoo’s erotic discourse turns out to be merely the motivation connecting its smaller segments (the letters) into a unified work, from the political standpoint the whole novel might be viewed as a pretext for mercy’.29 Numerous critics, Steiner included, warn against such reading of the text. Svetlana Boym cautions the reader who is likely to be led astray: In the last letter of Zoo, addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Shklovsky declares that the addressee of his prior correspondence, Alya, was not a real person, but only ‘a realization of a metaphor’. The ‘woman of European culture’ is killed in fiction. But the vertiginous ironies and metamorphoses of the text leave us wondering whether the ‘Central Committee of the Communist Party’ is also only a metaphor.30

The letter to the Party embedded in a fictional narrative becomes, on one hand, a kind of alibi for the writer’s departure from Russia while on the other hand, it calls attention to itself as a manifesto that questions the author’s stated intention to return to the Soviet Union. For most of the book, Shklovsky’s self-imposed moratorium on writing about love fails as the work itself becomes, in Steiner’s words, ‘the most

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typical work of world literature. For according to Shklovsky’s theory, artistic works are conglomerates of devices — irreducible monads of artistic form that migrate freely from work to work’.31 Shklovsky’s letter to the Party, both fictional and nonfictional at the same time, then forms part of something similar to letters intended, but also not intended, to be about love. The letter to the Party, too, is not merely a literary text, but also a text at the core of which, as in the love letters, is the displaced writer’s relation to his exile, a space in which his loneliness and disconnectedness from his language and country fuse into a longing for return. ‘Alya’ may have provided a formal motivation for writing the letters not about love; ‘the Party’ is the new addressee that provides a motivation for a much-desired return. The key to reading such texts, it seems, lies in the f lexibility of defining what constitutes the notion of text in the first place. Roland Barthes famously observed in his essay ‘From Work to Text’ that [...] work is concrete, occupying a portion of a book-space (in a library, for example); the Text, on the other hand, is a methodological field [...] While the work is held in the hand, the Text is held in language: it exists only as discourse. The Text is not the decomposition of the work; rather it is the work that is the Text’s imaginary tail. In other words, the Text is experienced only in an activity, a production. It follows that the Text cannot stop, at the end of a library shelf, for example; the constitutive movement of the Text is a traversal: it can cut across a work, several works.32

In Shklovsky’s Zoo, the ambivalent attitude to the city of Berlin, the discomfort of exile, and the wish to return to Russia constitute ‘the Text’, while the letters (not) about love, as well as the letter addressed to the Communist Party, are works that are ‘the Text’s imaginary tail[s]’. The addressees are mixed, and so are the fictional and non-fictional modes of the letters. The Text of exile and longing traverses many constitutive elements linked together by the larger motivation of wishing to return to an abandoned homeland. Bergelson’s decision to support the Soviet cause through his art has been perceived by critics as not genuine. Seth Wolitz, for example, writes that In style and content [...] Bergelson’s art was not for the working classes; it spoke to the children of the Russian-Jewish bourgeoisie in a staid and aff luent world, and when that world collapsed, Bergelson had in fact lost his readership. He was undone in his desperate bid to find a new identity as a writer, since all his attempts were never really successful.33

However, to avoid, after Michael Bernstein, the problem of foreshadowing the writer’s demise — one that that could not have been foreseen during Bergelson’s Berlin exile — it is sideshadowing, attentive to multiple possibilities of the text, which appears important here: Sideshadowing’s attention to the unfulfilled or unrealized possibilities of the past is a way of disrupting the affirmations of a triumphalist, unidirectional view in which whatever has perished is condemned because it has been found wanting by some irresistible historico-logical dynamic. Against foreshadowing [...] sideshadowing stresses the significance of random, haphazard, and inassimilable contingencies, and instead of the power of a system to uncover

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SASHA SENDEROVICH an otherwise unfathomable truth, it expresses the ever-changing nature of that truth and the absence of any predictable certainties in human affairs.34

I suggest in conclusion that Bergelson’s 1926 essay ‘Dray tsentren’ 35 can be read as part of his larger Berlin text. I should like to read Bergelson’s essay in a manner akin to Shklovsky’s letter to the Communist Party — as a work striving to be at one and the same time a non-fictional narrative that defines itself on the basis of stating a newly accepted ideology, and a work that solves the larger concerns of the exilic Berlin text in a kind of concealed fictional form that only pretends to be non-fiction. In ‘Dray tsentren’, Bergelson dismisses the American centre of Yiddish letters as unviable because it is in the hands of ‘allrightniks’ and is subject to assimilation. In Poland, Bergelson argues, neither Zionism nor Orthodoxy is concerned about the immediate problems of Polish Jewry. Only in Soviet Russia, he claims, does the Jewish intelligentsia have the closest connection with the Jewish working class: fun azelkher mamoshesdiker un gliklikher farbindung mit yidishe masn hot der beserer yidisher inteligent yornlang nor gekholemt, ‘for years, the superior Jewish intellectual could only dream of such a substantial and fortunate union with the Jewish masses’.36 However disingenuous these words might sound to those who enjoy the comfort of critical hindsight, I propose that they be understood as part of the same narrative space in which the writer-narrator of ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ doubts the ability of the Yiddish writer to exist in exile, and appears to witness the complete collapse of his purpose in an environment without a dedicated reading public. The author of ‘Dray tsentren’ who professes faith in the new state and its ideology that would permit him to continue as a published writer and an active participant in the literary process is not all that different from the writer-narrator of ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ who exists in the volatile space of exile, in which all familiar frameworks have failed and all allegiances need to be questioned anew.37 Notes to Chapter 6 1. ‘No Eastern Jew goes to Berlin out of his own free will. Who in the world goes to Berlin voluntarily? Berlin is a through-station, where, given worthwhile reasons, one might stay longer.’ Joseph Roth, ‘Die westlichen Gettos — Berlin’ in Einmal Ku’damm und zurück. Das große Berlin-Lesebuch, ed. by Holger Wolandt (Munich: Knaur, 2003), p. 204, my translation. 2. S. M. Dubnov, Kniga zhizni. Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia. Materialy dlia istorii moego vremeni [The book of life. Reminiscences and contemplations. Materials for the history of my time] (St Petersburg: Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 1998), p. 488, my translation. 3. Heather Valencia, ‘Yiddish Writers in Berlin, 1920–1936’ in The German-Jewish Dilemma From the Enlightenment to the Shoah, ed. Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), p. 196. 4. For comprehensive information on Yiddish publishing in Weimar Berlin, see Leo Fuks and Renate Fuks, ‘Yiddish Publishing Activities in the Weimar Republic, 1920–1933’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 33 (1988), 417–34. 5. Dubnov, Kniga zhizni, p. 515. 6. Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, in Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 66. 7. William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions and Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 48. 8. Arthur Tilo Alt, ‘The Berlin Milgroym Group and Modernism’, Yiddish 6.1 (1985), 35.

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9. Delphine Bechtel, ‘Berlin as Center of Jewish Modernism’, in Insiders and Outsiders. Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, ed. by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Gabrielle Weinberger (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), p. 121. 10. Israel Rubin, ‘Bay di tishlekh fun Romanishn kafe’, Literarishe bleter, 10 January 1930, 28, my translation. 11. Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 202. 12. William Mills Todd III, ‘Dostoyevsky as a Professional Writer’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dostoyevsky, ed. by W. J. Leatherbarrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 66–67. 13. Fuks and Fuks, ‘Yiddish Publishing Activities’, p. 431. 14. Avrom Novershtern, ‘Hundert yor Dovid Bergelson: materialn tsu zayn lebn un shafn’, Di goldene keyt, 115 (1985), 57. 15. Joseph Sherman, ‘From Isolation to Entrapment: Bergelson and the Party Line, 1919–1927’, Slavic Almanac: The South African Year Book for Slavic, Central and East European Studies, 6.9 (2000), 195–222. 16. The story was first anthologized in Shturemteg, vol. v of David Bergelson, Ale verk (Vilna: Kletskin, 1929), pp. 173–99. All Yiddish citations in this essay are from this edition, to which page references in parentheses, after the letter Y, refer. An English translation of the story is included in David G. Roskies (ed.), The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1988), pp. 263–74. The most recent English version appears as ‘Among Refugees’ in The Shadows of Berlin, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 2005), pp. 21–43, from which all translations are taken, and to which page numbers in parentheses, after the letter E, refer. 17. Dafna Clifford, ‘From Exile to Exile: Bergelson’s Berlin Years’, in Yiddish and the Left, ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2001), p. 253. 18. The story reads particularly interestingly in the light of the assassination in Paris of Symon Petliura, a Ukrainian nationalist thought to be indirectly responsible for the devastating pogroms of 1919–20, by a Jew, Shalom Schwarzbard, in 1926, a few years after Bergelson’s story was written. Another of Bergelson’s seven Berlin stories, ‘Tsvey rotskhim’ (Two murderers), deals with the aftermath of the pogroms in Ukraine by providing a sketch of a former pogromist, Anton Zaremba, who has escaped to Berlin and makes his living there by performing in a Ukrainian band. In Bergelson’s short story, Zaremba is compared to the second murderer of the story — his German landlady’s vicious dog Tel, who kills a small child. See David Bergelson, ‘Tsvey rotskhim’, in Ale verk, VI: Velt-oys velt-ayn (Vilna: Kletskin, 1930), pp. 203–12; English version as ‘Two Murderers’ in Joachim Neugroschel, The Shadows of Berlin, pp. 1–8. 19. Valencia, ‘Yiddish Writers in Berlin’, pp. 198–99. 20. David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse. Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 147. 21. Delphine Bechtel, ‘Dovid Bergelsons Berliner Erzählungen. Ein vergessenes Kapitel der jiddischen Literatur’, in Jiddische Philologie. Festschrift für Erika Timm, ed. by Walter Röll and Simon Neuberg (Tübingen: Max Niemer Verlag, 1990), p. 263, my translation. 22. For a memorable portrayal of émigré life in Berlin boarding-houses in the 1920s, see Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel, Mashen’ka (Mary). Although the protagonists of that novel are Russianspeaking exiles, at least one of them can be read for her implied Jewishness. Bergelson himself sets one of his seven Berlin stories inside a boarding-house: David Bergelson, ‘In pansyon fun di dray shvester’, in Ale verk, VI: Velt-oys velt-ayn (Vilna: Kletskin, 1930), pp. 99–111, English translations as ‘The Boarding House of the Three Sisters’ in Neugroschel, pp. 45–55 and ‘In the Boardinghouse’, trans. by Joseph Sherman in Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, ed. by Sandra Bark (New York: Warner Books, 2003), pp. 247–58. 23. All Yiddish citations from this story, with page numbers after the letter Y in the text of this essay, refer to Sholem Aleykhem, ‘An eytse’, in Ale verk fun Sholem Aleykhem, XXIV: Monologn (Vilna-Warsaw: Kletskin, 1926), pp. 73–91. English translation as ‘Advice’ in Sholem Aleichem, Nineteen to the Dozen. Monologues and Bits and Bobs of Other Things, trans. by Ted Gorelick

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(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998), pp. 59–72, to which page numbers in parentheses after the letter E refer. 24. Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘The Cafeteria’, The Penguin Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982; 1988), pp. 287–300. Page numbers in parentheses refer to this edition. Since Singer’s stories are most readily accessible in their official English translations, I refer only to the English text. 25. Valencia, ‘Yiddish Writers in Berlin’, p. 198. 26. David Bergelson ‘Mit eyn nakht veyniker’, first collected in Ale Verk, VI: Velt-oys velt-ayn (Vilna: Kletskin, 1928; 1930), pp. 187–202; English translation ‘One night less’ in Neugroschel, pp. 103– 16. Citations from these two texts appear in parentheses after the letters Y and E respectively. 27. The Yiddish word zhum means ‘buzz, hum’, the irritating and (to humans) meaningless sound made by insects; as an onomastic it is chosen to emphasize the character’s lack of receptivity as a potential ‘reader’. Additionally Berel Zhum is also a figure connected to professional letters. We learn that the character’s real name is Boris Blum, and that ‘Zhum’ is a nickname given to him because back in the terrorist’s home town er hot fun tomid on gezhumet bay di tsionistn un hot geshribn in zeyere rusishe tsaytungen. [...] er hot do in oysland zikh shoyn tsugeshart tsu a por daytshishe tsaytungen un shraybt in zey (Y 190), ‘he was always buzzing around the Zionists and writing for their Russian newspapers. [...] He’s already ingratiated himself with the editors of a few German gazettes, and now he’s writing for them’ (E 35). Berel Zhum is presented as a character who easily switches political allegiances for the sake of professional employment as a journalist and for monetary gain. 28. Viktor Shklovsky, Zoo, or the Letters Not About Love, trans. and ed. by R. Sheldon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 103–04. 29. Peter Steiner, ‘The Praxis of Irony: Viktor Shklovsky’s Zoo’, in Russian Formalism: A Retrospective Glance. A Festschrift in Honor of Victor Erlich, ed. by Robert Louis Jackson and Stephen Rudy (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1985), p. 33. 30. Svetlana Boym, ‘Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky’, in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, ed. by Susan Rubin Suleiman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 249. 31. Steiner, ‘The Praxis of Irony’, p. 32. 32. Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Textual Strategies. Perspectives in Post-structuralist Criticism, ed. by Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 74–75. 33. Seth L. Wolitz, ‘The Power of Style. A Tribute to David Bergelson’, Jewish Affairs, 52.3 (1997), 131. 34. Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions. Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 3–4. 35. David Bergelson, ‘Dray tsentren’, In shpan, pp. 84–96. An English translation appears as Appendix B in the present volume. 36. Bergelson, In shpan, p. 91. 37. I should like to thank Gennady Estraikh for contributing valuable bibliographical information at the early stages of this project, and Marc Caplan, Ruth R. Wisse, and Joseph Sherman for reading versions of this essay and contributing their comments. I am grateful to William Mills Todd III in whose seminar ‘Literature as Institutions’ the earliest idea of this project originated. I thank Steven J. Zipperstein for suggesting that Dubnov’s memoirs would contribute valuable details about the Russian-Jewish scene in inter-war Berlin. Many additional ideas about the project emerged in conversations with Harriet Murav during the Association for Jewish Studies conference in December 2005 and the Russian-Jewish Studies workshop she organized at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in June 2006. I am grateful to Liora Halperin for her editorial help and support.

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CHAPTER 7

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Narrating the Revolution: From ‘Tsugvintn’ (1922) to Mides-hadin (1929) Mikhail Krutikov Introduction: Aesthetics and Ideology in Bergelson’s Writing Bergelson’s transformation from leading Yiddish prose modernist into communist propagandist is among the most intriguing stories in the history of Yiddish literature. The motives and driving forces behind this remarkable conversion have been debated by critics and scholars for nearly eighty years, during which much attention has been paid to the possible ideological, political, and pragmatic reasons for his joining the communist camp at the expense of examining the aesthetic aspects of his evolution as an artist during that period. This essay is an attempt to redress the balance by giving priority to aesthetics over politics in analysing Bergelson’s writing about the revolution. Most critics agree that Bergelson’s turn to revolutionary themes can be regarded as the next stage in the innovative modernist project with which he entered the Yiddish literary world in 1909. Bergelson’s Kiev friend and associate Nakhmen Mayzel formulated the writer’s artistic agenda as farbreytern di ramen fun der yidisher literatur, araynbrengen in ir dos raykhe, komplitsirte, vos dos lebn hot farmogt, un derbay leygn spetsyele oyfmerkzamkayt oyf der form, oyf stil. [broadening the parameters of Yiddish literature, introducing into it the richest and most complicated that life affords, and in addition paying special attention on the form and style.]1

Among those writers whose works exercised particular inf luence on Bergelson, Mayzel named the Russian classics and contemporary Hebrew and Scandinavian authors; contemporary Yiddish literature had relatively little to contribute to his artistic development. For Bergelson, as for other Yiddish writers of his generation, the revolution opened new artistic horizons, but also created new challenges that Yiddish literature was not always able to meet. His failures should be measured against the formidable difficulty of the problems he tried to tackle. His experiments were not always

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successful, but most of them were products of a great and bold artistic imagination. Bergelson invented new narrative techniques which enabled him to tell the story of the revolution through innovative expressive devices and from multiple perspectives. This essay analyses the experimental features of two works which chronologically frame the beginning and the end of Bergelson’s transformation into a revolutionary writer: the long short story ‘Tsugvintn’ (1922) and the novel Mides-hadin (The full severity of the law, 1927–29). Bergelson as an Experimental Writer To appreciate Bergelson’s artistic evolution fully, it is essential to avoid treating him as the nostalgic chronicler of a modern Jewish bourgeoisie that had just begun to emerge as part of the multi-ethnic urban society in the south-western provinces of the Russian Empire when it was irretrievably swept away in the f lood of war and revolution. Bergelson was not a Yiddish Bunin or Galsworthy, but rather an experimental writer, an artistic innovator constantly searching for new ways in which to portray changing reality. In other words, Bergelson the artist looked forward rather than backward, and did not hesitate to part from his own achievements if he felt that these prevented him from moving forward. Nokhem Oyslender, another of Bergelson’s Kiev associates and later a leading Soviet Yiddish scholar and critic, claimed that the key feature of Bergelson’s creativity was its experimental nature. In his 1924 book Velt-ayn velt-oys (A world comes, a world goes) Oyslender noted: der iker fun Bergelsons kunst iz alemol geven der umru fun a kinstler, vos iz gekumen tsum rand fun zayn geyarshnter kinstlerisher derfarung un vil dos ‘geher-gezen’ iberzetsn oyf der shprakh fun naye kinstlerishe forgefiln. [the essence of Bergelson’s art has always been the restlessness of an artist who had reached the outer limits of his inherited artistic experience and wishes to translate reality into the language of new artistic presentiments.]2

Building on the ideas of the Russian formalist school that found their clearest formulation in Yuri Tynianov’s essay ‘O literaturnoi evoliutsii’ (On literary evolution, 1927), Oyslender argued that the most fertile ground for literary evolution lay not at the centre of a given literary system but at its periphery, where the established tradition of artistic representation bordered on artistically unexplored areas of ‘raw’ reality: der kinstlerisher eksperiment heybt zikh alemol on hart baym sharfn rand fun der kinstlerisher traditsye, ‘artistic experiment always begins close to the sharp edge of the artistic tradition’. The vector of Bergelson’s development as an artist, Oyslender argued, pointed in the direction of umbatsoymtn forgefil, ‘unrestricted presentiment’, and umdervarteter derfindung, ‘unexpected invention’.3 The tectonic social and political transformations caused by the revolution turned familiar Jewish ground into a new frontier, to which Bergelson was drawn by his ‘artistic restlessness’. I would argue that this evolution can be described, in terms of stylistic development, as a movement from impressionism to expressionism. The experimental character of Bergelson’s prose became especially evident in his treatment of the theme of revolution.

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In his detailed study of Bergelson’s poetics during the first two decades of his creative activity, Avrom Novershtern has identified and described a number of changes in Bergelson’s poetic construction of time and space that occurred around 1920, when the writer turned to depict the events of the civil war in Ukraine. In his 1918 essay ‘Dikhtung un gezelshaftlekhkayt’ (Belles-lettres and the social order)4, Bergelson famously insisted that a writer needed distance in time from actual events in order to be able to capture them artistically. As Novershtern notes, Bergelson’s artistic practice was inconsistent with his theoretical position because by the early 1920s he had already turned to depicting a civil war that had only recently ended.5 One of his innovations was a new concept of disintegrated space. As opposed to the old, pre-revolutionary hierarchical space structure that included the city, the shtetl, and the village as its key elements, the post-revolutionary space had no clear hierarchy or structure. The war and the revolution produced spatial gaps between the metropolis and the village. As a result of the violent disturbances, formerly continuous space disintegrated into small, unconnected units. One of the consequences of this disintegration was the ‘dejudaization’ of space, which became cleansed of visible signs of Jewish presence.6 Another innovation related to the generalization and typification of unique, actual events. For example, the story ‘Onheyb kislev 5769’ (The beginning of [the month of ] Kislev, 1919)7 — the very title of which, as Novershtern notes, is untypical of Bergelson’s usual practice because it refers to a specific historical date — presents one of the numerous pogroms of 1919 as part of eternal Gentile Jew-hatred. Unusually for Bergelson also, the characters in this story are portrayed not as individual personalities but as eternal types devoid of individuality. Novershtern sees elements of an expressionist style particularly in the way the landscape is depicted through a set of emotionally charged metonymic details.8 Expressionist Features in ‘Tsugvintn’ These new elements in Bergelson’s writing of the early 1920s deserve closer examination. The disintegration of the time-space continuum and the deindividualization of characters, the two features that Novershtern singles out in Bergelson’s post-revolution style, were characteristic of the aesthetics of German expressionism. As August Dierick explains in his study of German expressionist prose, ‘Art styles such as expressionism and baroque concentrate on things in isolation rather than on relationships, on the fragment rather than the integrated whole, and on the object taken out of its usual context’.9 Dierick continues: ‘The second way in which expressionism moves away from the imitation of nature and in the direction of abstraction is the rejection of psychology’.10 It is important to note that these stylistic elements came to the fore when Bergelson was dealing with such extreme situations as war, revolution, and pogrom. They tended to disappear when he returned to depictions of ‘normal’ life, yielding place to a more traditional, psychologically realistic style. Most of Bergelson’s works produced in the 1920s that deal with the contemporary reality of Berlin, New York, or Moscow

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are stylistically closer to his pre-revolution writing than to his ‘revolutionary’ works of the same period: in them, the narrator is again confident and ironic, characters are individualized, psychology is explored with great depth and precision, and the time-space continuum is rendered stable and uniform. One of Bergelson’s first approaches to the theme of revolution was his long short story ‘Tsugvintn’ (1922), which was meant to grow into a novel about the civil war in Ukraine. Its main characters are two vagrant Red Army fighters who are making their way across the uncharted civil war landscape in the hope of getting back to their side. The action takes place in the Kiev area on the left (east) bank of the Dnieper11 in February 1918, but now this hitherto wholly familiar home ground of Bergelson’s prose is presented as a mythological landscape. Normal life has ceased to exist, and the world is ablaze with apocalyptic fire: funem breytn tol, a vyorst tsvey vayt fun vald, hot gezetst a farnakhtiker damf, a gedikhter un a bloylekher, glaykh s’roykhern zikh ale felder durkhoys in arumikn horizont — got hot untergetsundn di velt.12 [From the broad valley, a verst or two distant from the forest, rose a crepuscular steam, thick and tinged with blue, as though all the fields along the surrounding horizon were smoking — God had set fire to the world.]

The apocalyptic quality of this landscape is stressed by biblical references evoking the motifs of judgement and punishment: akegn, in shleferikn horizont, hobn farveynte volkns, vi baynakht, baloykhtn mit royte ekn di shpitsn fun a fremder shtot; funvaytns hot oysgezen, vi dort volt lign Sdom — an ibergekerte, ‘opposite, on the enervated horizon, bleary clouds, as though at nightfall, illuminated the spires of an alien city with red rims; from a distance it seemed as though Sodom lay there — in ruins’ (19). Sodom becomes a popular biblical topos in Bergelson’s writing about the revolution; as will be seen, it replaces the traditional metaphoric representation of the shtetl as ‘Jerusalem in exile’, building up the sense of estrangement and ‘dejudaization’ of the familiar landscape. The trope of the ‘apocalyptic landscape’, with its roots in medieval visionary images and the writings of Nietzsche and his followers, made its appearance in German expressionist literature and art on the eve of World War I. In the German tradition, the apocalyptic landscape was often urban, dramatizing the destruction of the modern city by the forces of war and revolution. Jewish expressionists preferred to set their apocalyptic visions in the forest, which in Hasidic folklore — most notably in the stories of Rabbi Nakhmen of Bratslav — served as a locus of danger and temptation. The primordial forest of the Hasidic tales had been ‘domesticated’ by such realists as Mendele Moykher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem, who transformed it into an ironic backdrop for their tales. Yiddish modernists such as Der Nister and Moyshe Kulbak, on the other hand, restored the forest’s mythological significance as a symbolic space of operation for the primordial forces of creation and destruction. Although Bergelson himself never abandoned the realistic tradition, during the 1920s he appropriated some of these avant-garde metaphoric devices, in particular the charging of landscape with mystical symbolism. The characters of ‘Tsugvintn’, Botshko, Zik, and Andryuk, travel through a wasteland of winter forest with no clear sense of concrete space. Botshko’s dream is

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to get straight to Moscow: un geyen vil er vayt, vayt ... nisht mer un nisht veyniker, vi glaykh ahin — keyn Moskve, ‘and he wanted to walk further and further ... neither more nor less than straight there — to Moscow’ (20). The face of the earth is littered with the unburied corpses of people and the carcasses of animals, which are indistinguishable from one other, an opgeshundn ferd oder a gehargeter mentsh, ‘a skinned horse or a murdered man’ (19). Significantly, this story has no living Jewish characters. Jews belong to the past, and have perished together with it. They linger in the memory of the living as remote reminders of old human morality, residual pangs of conscience which have not yet fully died out in those left alive. Andryuk’s over-exhausted imagination produces a supernatural vision: fun shlekht lebn un khadoshim-lang nisht farzukhn keyn varem gekekhts zenen im di oygn geven kalye un fartsoygn, vi mit heytlekh, nor itst, hot zikh im gedakht, zet er far zikh di gantse tsayt a dray-shpitsikn kloyster [...] un dray likhtlekh brenen dort fun oybn, oyf yedn tselem a likhtl. [...] un broygez iz dort der kloyster — er mit di brenendike likhtlekh oyf di dray tslomim — okh, vi broygez... tfu! (21) [From bad living and months of not having tasted any cooked food, his eyes were weak and filmed over, as though with membranes, but now, it seemed to him, he continually saw before him a church with three spires [...] and three lights were burning above them there, on every cross a little light [...] And the church over there was angry — that church with its little lights burning on its three crosses — oh, how angry ... Tfu!]

The church is angry with Andryuk for the sin he has committed in murdering an innocent Jew: zayn geharget yidl ligt nokh efsher vi a peyger in yenem vaytn vald, un plutsem — na! ot hostu dir an aktsye — a kloyster gor fun fornt inem nepl, a kloyster, vos rukt zikh vi a mentsh, ‘perhaps his murdered little Jew still lay like a dead animal in that distant forest, and suddenly — There! A manifestation out of the blue! — A church right before your eyes in the mist, a church shoving itself forward like a human being’ (21). The image of the Jew as the victim of violence appears here in a context that would not be appropriate in the normative Jewish tradition in which Christianity historically denotes enmity to the Jewish people. By bringing together the Jew and the church in one metaphor, Bergelson stresses the post-historical character of reality, where all religions have been rendered equally obsolete. The ‘dejudaizing’ of Jewish imagery by estranging it from Jewish context and by applying ‘Jewish’ attributes to manifestly ‘non-Jewish’ if not ‘anti-Jewish’ objects is a device Bergelson frequently uses to produce new effects. Thus Andryuk describes two strangers whom he saw in the forest in distinctly ‘Jewish’ terms: eyner iz an art kapelyush, vi a zhid um shabes [...] un der anderer — a blonder, gver a yung, a miteler, hot a groyse blonde peye, vi undzerer a kozak, ‘one was wearing some sort of fur hat, like a Jew on the Sabbath [...] and the other — a fair-haired, powerfully built youth of medium height, had a great blond earlock like one of our Cossacks’ (28). The word peye, ‘earlock’, sounds particularly ironic when used to describe the tshub, that long lock of hair left on the top of their otherwise shaven heads that was an object of intense pride among the Cossacks. This ‘dejudaizing’ technique is made to function at the level of plot as well. The episode in which Botshko, Zik, and Andryuk steal

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two horses left to graze by their owners is an intertextual reference that directs the attentive Yiddish reader to a similar scene in Mendele’s classic novel Fishke der krume (Fishke the lame), but which is now enacted among Gentiles, not Jews. These horses might take them up to Moscow, says Andryuk, the most deceitful and repellent character in the story (25). These few examples support Oyslender’s insight into the experimental nature of Bergelson’s prose. In ‘Tsugvintn’ he moves from the domestic milieu of Jews to the wild and violent world of the Gentiles, yet his narrator remains steeped in Jewish conceptual and metaphoric language, which he draws on to depict the new reality. This narrator has nothing in common with his characters; indeed, had they met in real life they would in all likelihood have murdered him. At this point the language of the revolution, with its emphasis on class struggle, remains completely unfamiliar to Bergelson. He still operates within the parameters of mythological, biological, and religious discourse, using the rich range of traditional Jewish imagery to portray the destructive side of revolutionary transformation. Nature triumphs over culture; life loses its innate value and turns into a struggle for survival. The only character with positive potential is Botshko, who tries to organize his three random companions into a military unit that might make a breakthrough to Moscow. He is driven not by his proletarian consciousness but by two most basic instincts: dreams of power and his beloved shiksl, his girl, who is ongeton in hoyzn un reyt baglaykh mit ale oyf a ferd, ‘wears breeches and rides on horseback like everyone else’ (34). Out of these dreams emerges a new Botshko, a strong and unyielding military commander, so that ale derfiln mitamol, az zayn kol iz punkt dos, vos m’darf — a kol fun an emesn eltstn, ‘they all suddenly sense that his voice is exactly what is required — the voice of a genuine leader’ (35). Botshko’s new-found authority is not a product of his personal development but is inherent in his nature: er iz an eltster — fun eybike yorn an eltster, ‘he is a leader — from time immemorial, a leader’ (35). If anything, Botshko personifies the Nietzschean ideal of the superman rather than the communist model of a Red Army commissar. Under Botshko’s command, the lost soldiers of assorted defunct armies are steadily reorganized into a new military unit. Together with himself and his two comrades, the company includes a former Hungarian officer and eight Chinese men. Joining the army of the revolution has a transforming effect on all of them: der nekhtiker Fritz iz geshtorbn; haynt iz Fritz fun shlof oyfgeshtanen, heyst es: der hayntiker Fritz iz nay-geboyrn un hot lakhlutn nisht tsu ton mitn nekhtikn, ‘the Fritz [the Hungarian] of yesterday has died: today Fritz has awakened from sleep, in other words, today’s Fritz is new-born and has absolutely nothing to do with the man of yesterday’ (37–38). To become a successful commander, Botshko needs to assert his authority. From his own experience he knows only two types of commander, the tsarist officer and the communist commissar. His instinct tells him that only the latter model is suited to his present situation: ‘Khaveyrim!’ — hot er zikh gevolt dermonen on ale redes, vos er hot ven s’nisht iz in zayn lebn gehert, ‘ “Comrades!” — he wanted to remember all the speeches he had ever heard in his life’ (41). As Bergelson seems to suggest, the primary driving force of the revolution is not class consciousness but instincts and dreams. These acquire social and ideological forms only at a later stage, when the

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practical task of organizing the masses must be undertaken. Bergelson’s focus on the individual rather than on society in general corresponds with the artistic intention of expressionism as formulated by Dierick: ‘Expressionists see the primary goal as the New Man, not the new society’.13 The revolution forced Bergelson to abandon the enclosed Jewish milieu of the shtetl and to operate instead in the same large universe as German and Russian writers. The new material with which he was working required a new form and a new narrative voice. Neither task was easy, and despite several attempts Bergelson was unable to produce a novel about the revolution until 1927–29. In ‘Tsugvintn’ the narrator is still part of the old world: ironic, omniscient, and Jewish. Notwithstanding his cautious sympathy with the experiment that is the revolution, he does not subscribe to its ideology. For him, the revolution is the eruption of primitive, destructive energy that has for centuries been building up deep in the collective psyche of the oppressed masses. This revolution was as hostile to the Jews as it was hostile to any of the other old forms of social and cultural organization. But in ‘Tsugvintn’, the tension between the narrative voice, steeped in traditional yidishkayt, and the newly released forces of nature, produced an ironic rather than a tragic effect, which left room for the future reconciliation between Bergelson and the revolution. The first expansion of Bergelson’s thematic horizon occurred in his novella ‘In a fargrebter shtot’ (‘In a backwoods town’, 1914), which Mayzel characterized as a nayer pruv bay Bergelsonen tsu shildern a svive, vos iz vi oyser im, ‘a new attempt by Bergelson to depict an environment somewhat unfamiliar to him’.14 According to Mayzel, this was Bergelson’s first attempt to step beyond the limits of his own environment, based on the obyektiv-realistisher tsugang funem kinstler tsu di tipn un gesheenishn, ‘objective-realistic attitude of the artist to types and events’.15 ‘Tsugvintn’ can be regarded as the next step in the same direction, from the familiar to the non-familiar. Here Bergelson enters hitherto uncharted Gentile territory which is ruled by the unknown laws of violence, war, and revolution. Shmuel Niger, another of Bergelson’s associates from the pre-revolutionary period and a great admirer of his talent, initially questioned the compatibility between art and revolution. Later Niger described Bergelson’s position during the post-revolutionary period as ‘intermediate’: er shteyt in yene yorn in mitn tsvishn zayn eygener vort-kunst un der kunst fun der revolutsyoner-politisher tat, ober men filt, az dos vort iz im nokh alts nenter, vi di tat. Kunst iz far im alts a tiferer kval fun inspiratsye, vi revolutsyonerer kamf. Men filt, az khotsh er matert zikh shoyn tsu zayn a revolutsyonerer kinstler, iz er nokh alts mer kinstler, vi revolutsyoner.16 [In those years he stood in the middle, between his own skill with language and the art of revolutionary-political action, but one feels that language is still dearer to him than action. For him art still remains a deeper wellspring of inspiration than revolutionary war. One feels that, even though he is now struggling to be a revolutionary artist, he still remains more artist than revolutionary.]

For Niger, whose attitude to literature remained embedded in the poetics of Russian critical realism, Bergelson’s artistic experiment with the theme of

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revolution was interesting but unsuccessful. In Niger’s view, Bergelson’s artistic strength lay in his ability to portray the inner complexity of the modern personality rather than in the social upheavals of wars and revolutions. In the age of revolution, his task was to preserve the past: vos tifere vortslen a zakh oder a perzon hot in der noenter fargangenhayt, alts mer farbn hot far ir Bergelson — un alts lebedikere farbn, ‘the deeper the roots possessed by events or persons in the recent past, the more colours Bergelson has for them — and the more lively the colours’.17 The fading of these psychological lebedike farbn, ‘lively colours’, and the disintegration of the old space were part of the price Bergelson was forced to pay for his break with the trademark style that had earned him the admiration of a small circle of connoisseurs of modern Yiddish letters. In his prose about the revolution, the focus shifts from character and description to the narrative voice. Bergelson mobilizes all the metaphorical resources of Jewish discourse by revising and refreshing its mytho-poetic potential, worn out by centuries of routine automatization. To actualize old symbols and images, Bergelson uses the artistic device known in Russian formalist theory as ostranenie, ‘estangement’ or ‘defamiliarization’: familiar details, images, and expressions are removed from their customary or conventional context and placed within radically different terms of reference. Thus narrative technique, rather than complexities of plot and characterization, becomes the main bearer of artistic weight. Mides-hadin and the End of Modernist Experiment Bergelson’s third complete novel, Mides-hadin, marked a watershed between his modernist and socialist-realist periods. Written in 1926–27, during the years of his emigration, it was published jointly in Kiev and Vilna in 1929, five years prior to his final return to the Soviet Union. This novel is an artistic experiment, the purpose of which was to portray the revolution in a manner that would appeal to a readership both inside and outside the Soviet Union. In her study of Bergelson’s novels, Susan Slotnick states: ‘It is in Mides-hadin that his concept of Marxism and the Marxist view of history achieved sufficient clarity and cohesiveness to sustain a novel-length work’. But Slotnick’s next point indirectly questions the orthodoxy of Bergelson’s Marxism, because she suggests that in the novel the way to the revolution ‘is presented, not as an emotional or even intellectual process, but rather as a quasi-religious one’.18 As I shall try to demonstrate, it is precisely Bergelson’s attempt to express a Marxist view of the revolution by the means of ‘quasi-religious’ discourse that makes Mides-hadin one of the most original examples of his revolutionary prose. The experimental character of the novel is evident from its title. To designate the theme of his work by using a Jewish mystical concept was exceptional for Bergelson, whose normal practice in this regard was to choose words related to time or space, either directly, as in ‘Arum vokzal’ (At the depot) and Baym Dnyepr (At the Dnieper), or metaphorically, as in Opgang (Descent), Nokh alemen (When all is said and done) and ‘In fartunklte tsaytn’ (In darkened times); in other cases he named his works after their main characters, as in the case of ‘Der toyber’ (The

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deaf man), a practice wholly consistent with his realist style. A title like Mides-hadin evoked a set of metaphorical associations that belonged more to the symbolist or expressionist, rather than the realist, tradition, recalling such works as Moyshe Kulbak’s novel Moshiekh ben Efraim (Messiah, the Son of Ephraim) or Der Nister’s stories from the collection Gedakht (Imagined). The mystical concept of mides-hadin, literally ‘measure of judgment’, which in the Jewish tradition is associated with the rigour of divine justice, is embodied in the novel’s chief character, Filipov, a Gentile Red Army commander who has been sent to take charge of Kamino-Balke, a former monastery now converted into a communist fortress, and to stop the smuggling of people and goods across the Soviet–Polish border. A ‘prophet and messenger of the revolution’,19 as Slotnick characterizes him, Filipov trogt in zikh a kaltn, ayzernem tropn yoysher, vos bashlist, shisn arestantn, tsi neyn, ‘bears within himself a cold, iron drop of even-handedness, which decides whether to shoot prisoners or not’.20 The Soviet critic Dobrushin calls Filipov a min medium, a min fatum fun der gerekhtikayt, ‘a kind of vehicle or predeterminer of justice’, in this way stressing the character’s impersonal and functional aspect.21 Filipov has nothing of that opaque psychological complexity that was the hallmark of Bergelson’s pre-revolution characters and style. He is portrayed as a single-minded type, devoid of personal weaknesses and contradictions, who has put his entire life at the service of the revolution. The extent of his commitment is conveyed by the fact that he no longer remembers his own birthday; it is ‘as if I was born in October’, he tells his comrades (243).22 When he joins the revolutionary struggle, he changes his real name, Anastasyev, for the revolutionary pseudonym Filipov, in this way symbolically shedding his pre-revolutionary past. His spiritual strength is contrasted with his physical weakness. He is constantly in pain from a chronic inf lammation in his neck, which adds the dimension of suffering to his messianic mission. To convey the nature of Filipov’s revolutionary messianism, Bergelson uses religious metaphors sundered from their traditional or conventional contexts. Filipov’s ‘iron drop’, the symbol of his revolutionary consciousness that he bears in his heart and which instructs him how to act in critical situations, is an allusion to the mysterious biblical medium of divination, the urim ve’tumim, literally ‘lights and perfections’ (Exodus 28. 30), through which God revealed His will to the High Priest in the Temple of Jerusalem (240). The comrades call Filipov an ‘iron man’ and a tsadik, to which one of the counter-revolutionary characters retorts, ‘I’ve never yet seen a tsadik made of iron’ (177). But even the iron man Filipov is mortal. Worn out by the burden of the revolutionary struggle and by his physical pain, he finally decides to meet his death and, in a desperate attack, charges at the enemies of the revolution. His heroic death enables him to fulfil his messianic mission to the very end, because his sacrifice helps to mobilize those demoralized forces of the revolution that were on the brink of moral and physical collapse. Jewish and Christian religious imagery removed from its traditional context plays a key role in the metaphorical language of Mides-hadin. The variety of its uses can be demonstrated by the example of tseylem, the Hebrew word for ‘image’ or ‘idol’ which in Yiddish usage came to denote the Christian cross. This word, which carries obvious negative connotations for the traditional Jewish ear, is subversively

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associated with Filipov, the novel’s most positive character. We are told that Filipov was raised in a poor working-class suburb by his pious grandmother who is characterized as a groyse tseylemniste (244), a phrase meaning ‘a woman who crosses herself at every opportunity to shown her piety’. From her Filipov learned the virtue of devotion, which he later gave in full measure to the cause of the revolution. In another case, the root tseylem appears in a context that has no immediately obvious religious connotations. During his pursuit of the smugglers, with two shots from his gun Filipov has ibergetseylemt, literally ‘crossed over’ their way, or fired across the path they were taking. Normally, the verb ibertseylemen denotes the Christian religious custom of crossing oneself in symbolic affirmation of the Christian faith. Removed from of its conventional context here, this verb is nevertheless still endowed with metaphysical connotations that transform Filipov’s action of shooting at the smugglers into a symbolic affirmation of his new revolutionary faith. In other cases, the word tseylem bears negative, counter-revolutionary, and traditionally Christian connotations. It is exquisitely deployed to portray the questionable nature of di blonde, ‘the blonde woman’, wife of a White army officer, who comes to the shtetl with the intention of being smuggled across the border and with a curious image visible in her eyes: modne oygn, glaykh yeder oyg hot tif in zikh nokh a froy, un bay yeder froy hengt dort a tseyleml oyf der brust, ‘strange eyes, as though each eye had deep within it another woman, and each woman wore a little cross hanging on her bosom’ (15). In this instance, a cross on a female bosom is ironically made to appear both pious and sensual, two traits that characterize ‘the blonde’;23 Bergelson makes the same link between tseylem and brustn, between religion and eroticism, in a metonymic characteristic of one of this novel’s most remarkable female characters, a vaybl [...] mit a varem shalekhl ibergeflokhtn vi a tseylem iber ire fule brustn, ‘a young woman [...] with a warm shawl tied crosswise [literally, ‘like a cross’] over her full breasts’ (91). Elsewhere, the juxtaposition of Christian and Jewish imagery is used for comic effect: a priest in the communist prison automatically crosses his mouth when he yawns in his sleep, while his observant Jewish cellmate recites the Sabbath blessing over the gaol food he is served (126); Christian monks are made to say moyde ani, ‘I give thanks’, the opening words of the traditional Jewish prayer that observant Jews recite immediately upon waking in the morning (253). But probably the most ingenious subversion of both Christianity and Judaism is the oxymoron koshere tseylemlekh, literally, ‘ritually pure little crosses’. These few illustrations show the various ways in which Bergelson makes the metaphoric diapason of the word tseylem far exceed its denotative meaning and acquire a wide variety of cultural and metaphysical connotations that are associated with the new order. He does not shy away from using religious references in the most inappropriate contexts when he wishes to expose the counter-revolutionary nature of individual characters. He makes a bandit sitting over a bottle of vodka frequently recite ‘a new asher-yoytser over vodka’ (204). This oblique reference leads the implied reader to understand that the bandit is obliged periodically to get up and relieve himself, an action metonymically alluded to in the mention of the traditional Jewish blessing, ‘the One Who Created’, always recited by the observant after such calls of nature.

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Through this allusion, the Jewish narrator establishes a cultural bond with his Jewish reader over the head of his Gentile character, simultaneously mocking both the brutishness of the robber and the automatic nature of Jewish religious observance. At the ideological level, these allusions to religious customs and symbols send a straightforward message that religion, whether Christian or Jewish, is part of the counter-revolution and has no place in the new social order. Artistically, their function is far more subtle and sophisticated. The narrator expects the reader to appreciate the inventiveness of his subversive play with religious imagery which requires, of course, a familiarity with both Jewish and Christian traditions. The impersonal force of mides-hadin, ‘the full severity of the law’ attributed to Filipov sets him apart from the old order and transforms him into its executioner: itst iz er geven ful mit mides-hadin funem ‘groysn gerekht’, alts eyns kalt un alts eyns vayt tsu ale arumike punkt vi tsu zikh aleyn, ‘now he was filled with the full severity of the law of absolute justice, equally as cold and as alien to everyone around him as he was to himself ’ (240–41). On the metaphysical level, the narrative implies, the consequence of the revolution has been to effect a total separation between the two mystical powers, mides-harakhmim, the power of mercy, and mides-hadin, the power of justice, which had until then jointly coexisted. Mercy, rakhmones, has no place in the new world order of strict revolutionary din, justice. As one of the other characters explains, Filipov is one of those people who cannot permit himself the pleasure of rakhmones. The concept of rakhmones belongs to the world of women, the wives and daughters of the prisoners in Kamino-Balke, who wait for days in front of the closed gates of the former monastery. As Novershtern has noted, all Yiddish writers who wanted to engage with the theme of the revolution had to tackle the problem of location: how were they to represent an event of universal scope within the limits of the traditional Jewish shtetl space without reducing it to mere shvakhe opgerisene ekhos, ‘weak, disconnected echoes’, to use Niger’s expression? Sholem Asch resolved this problem by moving the action of his trilogy Farn mabl (Three Cities) to the urban epicentres of the events — Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow — effectively producing a dramatization of the historical narrative. Peretz Markish in his novel Dor-oys dor-ayn (A generation goes, a generation comes) was also obliged to relocate his leading character from the shtetl to the city in order to offer him a larger arena in which to participate in revolutionary action. In Mides-hadin, Bergelson chose a different way. As Niger put it, er hot gelozt oyfshaynen in der provintsieler ‘gloz vaser’ yenem vunderlekhn tropn, in velkhn di zun shpiglt zikh op azoy vi in yam. Er hot, mit andere verter, gezukht undz tsu gebn a revolutsye in miniatur, ‘in a provincial “glass of water” he permitted that marvellous drop, in which the sun is ref lected as though on the sea, to coruscate. In other words, he sought to give us a revolution in miniature’.24 By situating the narrative space of his novel around a shtetl near the Soviet–Polish border, Bergelson closed it off from the larger world.25 However, to avoid the danger of reducing the vastness of the revolution to the small scale of a shtetl, Bergelson introduces Filipov as the novel’s main character. As Novershtern points out, Filipov has no connection to the locality of the novel, and brings into its provincial backwater not only the ideas and the power of the revolution, but also the presence of the larger world,

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qualities Novershtern interprets as poetic manifestations of Bergelson’s ideological turn to communism during the second half of the 1920s.26 Bergelson himself was well aware of the limitations that a shtetl location could impose on a writer’s expressive abilities. He criticized the young Soviet author Itsik Kipnis (1896–1974) for imitating Sholem Aleichem in his novella Khadoshim un teg (Months and days, 1926), a choice that, in his view, resulted in Kipnis’s failure to represent the true scope of the transformation wrought by the revolution.27 Sholem Aleichem’s greatest artistic achievement, his ability to create synthetic folk types likes Tevye or Menakhem-Mendel, also had its limitations, Bergelson argued in his 1926 essay on Sholem Aleichem’s style. Sholem Aleichem’s identification with the collective prevented him from speaking for an individual. As a result, such phenomena as individual psychology, female beauty, or the splendour of nature remained outside the scope of Yiddish literature because the Yiddish of the ‘folk’ lacked adequate linguistic and artistic resources for their representation.28 As many critics have agreed, Bergelson’s major artistic innovation was breaking with the synthesizing, typological mode of the ‘classical’ writers and identifying instead individual voices in the shtetl chorus. Later, Bergelson followed some of his characters on their way from the shtetl to the city and further abroad, producing a series of stories set in Kiev, Berlin, and Moscow. Yet it was the shtetl, not the city, which remained the central space in all four of Bergelson’s novels. How did he cope with the artistic limitations of the shtetl in his novel about the revolution? If the traditional image of the shtetl was, as Miron tells us, derived from the metaphor of ‘Jerusalem in exile’, then the metaphoric model of Golikhovke, the shtetl locale of Mides-hadin, was Sodom, a symbolic image that had already made a cameo appearance in ‘Tsugvintn’.29 In Golikhovke, as in Sodom, a stranger cannot even buy food. A local girl explains this to a Red Army soldier who passes through Golikhovke on his way from the border to Kamino-Balke: m’kokht un m’bakt nit far azelkhe vi ir — do makht men ‘khasene’ yene, vos kumen aher ganvenen di grenets, ‘Here they don’t cook and bake for the likes of you — here they make a party for all those who come to this place to steal across the border’ (145–46). Slotnick observes that every space in Mides-hadin is politically marked: ‘Golikhovke is the home of one counter-revolutionary element: those who smuggle goods and people over the border for their livelihood’, whereas another oppositional force, the anti-Bolshevik socialist revolutionaries who prepare an anti-Soviet peasant rebellion, is associated with the villages in the vicinity.30 The countryside is the locus of insecurity and danger both for the revolution and for the shtetl Jews, and it needs to be eliminated by the revolutionary force. The shtetl is physically and metaphorically located between two antagonistic forces, the Bolshevik Kamino-Balke and the rebellious anti-Soviet villages. True to its nature, the shtetl tries to find a new mediating role for itself by arranging an exchange between the two sides, in this particular case by helping people to get out of Soviet Russia. But in the new post-revolutionary situation of antagonistic struggle, no compromise is possible. Bergelson conveys the disintegration of the shtetl under the impact of the revolution through a variety of rhetorical devices, among which estrangement and subversion play an important role. An ordinary sunset is transformed by the writer’s

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skill into a mystical vision of darkness setting over the shtetl: zi farfintstert frier dem tol, di alte mil mitn brikl, dernokh dem mark, di dekher, vos grobn zikh ayn in barg un shtaygn, shtaygn, vi di shtaplen fun a layter. Tsuletst farshlingt di fintster dem barg aleyn, dem altn katoylishn kloyster. Dort blaybt zi hengen, vi far a durkhzikhtiker vant, vos vart nokh vi oyf havdole ... Ayngehilt in ir ligt Golikhovke on a likht un vart mit fartayetn otem ... Glaykh dort, oyfn kloyster, vu a breg fun himl iz nokh hel, drapet zikh emetser oyfn same shpits un kukt zikh ayn far ale Golikhovker: vos tut zikh itst in gevezenem altn monastir — in Kamino-Balke? (22–23) [Darkness obscures first the valley, the old mill with its the little bridge, then the marketplace, the rooftops that burrow their way into the mountainside and rise up, higher and higher, like the rungs of a ladder. Finally the darkness engorges the mountain itself, [and] the old Catholic church. There it remains suspended, as though before a translucent wall, still waiting, as though for havdole ... Without a single light, enveloped in [darkness], Golikhovke lies waiting with bated breath ... At the same time, there, on the church, where a f lange of sky is still bright, someone is scrambling up to its topmost point and staring down on all the inhabitants of Golikhovke: Now what is going on in Kamino-Balke, in the old monastery of bygone days?]

By comparing the ref lection of the setting sun on the church spire with the light kindled during the ceremony of havdole, the Jewish religious ritual that marks the conclusion of the Sabbath, Bergelson signals the metaphorical sunset of both Christianity and Judaism, and the coming of a new age of revolution. The seat of the new revolutionary power is situated in the former monastery of Kamino-Balke, now converted into a military command post cum prison. This prison represents a new microcosm created by the revolution, since its cells are filled with people who under ‘normal’ circumstances would never be found together in the same room. The Jews include a merchant, Reb Arn Lemberger, and his assistant; a former Red Army soldier; an anti-Bolshevik socialist revolutionary; and a watchmaker. The old Gentile world is represented by two Polish prostitutes, a Russian Orthodox priest, and a Ukrainian bandit. Having been caught attempting to cross the border illegally, they are all waiting for the revolutionary committee to pronounce its verdict. Although this committee meets on a Friday night, its sentence is not pronounced until the eve of Sunday, a timing that symbolically desecrates both the Jewish and the Christian Sabbath. On the Friday afternoon immediately preceding the committee meeting, the religiously observant Reb Arn bribes a guard to get him a khale, a braided loaf, for shabes, and when it eventually arrives, late on the Sabbath afternoon, he invites his fellow Jewish inmates to celebrate with him the departure of the holy day. In the interim he has been sentenced to death, and on Saturday night the executioners take him and the two Polish girls to be shot. The fact that he is to be executed in the company of two Gentile prostitutes is a great offence to Reb Arn’s religious sensibilities, because he has been preparing himself to die as a pious Jew for the sanctification of God’s name. This obvious mockery of Jewish faith is accompanied by an ironic anti-Christian slant, an allusion to the summary execution of Jesus between two thieves, a point insightfully noted by Susan Slotnick.31 How Sholem Asch might

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have rendered a situation in which an observant Jewish merchant and Catholic Polish prostitutes are led together to execution by pitiless Russian Bolsheviks can readily be imagined: he would fully have exploited its sentimental and symbolic potential, presenting the episode simultaneously as an act of both Jewish kidesh hashem and of Christian martyrdom. By contrast, Bergelson’s artistic and ideological goal was to expose the ‘true’, that is, the materialist, essence of national and religious heroism, and this he achieves with several inventive strokes. He encourages the reader to anticipate yet another heroic act of kidesh hashem, the sanctification of God’s name by martyrdom, a theme popularized by Asch in his 1919 novel Kidesh hashem, and then def lates these expectations with the addition of one single detail. Before leaving the cell to be executed for a crime that consisted of hiding his money to prevent it from being confiscated by the revolutionary authorities, Reb Arn quietly tells his assistant where he has hidden the fortune he has amassed from smuggling leather goods. In the mind of his assistant, therefore, Reb Arn, formerly a prominent shtetl merchant and a pious Jew, is metonymically reduced merely to his five gold teeth, which hobn oyf eybik farshvakht un vokhedik gemakht ale sheyne toyres, vos men zogt farn toyt oyf shabesdike khales, ‘have forever diminished and profaned all the beautiful religious teachings that one reiterates over the Sabbath loaves before death’ (132). This last phrase may serve as a good example of Bergelson’s uncertainty about how to maintain the balance between art and ideology. His narrative strategy shifts between ironic detachment from, and didactic engagement with, the subject matter. This diversification of the narrative voice is a particularly innovative feature of the novel. Despite his assumed ‘stance of objectivity’, Bergelson’s narrator is not impartial, Slotnick observes.32 In 1932, while reading Baym Dnyepr, Shmuel Niger perceptively described Bergelson’s narrative strategy in his diary: Bergelson molt nit zayne parshoynen, er mishpet zey, ober kedey zey tsu konen shteln far zayn rikhter-shtul, makht er zey lebedik, azoy az zayn libe-un-has tsu di heldn, velkhe er shaft, shtert im nit tsu zayn obyektiv in dem moment fun shafn, ‘Bergelson does not paint his characters, he judges them; but in order to bring them to the bar of his court of judgement, he makes them live, so that his feelings of love and hate towards the heroes that he creates does not prevent him from being objective in the moment of creation’.33 Bergelson’s narrator is simultaneously engaged with the old world and detached from it; he has an intimate knowledge of its ways but no sympathy for its sorrows. To construct his multiple vision of reality, Bergelson uses several characters as ‘centres of consciousness’, each of whom ref lects one aspect of reality. The major ‘centre of consciousness’ is Dr Babitski, a disappointed and depressed middle-aged physician who wants nothing more than to be left in peace, but instead is always dragged into the midst of unwanted activity. Through the eyes of this passive and intelligent man we are made to see a stunning revelation of the new regime as a mystical vision of cold fire over the seat of Bolshevik power: zey zenen kalte fayern fun mides-hadin, fayerlekh, iber velkhe es iz balebos ‘er’, Filipov, an arbeter fun shakhtes — zey zenen fayern fun epes a modner nayer shtrenger velt, ‘They are cold f lames of strict justice, little fires, whose master is “he”, Filipov, a mine-worker — they are the f lames of some sort of strange, strict new world’ (79).

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Conclusion Bergelson successfully avoided the danger of ‘provincialism’ in portraying the revolution, not by relocating the action of his novel from the periphery to the centre of events, but by re-presenting the periphery as an arena of the universal cosmic struggle between absolute ‘good’ and absolute ‘evil’. Instead of dramatizing the historical narrative in the style of nineteenth-century realism, as did Sholem Asch, Bergelson mythologized it by using a variety of avant-garde stylistic devices. His main instrument was a new metaphorical language based on the subversion and defamiliarization of traditional religious symbolism. Artistically, Mides-hadin represents one of Yiddish prose writing’s most ambitious experiments, in which Bergelson succeeded in creating a complex, multi-layered narrative driven by a somewhat primitive thriller-like plot. Mides-hadin continued and completed the trend started with ‘Tsugvintn’. Elaborate characters lose the central position they traditionally occupy in realist fiction. Psychological depth and ideological sophistication belong to the disappearing world. The New Man is f lat and single-minded, his personality subordinated to ideology. In this situation, the narrator becomes the central feature of the novel. He alone is capable of negotiating between the old world and the new by using the vast reservoir of traditional imagery. On one level, he transmits the straightforward ideological message of the revolution that is accessible to everyone. On another level, he addresses an élite, sophisticated readership capable of appreciating the verbal interplay between religious imagery and godless reality. This interplay produces a range of bitter-sweet emotions and sceptical ideas that have little to do with the new communist ideology; and indeed, in some cases, undermines it. This carefully orchestrated tension between simplistic ideological message and complex artistic medium is the key innovation of Bergelson’s ‘transitional’ period, which was marked by bold experimental attempts to expand the stylistic and thematic diapason of Yiddish literature. Unfortunately for Bergelson — and for the whole of Soviet literature — this way led into a dead end. Mides-hadin appeared in book form in 1929, the fateful year officially known in Soviet historiography as god velikogo pereloma, ‘the year of a great break’, which marked the end of ideological tolerance for experimental art in the Soviet Union. From 1929 on, the leadership of the Communist Party began to establish a strict set of rules that by 1934, the year in which Bergelson finally returned to live permanently in the Soviet Union, had hardened into the doctrine of socialist realism. Notes to Chapter 7 1. Nakhmen Mayzel, Forgeyer un mittsaytler (New York: YKUF, 1946), p. 308. 2. Nokhem Oyslender, Veg-ayn veg-oys (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1924), p. 21. 3. Oyslender, Veg-ayn veg-oys, p.22. 4. English translation given in Appendix A of the present volume. 5. Avrom Novershtern, Aspektim mivniyim ba-proza shel Dovid Bergelson me-reshitah ad ‘Mideshadin’ (PhD dissertation, Hebrew University, 1981), p. 137. 6. Novershtern, Aspektim, p. 138.

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7. Milgroym, 1 (1922), 25–26. 8. Novershtern, Aspektim, pp. 138–39. 9. Augustinus P. Dierick, German Expressionist Prose: Theory and Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), p. 42. 10. Dierick, German Expressionist Prose, p. 43. 11. In Ukraine, there is a significant cultural difference between the Dnieper’s more Russianized left bank, and its more independent-minded, Polish-dominated right bank. This distinction goes back to the sixteenthth–seventeenth centuries, and Cossacks are associated with the left bank. Regarded from the West, the left bank is frontier territory, but from the Russian point of view, it is closer to Moscow; this distinction remains very vivid even today. ‘Left bank’ is a cultural-historical concept which plays a symbolic role in the story. 12. David Bergelson, Geklibene verk, VII (Vilna: Kletskin, 1930), p. 16. Hereafter, all page numbers in parentheses refer to this edition of the story. 13. Dierick, German Expressionist Prose, p. 84. 14. Mayzel, Forgeyer un mittsaytler, p. 315. 15. Mayzel, Forgeyer un mittsaytler, p. 316. 16. Shmuel Niger, Yidishe shrayber in Sovet-Rusland (New York, CYCO, 1958), p. 289. 17. Niger, Yidishe shrayber in Sovet-Rusland, p. 289.. 18. Susan Ann Slotnick, The Novel Form in the Works of David Bergelson (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1978), p. 241. 19. Slotnick, The Novel Form, p. 233. 20. Bergelson, Mides-hadin (Vilna: Kletskin, 1929), p. 107. Hereafter, all page references in parentheses refer to this edition of the novel. 21. Yekhezkl Dobrushin, Dovid Bergelson (Moscow: Der emes, 1947), p. 229 22. On the one-sidedness of Filipov as literary character, see Novershtern, Aspektim, pp. 51–52. 23. Editors’ note: This device irresistibly calls to mind the identically ironic ambivalence deployed in Pope’s depiction of Belinda, the femme fatale of The Rape of the Lock (1714): On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore, Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore. (Canto II, ll. 7–8) 24. Niger, Yidishe shrayber in Sovet-Rusland, p. 296. 25. Novershtern, Aspektim, p. 141. 26. Novershtern, Aspektim, pp. 142–43. 27. Dovid Bergelson, ‘Kipnises Khadoshim un teg’, Literarishe bleter, 29.272 (1929), 559. 28. Dovid Bergelson, ‘Sholem Aleykhem un di folks-shprakh’, Morgn-frayhayt, 29 August 1926. I thank Gennady Estraikh for drawing my attention to this essay. 29. Bergelson was not the first Yiddish author to draw on this metaphor. It is already present in Mendele’s novel Dos vintshfingerl (The Magic Ring); see Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Geklibene verk, IV (New York: YKUF, 1946), p. 262. Six years after the publication of Mides-hadin, Isaac Bashevis Singer developed this motif into a full-blown antinomian nightmare in his first novel, Der sotn in Goray (Warsaw, 1935). 30. Slotnick, The Novel Form, p. 242. 31. Slotnick, The Novel Form, p. 252. 32. Slotnick, The Novel Form, p. 288. 33. Shmuel Niger, Fun mayn togbukh (New York: CYCO, 1973), p. 233.

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CHAPTER 8

❖

Uneasy Patronage: Bergelson’s Years at Forverts (1922–1926) Ellen Kellman In March 1922, short fiction by David Bergelson began to appear with some regularity in the American Yiddish daily, Forverts ( Jewish Daily Forward). During the following four years, his stories, reportage, feuilletons, and occasional literary criticism graced the pages of a newspaper known for publishing low- and middlebrow fiction while eschewing sophisticated literary works. In the spring of 1926, however, Bergelson’s writings abruptly disappeared from its columns, and on 29 May of that year, Forverts’s arch-enemy, the communist Frayhayt (Freedom), triumphantly announced that it was now the only Yiddish newspaper in the United States in which Bergelson’s work would appear.1 This essay considers the nature of Bergelson’s association with Forverts, his infelicitous professional relationship with its powerful editor Abraham (Ab) Cahan, and the implications for Bergelson’s life and art of Cahan’s disinclination to sustain his livelihood. Since Cahan’s equivocal reception of Bergelson’s work calls for an examination of the short fiction and reportage he did publish in Forverts, a few examples are considered here in an effort to characterize this work and shed light on Cahan’s reluctance to offer Bergelson permanent employment. Cahan as Literary Tastemaker Official histories of Forverts claim that, under Cahan’s editorship, the newspaper serialized the twentieth century’s most inf luential serious fiction written in Yiddish. Himself a novelist and a devoted reader and critic of modern literature, Cahan took pride in making besere literatur (serious fiction) available to his immigrant, working-class readers for a few pennies a day. The claim of Forverts historians seems to be tautological, however. Since the main means of distributing Yiddish fiction was the daily newspaper, and since Forverts had by far the largest circulation of any Yiddish newspaper and outlived similar Yiddish dailies in Eastern Europe, the fiction published there inevitably reached a wider audience than that of others. What remains unstated is that Cahan probably inf luenced the course of Yiddish literature as much by what he chose not to publish as by what he actually did. This is evident when one compares the Forverts careers of David Bergelson and Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944), the first brief and truncated; the other long and successful.

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Singer was largely unknown when, in the autumn of 1922, Cahan chanced to read his story ‘Perl’ (Pearls) in the Warsaw Yiddish literary journal Ringen (Rings). Excited by the idea that he had discovered a new talent, Cahan praised the story in a Forverts review and sent Singer, who was then just twenty-nine years old, a handsome honorarium of one hundred dollars to entice him to join the staff of Forverts as a correspondent. Throughout the first decade of Singer’s association with his newspaper, Cahan’s attitude towards him and his work was paternalistic but unwaveringly supportive, and the editor prided himself on having nurtured Singer’s career.2 Above all, Cahan made sure that Singer’s economic situation remained stable. During a decade in which many Jews living in Eastern Europe experienced tremendous economic privation and uncertainty, the opportunity to draw a regular salary in American dollars was a great boon. Although Singer’s relationship with Cahan was complicated and occasionally strained, his career at Forverts ultimately spanned some twenty-one years, until his untimely death at the age of fifty in 1944. Forverts published all of Singer’s novels, dozens of his short stories, and hundreds of items of reportage, mainly feature articles. By contrast, Bergelson apparently felt financially insecure and insufficiently appreciated throughout the four years he was a contributor to Forverts. The record shows that Cahan was, at best, ambivalent toward Bergelson’s contributions, and that Bergelson, initially eager to make a permanent home for himself at the newspaper, eventually became so discouraged by his dealings with Cahan that he resigned from his staff. The Role of Fiction in Forverts As the Yiddish press began to establish itself in the United States during the 1870s and 1880s, publishers continued the longstanding practice of the European press: printing fiction in serial form. By the 1890s, when the Eastern European Jewish immigrant community was sufficiently large to support a daily press in Yiddish, American newspapers entered into sharp competition with the purveyors of heftn, cheaply priced novels and stories serialized and published in pamphlet or chapbook format. Although these heftn had enjoyed great popularity with barely literate readers of Yiddish on both sides of the Atlantic, Yiddish newspapers in the United States were able to drive the publishers of these pamphlets out of business by offering their readers news, features, and serialized fiction as well, all for a price only slightly higher than that of a single heft. By the turn of the twentieth century, the heftn had virtually disappeared, and the Yiddish newspaper had become the average reader’s main source for fiction. Every newspaper was thus obliged to carry at least one serialized novel at all times, a pattern that Forverts continued. Although much of the fiction it serialized comprised stories and novellas, hundreds of fulllength novels also appeared there. Forverts was founded in 1897 in New York by a group of Jewish socialists who had broken away from Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labour Party3 because they disagreed with the party’s position on the rivalries between unions.4 Their new organ quickly became a leading force in the nascent American Jewish labour

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movement. Cahan was named as its first editor, but after only four months he resigned in consequence of a dispute with his colleagues, who were reluctant to give him total editorial control. He spent the following four years as a reporter for the New York Commercial Advertiser, where he worked under the talented American journalist Lincoln Steffens,5 and returned to the editor’s desk at Forverts brief ly in 1902, only to resign for a second time over the same issue of editorial control. When he finally assumed the editorship of the financially ailing Forverts on a permanent basis in the autumn of 1903, it was on the understanding that he would be free to shape the paper as he saw fit. His experiences as an Englishlanguage journalist informed his plans for converting Forverts into a commercially successful newspaper. One of Cahan’s most important innovations was his transformation of the serialized fiction published there. During the first five years of its existence, the newspaper mainly printed serious novels translated into Yiddish from world literature.6 Realizing that beletristik (belles-lettres) of this type was not attracting sufficient readers, Cahan began phasing it out, substituting for it lowbrow romance novels written chief ly by members of his staff. These novels, the plots of which dramatized Cahan’s acculturationist politics, were enormously successful and became a key factor in building the newspaper’s famously high circulation. Typically set in New York’s immigrant Jewish neighbourhoods, they ref lected the social and familial issues that preoccupied Forverts readers in the early decades of the twentieth century, among them loss of parental authority, shifts in sexual norms and gender roles, and the breakdown of barriers to secular culture and economic advancement. In the first ten years of his permanent editorship, Cahan published no full-length serious novels originally written in Yiddish. Long sceptical of the merits of modern Yiddish literature, he was certainly no Yiddishist and had scant desire to encourage authors of serious Yiddish fiction. After 1910, however, he became aware that Sholem Asch, David Bergelson, Joseph Opatoshu, and others were developing the range and depth of the modern Yiddish novel. Now aware that serious fiction about Jewish life could capture the attention of his readers, he began to interest himself in publishing it. By this time Forverts had become financially secure, so he could afford to pay authors well for their work. Thus in the autumn of 1914, Cahan hired Sholem Asch, newly arrived in New York from war-torn Europe, to write novels for Forverts. While lowbrow entertainment novels appeared seven days a week, Cahan instituted a new, weekly format for the serialization of Asch’s fiction, which consequently appeared as something special. By the late 1910s and early 1920s, Cahan’s attitude toward Yiddish fiction had changed, and he began actively searching for talented writers whose work might be suitable for publication. Regarding himself as an inf luential tastemaker, he relished the power he had to make or break literary careers. Since he already had one writer of besere romanen (serious novels) — Sholem Asch — on his staff, he felt free to take his time finding others, waiting until 1927 to put I. J. Singer and Zalmen Shneour on salary as mitarbeter (regular contributors). During the 1920s, as his newspaper continued to enjoy financial stability, Cahan seems to have regarded the publication of beletristik in Forverts as a kind of cultural ornament, a means of

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exposing the general reading public to good literature. He did not need to rely upon it to boost circulation. In reality, the proportion of serious short stories and novels that appeared in Forverts was minuscule by comparison with that of the paper’s entertainment fiction, often referred to pejoratively as shund-literatur (trashy fiction), on which Cahan depended to sell newspapers. To his search for belletrists Cahan brought his distinctive personal brand of realist poetics. He preferred authors who took a conservative approach, creating straightforward plots and fast-paced narratives unencumbered by too much descriptive detail. He distrusted historical fiction, arguing that in order to write authentically, a writer should have direct experience of his subject.7 He professed to dislike the use of sophisticated vocabulary, insisting that the language of his newspaper should be accessible to its largely self-educated readers. Writers whose styles did not conform to these requirements were generally not invited to publish in Forverts so it seems that Bergelson was the exception that proved the rule. He came to be employed at the very moment its editor was searching for fresh ideas and new talent. World War I and the Russian revolution were both recent faits accomplis, Europe was beginning to reconstruct itself, and the American-based readers of Forverts were keenly interested in what was happening across the Atlantic. The development of the Soviet Union was a particularly important topic, and Cahan deployed a variety of his regular contributors to visit the emerging new nation and report on what they found there. Cahan’s Search for New Talent: Berlin, 1921 Cahan spent most of the summer of 1921 in Berlin, making the acquaintance of Yiddish writers who had relocated there from various places in post-war Eastern Europe. Inadequate communication systems between many newly independent countries, combined with the opportunity to use the excellent publishing facilities available in Berlin, drew many writers to the city. While rampant inf lation of the German mark drove domestic prices up to inordinately high levels, the purchasing power of foreign currency was very strong, and many Yiddish publishing ventures were funded by literary patrons whose money came from abroad. In an article published in Forverts on 27 August 1921, Cahan explained to his readers how, ‘under these strange new circumstances, Berlin has become the intellectual marketplace of the Jewish world, the Jewish intellectual’s Nizhny-Novgorod’:8 Before the war, Vilna and Warsaw were twin capitals of Yiddish intellectual life. Today the great Jewish population of the former Russian empire has been broken up and reduced, and various locales (such as those in Byelorussia and Ukraine) are cut off from one another. Even communications between Warsaw, Vilna, Kovno, and Riga, for example, are very difficult. The new borders are like walls surrounding prisons. [...] Today, for example, it takes a week or two for a letter to get from Warsaw to Kovno, and one is still never sure whether it will finally arrive at its destination or not. [...] Travel is very difficult. There is always the matter of obtaining a visa, and that means days of waiting, uncertainty, and various unpleasant circumstances. [...] Warsaw and Vilna can, therefore, no longer play their earlier roles as intellectual centres.9

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He spent many evenings at the Romanisches Café in Tauentzienstrasse, a popular haven for writers and artists, and his reports on this visit for Forverts make clear that he was excited by the opportunities he now had to interact with Berlin’s Yiddishspeaking intellectual émigrés. In their café haunt he met such leading figures as Noyekh Prilutski, Tsemakh Shabad, Elias Tsherikover, Yisroel Yefroykin, HirshDovid Nomberg, Zalmen Shneour, and the political economist Yakov Lestschinsky. Bergelson, however, though he was en route out of Moscow, was still in Kovno (Kaunas) with the critic Bal-Makhshoves and other colleagues from Kiev.10 In a memoir published in Forverts on the occasion of Cahan’s 60th jubilee as a writer, Shneour recalled meeting him one evening in 1923 on the veranda of the Romanisches Café 11 where he noticed that the editor was ‘surrounded by Forverts contributors and some who were hoping to become Forverts contributors’.12 Himself in need of employment, Shneour was drawn to Cahan’s table, ‘where people used to discuss literature and kibets ( joke around) with great enthusiasm. Cahan would respond to every successful joke with laughter from deep in his chest’.13 The prospect of being paid for their work in American dollars was undoubtedly a key factor in stimulating the eagerness of Yiddish émigré writers in Berlin to pay court to and be courted by Cahan. Taking full advantage of their need to sell their wares in the Jewish intellectual marketplace that Berlin had become, Cahan arranged for several of them to contribute to Forverts, thus launching a new phase in the paper’s literary activity. Throughout the 1920s, he published short fiction and reportage by a variety of Yiddish writers who had remained in Europe after World War I, introducing many of them to his readers. Singer and Shneour were two of the three authors whose novels were serialized in Forverts during that decade. Together with Sholem Asch, they enjoyed stable, handsome salaries and the prestigious status of mitarbeter for the most successful Yiddish newspaper in the United States. Bergelson, indisputably one of the great talents in modern Yiddish literature, was no less ambitious than they were, yet his career at Forverts lacked the lustre of theirs. One of the people Cahan hired in Berlin was Yakov Lestschinsky (1876–1966). Impressed with his work in documenting the recent pogroms in Ukraine and the economic circumstances of the Jewish population there, Cahan invited him to write for Forverts about Jewish life in various parts of post-war Europe,14 and Lestschinsky’s articles duly began appearing in September 1921. By December of the same year, Cahan had fired his Berlin bureau chief and hired Lestschinsky in his place, giving him the additional brief of managing the output of Forverts correspondents in Russia, Latvia, and Berlin.15 This key position consequently enabled Lestschinsky to secure employment with Forverts for several of his friends and acquaintances,16 and Cahan began publishing Bergelson’s short fiction, feature articles, and literary criticism during March 1922. The first of his pieces was a story entitled ‘Dos kabtsonishe bekherl’ (The pauper’s goblet), which appeared in three instalments.17 Like many of the stories Bergelson wrote for Forverts, this one is set in Ukraine during the period of the civil war. Most new serializations were announced in the paper a few days in advance, and a fairly lengthy announcement regarding ‘Dos kabtsonishe bekherl’, which appeared on the editorial page on

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14 March, signalled Cahan’s intention to pique readers’ interest in this story and from then on to integrate Bergelson into his roster of frequent contributors.18 Only in 1921, after the Bolsheviks had consolidated their control of Ukraine, did Bergelson move to Berlin because, according to a memoir by his son, he feared the dangers of pogroms and found himself in disfavour as a ‘bourgeois’ artist.19 In Berlin he involved himself in a variety of important publishing projects and periodicals, but found no steady sources of income as a writer.20 Under these circumstances, the prospect of regular remuneration in US dollars for his belletristic work must have been very attractive to him. Bergelson’s Relationship with Cahan A series of nine letters from Bergelson to Cahan, housed among Cahan’s papers in the YIVO archives, document an uneasy professional relationship that began in March 1922 and terminated just over four years later, in May 1926.21 Additionally, letters from Cahan to Lestschinsky from the same period document the editor’s attitude towards Bergelson’s writing and his opinion of its suitability for serialization. They also reveal the extent of Cahan’s vexation at Bergelson’s orientation, in 1926, towards Moscow.22 Cahan knew Bergelson’s early work well. Referring to his masterpiece Nokh alemen (When all is said and done), Cahan wrote: ‘In an important sense, Nokh alemen can be ranked as the most significant novel in Yiddish literature. It is not without f laws, but it is a powerful work, chock full of vividly drawn figures. It made a singular impression’.23 Yet despite the fact that Cahan recognized his stature as an artist, while he was officially in Forverts’s employ during the years 1922–26, Bergelson felt that Cahan kept him on a very short string. In several letters Bergelson complained that the newspaper was slow to print the material he submitted and slow to pay him the money he was owed. He repeatedly asked Cahan to pay him a weekly salary and to publish his work on a regular basis. Although Cahan eventually did put Bergelson on salary, he persisted in delaying publication of his stories. Most importantly in terms of Bergelson’s long-term prospects at Forverts, Cahan never invited him to publish a novel there.24 His early letters to Cahan make it clear that Bergelson wanted very badly to be invited to join the newspaper’s permanent staff. The fact that his four years of service did not develop into a fullf ledged career can be largely ascribed to Cahan’s ambivalent attitudes — primarily artistic but increasingly also political — towards Bergelson’s work. Evidence that he valued it is found in his review of Opgang (Descent), published in Forverts on 4 February 1923. Yet even though he acknowledged Bergelson’s extraordinary talent, Cahan felt that his longer works were too complex for Forverts’s readers to digest, and that their pace was too leisurely to succeed as serialized fiction, as he remarked in his review: Opgang is a much weaker work than Nokh alemen. There are quite a few powerful passages, and beautiful ones are also not lacking. One recognizes talent and vigour there, but this time it is mostly a talent for portraying unimportant things, incidental details. The characters’ personalities are very

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pale [...]. One reads page after page and the impressions grow in one’s mind very slowly. The work proceeds very slowly.25

While Cahan’s review was not entirely negative, it must be understood in light of the fact that Forverts’s usual approach to reviewing works by regular contributors was to praise them to the skies, as can be frequently noticed in reviews of new novels by Sholem Asch and I. J. Singer.26 Cahan’s decision to publish so disapproving a critique of Bergelson’s work may have been intended to communicate his disinclination to publish his novels. In his letters to Cahan, Bergelson made it clear that he was eager to please him and was easily hurt by any perceived slight. In a letter dated 21 May 1924, he pleaded with Cahan to publish his work in a timely manner in order to allay his fears that what he had submitted had been unfavourably received: I respect you as a writer, as a great expert in mass psychology and a great teacher. But apart from all of that, I respect you as a very, very intelligent person. And as such, I believe that you understand very well the psychological state in which a writer of my stature finds himself, when one of his pieces lies on the editor’s desk for more than two months. It is, dear friend, a state of depression, when the writer loses confidence in himself, loses heart and the sense that what he writes is useful to someone else. And if he is not simply an arrogant person or a compulsive scribbler, then his mood becomes so bad that he must put aside his pen for a time.

Earlier letters provide abundant evidence that Bergelson tried to make the fiction he submitted conform to Cahan’s poetics as he understood them. For instance, on 2 March 1922 he wrote to Cahan about his story ‘Botshko: der firer fun vildn polk’ (Botshko: leader of an insurgent regiment), which he later adapted as the novella Birgerkrig (Civil war). Apparently responding to a comment by Cahan in an earlier letter, Bergelson wrote: Yesterday I mailed you a piece entitled ‘Botshko: der firer fun vildn polk’ written, as you will see, on the subject of the momentous events in Russia. I consider it one of my more successful pieces. It is, without doubt, purely artistic, yet it evokes great interest on the part of an ordinary reader, as, for instance, one of Jack London’s artistic stories does [...].

It is relevant to note here that it was typical of Cahan to advertise forthcoming publications in a similar way: as serious, even artistic works of fiction that were all the same capable of engaging the attention of the relatively unsophisticated Forverts reading public. Apparently aware of this, Bergelson seems to have been at pains to stress the salesworthiness of his work. In a letter dated 13 May 1922, he addressed one of Cahan’s greatest concerns: that writing published in Forverts should be free of vocabulary that might be too difficult or unfamiliar to its readers. Cahan had apparently complained about some of Bergelson’s word choices in ‘Botshko’: Yesterday I received your letter through Lestschinsky. You are an editor of a newspaper that has hundreds of thousands of readers, and with respect to the foreign words that one encounters in my piece, you are certainly right. You will see in the succeeding chapters, which I mailed to you today, that I have done everything possible to avoid using difficult words.

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Many parts of Bergelson’s letters to Cahan deal with monetary issues. He repeatedly insisted that the cost of living in Berlin was as high as that of the United States, especially after the hyperinf lation of 1921–23 ended with the revaluation of the German mark. In his letter of 24 May 1924 he complained bitterly at Cahan’s consistent delay in publishing his work; since he was only paid on publication, these delays were disastrous for his family’s welfare. All of this would be acceptable if the times were different. I would simply ask myself: what do you want from Ab Cahan? Ab Cahan must consider the interests of his paper first. If he publishes me only once, or at best, twice a month, it is a sign that the paper doesn’t need me three or four times a month. But I could only think this way if my family and I were not experiencing hunger. It is very different when one finds oneself in the loathsome, inhuman situation of permanent hunger. One then begins to become upset. One begins to think: even if I were only a small cog in a piece of machinery, I would still deserve to be fed. If Forverts needs me only on special occasions, then I should be valued no less than a typesetter, no less than a [...] bookkeeper [or] a janitor who cleans Forverts’s offices.

In the same letter, Bergelson admitted that he craved approval for his contributions: You need to know that there is an element in the attitude of several of your contributors towards you that reminds one of the feelings of adult children towards their father. A father should praise his children from time to time. It makes the children more cheerful and able. A father should hear his children out attentively. And, however you reckon it, I am one of your contributors.27

There is a gap of about sixteen months in this collection of correspondence: from late summer 1924 until December 1925, none of Bergelson’s letters are preserved among Cahan’s papers. During this period, Bergelson was finally paid the regular salary he had been pressing for, and from the beginning of August 1925 he started receiving forty dollars per week. Yet in his letter of 4 December 1925, he again expressed dissatisfaction with the way his material was being handled. He still felt that some pieces were not being published in good time. He mentioned a short story contest being organized by Der tog (The Day), one of Forverts’s leading competitors and respected for the high quality of the writing it published, and he asked Cahan to print ‘Tsvishn lebn un toyt’ (Between life and death), one of the stories he had recently submitted to Forverts, to coincide with the appearance of Der tog’s winners. He described his own story as zeyer shpanend-realistish, ‘very suspenseful and realistic’, and a shtarke zakh, ‘a strong piece’. Evidently Bergelson wished to enter the competition himself, and feeling frustrated that, as a Forverts contributor, he could not do so he nevertheless wanted to find some way of sharing its kudos. ‘It is possible,’ he wrote to Cahan, ‘that the public and the judges of the contest will find that the best story was printed [not in Der tog, but] in Forverts’. The story, however, never appeared in Forverts. The penultimate letter in the collection, dated 5 February 1926, concerned a new story entitled ‘A zeltener sof ’ (An unusual ending), which Bergelson had submitted for publication. He noted that it had turned out somewhat longer than

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he had intended, and hoped that Cahan would not take this amiss. This brief, businesslike letter is a perplexing document since we know that by the time he wrote it, Bergelson was deeply involved in planning the first issue of a new journal, In shpan (In Harness), and may already have decided to leave the employ of Forverts. While his previous letter, dated 4 December 1925, conveys his dissatisfaction with Cahan’s management style, the letter of 5 February does not. In letters to Shmuel Niger and Joseph Opatoshu dated ten days earlier (25 January 1926), Bergelson wrote with pride and excitement about the new literary venture in which he had taken a major part,28 expressing the hope that leading Yiddish writers and critics internationally would cooperate in producing a high-culture journal that would reach the arbeter-leyener (working-class reader). He urged both men to contribute to its first issue, and proposed to Niger that he eventually take over its editorship. On the basis of these letters of invitation, we might conclude that, at this stage, Bergelson conceived of In shpan as a forum that would bring together the best works in Yiddish by left-oriented writers outside the Soviet Union, especially those living in Poland and the United States. He may have intended, albeit naïvely, to bring out an umparteyish (politically unaffiliated) publication with such impeccable literary credentials that both pro- and anti-Bolsheviks would read it. If so, he might also have been planning to keep his hard-won position as regular contributor to Forverts. In any case, there is no hint in his letters to Niger and Opatoshu of the furore that would erupt over his rejection of Yiddish literature in Poland and America in his essay ‘Dray tsentren’ (Three centres), which he published in the first issue of In shpan. Taken together, both the journal’s title and Bergelson’s statement that ‘there is a possibility that In shpan will be allowed into Russia’ signalled the pro-communist alignment of the editorial board. Asserting that it was no longer feasible to expect the publication of Yiddish literature to be supported by ‘bourgeois’ literary patrons, Bergelson wrote to Niger: ‘It is high time to return home — I mean, to orient ourselves toward that productive sector which has, from the beginning, been organically bound up with Yiddish culture, and necessarily so, since there it is not a luxury, but a necessity’. We know that Bergelson’s appeals to other leading figures on the Yiddish cultural scene to ‘get into harness’ were, for the most part, unsuccessful. In an undated letter to his close friend Nakhmen Mayzel, editor of Literarishe bleter and manager of the Kletskin publishing house in Warsaw, Bergelson expressed deep disappointment at Mayzel’s apparent unwillingness to join the editorial staff of In shpan and help in procuring material for the first few issues of the journal.29 Yet Bergelson continued on the course he had set, intending to publish the first issue of In shpan in March 1926.30 In the event, he shocked many of both his friends and his enemies when, on 24 February, he sent a tshuve-briv (letter of repentance) to Der emes (The Truth), the Soviet Union’s leading Yiddish daily, 31 in which he apologized for having openly attacked the Yevsektsia in articles he had written for Forverts during 1923. Published in Der emes on 2 March, this letter was widely regarded as signalling Bergelson’s intention to return to the Soviet Union. Possibly, this communication was an impulsive gesture, written in desperation and perhaps out of spite when, realizing that his friends in Warsaw and New York had

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let him down, he felt that his only recourse was to seek support from the literary commissars in Moscow. Because of an absence of documentation in Bergelson’s own hand from this period, we can only speculate about whether or not he intended his tshuve-briv to signal his resignation from Forverts as well. We can be quite certain, though, that Cahan was very much taken by surprise when he heard of it. On 5 March, he telegraphed Lestschinsky in Berlin: ‘What are the real facts about Bergelson and his letter for Soviet Russia — please write at once’.32 Perhaps Bergelson intended the news of his decision to reach Cahan in precisely this way, in order to maximize the shock and hurt the imperious editor would feel at the defection of his subordinate. In any case, Bergelson did not write to Cahan again until two months later, nor did Cahan write to him during this period.33 In Bergelson’s final letter to Cahan, dated 1 May 1926, he resigned his position at Forverts, citing Cahan’s tendency to withhold his pieces from publication for unacceptably long periods of time, and announcing that he would henceforth seek to publish his work in a newspaper to which they were better suited. He asked that Cahan return the half-dozen stories which had not yet been published. By the end of May, ‘Hershl Toker’, Bergelson’s story about the death of a young communist captured by Polish border guards and imprisoned in a typhus infirmary, appeared both in New York’s communist daily Frayhayt, which set itself up as Forverts’s greatest rival and detractor, and in Moscow’s Der emes. In a brief notice appended to the text of ‘Hershl Toker’ in Der emes, Bergelson wrote: ‘I find it necessary [to state] that I have severed my ties with the American newspaper Forverts and no longer publish my work there’.34 Cahan’s Correspondence with Lestschinsky about Bergelson Cahan’s correspondence with Lestschinsky shows that throughout Bergelson’s tenure at Forverts and even subsequently, Lestschinsky functioned as a go-between.35 Cahan often charged Lestschinsky with delivering his criticisms of Bergelson’s work, while on several occasions Lestschinsky took it upon himself to justify Bergelson’s proposals for new writing projects and his requests for higher pay. There are many gaps in the Cahan–Lestschinsky correspondence, but the extant letters are quite revealing. One of these, dated 16 January 1922, attests to the fact that from the start Bergelson mistrusted Cahan, who in turn viewed publishing Bergelson’s work largely as a literary mitsve (good deed): Do your best to convey the following to Bergelson: if my letter made an unpleasant impression on him, an impression of coldness, I regret it with all my heart. I assure him that he did not understand what I meant. He knows very well that I have the highest regard for his talent. I have expressed this with great enthusiasm more than once in Forverts. [...] Your belief that such a novel can attract many readers to Forverts has no basis in fact. Really good works of literature do not attract a mass readership. [...] We have always printed literary works by the greatest artists, such as Sholem Asch, Jonah Rosenfeld, and so on. We create new readers for them, not the other way around.

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Really talented writers have relatively few readers, although Forverts has many more readers of good literature than other papers do. This is absolutely true. I want Bergelson as a mitarbeter for the same reasons that I want Sholem Asch and Jonah Rosenfeld. I will have an advance of $50 sent to him. Express my admiration of his talent to him and give him my warmest greetings once again.

Despite Cahan’s claim that to employ Bergelson served no practical purpose, it seems that he was initially pleased with Bergelson’s decision to write fiction focused on the Jewish experience in the newly established Soviet Union, viewing it as consonant with his own editorial priorities at that time. To Lestschinsky on 24 March 1922, he wrote: ‘I am very satisfied with his plan to write a series of stories that represent the contemporary life of Jews in Ukraine. His first story [‘Dos kabtsonishe bekherl’] has already been printed’. Further evidence that Cahan viewed Bergelson’s work for Forverts as more than literary decoration is found in letters to Lestschinsky from 1923 in which he expressed growing dissatisfaction with Bergelson’s style.36 On 24 February, he wrote confidentially: ‘Bergelson’s letter will be printed. The topic is a very interesting one and many sections are well written too, but (between you and me) the language is difficult, and we had to make changes in the text. I hope, however, that he won’t mind’. In a letter written five weeks later, Cahan mentioned his dissatisfaction again, this time enlisting Lestschinsky’s aid in broaching the subject with Bergelson, whose acquaintance Cahan was soon to make in Berlin: Bergelson’s article about the Jewish communists was printed quite a while ago. It made a strong impression here, although there were complaints about the difficulty of his style. If you can very courteously suggest to him that he should write shorter, simpler, more direct sentences, not such complicated ones, you’ll get a bouquet from me when I get to Berlin.37

There is a gap of more than a year between the last of Cahan’s letters dated 1923 and the next, dated 5 May 1924, of which only one page is extant. In it, Cahan responded to Lestschinsky’s suggestions about the terms of Bergelson’s employment; since Lestschinsky’s letter has fortunately survived, it is not necessary to guess at its content and tone.38 He appealed to Cahan on Bergelson’s behalf, asserting that in Berlin rampant inf lation was forcing him to live from hand to mouth, making it difficult for him to concentrate properly on his writing. He mentioned that Cahan had given Bergelson certain assurances when they discussed the matter of salary almost a year earlier, and suggested that it was time Cahan made good on his promises and paid Bergelson a modest monthly retainer. He assured Cahan that, although he was a loyal friend to Bergelson, he also had the best interests of Forverts in mind in making these recommendations, since ‘Bergelson is [...] a good and productive contributor [...]. He demonstrated this winter that he can frequently produce magnificent short stories and interesting, readable articles as well’. Lestschinsky passed on an additional piece of information that must have been intended to put pressure on Cahan: representatives of ‘other newspapers’ had spoken to Bergelson about leaving Forverts and writing for them instead, but Bergelson had put them off, still hoping that Cahan would eventually put him on salary.

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Cahan responded to this veiled threat with bluster: You say that another paper wants to take Bergelson away. Let me tell you something about this, but it should remain between the two of us: I am probably Bergelson’s greatest khosed (admirer) in America. He is not very popular here. His writing is difficult and one has to be a connoisseur to appreciate the inner qualities of his better works such as Nokh alemen, which I have praised many times in Forverts. The general audience prefers the superficial lustre and the romantic magnetism of Sholem Asch’s works, even in cases when they have no intrinsic meaning. I want Bergelson simply because I love literature and appreciate his talent much more than the general audience and even the intellectuals. Therefore, Comrade Lestschinsky, if you think he is a jewel over whom editors are fighting, you are mistaken.39

The record shows that, in spite of Cahan’s professed admiration for Bergelson and his reiterated desire to continue publishing his work, he did not honour his promise to put Bergelson on retainer until more than a year later.40 His ambivalence about Bergelson’s place at Forverts is obvious in this correspondence. On the one hand, he viewed Bergelson’s work as mainly ornamental, but on the other, he pressured him to write material that would be easy for the general readership of Forverts to digest, implying that he did, in fact, regard Bergelson’s work as important to the paper’s mission. A short time after he received Bergelson’s letter of resignation dated 1 May 1926, Cahan wrote at length to Lestschinsky to explain his side of the story, 41 emphasizing his objection to the political nature of many of the pieces that Bergelson had submitted: I got to know Bergelson fairly well in Berlin. I think you will recall my telling you that [...] I felt that he was making plans to return to Russia, and I said this to Vladek and Rogoff when I returned to New York. I also noticed that certain stories of his were heading in the same direction — laying a foundation for ‘subjugation’ to the Bolsheviks. I brought this to his attention and explained that we couldn’t print such stories. Even a few of the stories that we were able to print were of the same sort. After his letter appeared in Emes, I received letters from several comrades in Europe, who expressed the opinion that after writing such a letter, he should no longer have a position at Forverts. I responded that I preferred to take a philosophical attitude toward the situation, and that if he were to write things that we could print, we would do so. [...] But many of his stories and other pieces in our possession remained unpublished, all for the same reason: they are not literature, but propaganda.42

After expressing outrage at Bergelson’s apparent political about-face — his having turned from attacking the communists in the pages of Forverts three years earlier to his recent attack in the Frayhayt on Rafael Abramovitsh, a Forverts contributor who frequently wrote about Soviet Russia — Cahan reiterated his litany of criticisms of Bergelson’s writing style: When I was in Berlin three years ago and again last year, I took every opportunity to explain to Bergelson that his articles have few readers, that his style is difficult, and that despite his fine belletristic talent, his pieces lack charm and appeal. He would thank me for my frank comments and would ask me to show him how to improve his style in order to reach a wider readership. And I did everything I could. The number of his readers remained very small, however.

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I consider Nokh alemen the most important novel in Yiddish literature. I think very highly of several of his other pieces too. I believe that, in essence, his work is more important than Sholem Asch’s, but Asch’s is juicy, poetic, dramatic, and his style is lighter and more pleasant. He is, therefore, very popular. Bergelson lacks these qualities, and he is not popular. In general, serious fiction plays no role in the circulation of a large daily newspaper. But Bergelson’s work has absolutely no importance in this regard. Forverts did not lose even one reader when we stopped printing his work, and no other paper will gain even one by starting to print it. I am speaking here about his talent as a belletrist. Now that everything he writes is pervaded by propaganda in order to find favour with Soviet Russia, he has no value as a belletrist. He has sold his birthright for a pot of lentils, so to speak.43

A Sampling of Bergelson’s Work for Forverts Literary historians have tended to regard Bergelson’s four-year stint at Forverts as a brief interlude during which he managed to support himself as he struggled to decide the direction he would take in his life and later career. It is undeniable that Bergelson’s association with Cahan’s so-called ‘yellow sheet’ was part of what he later repudiated in his effort to become accepted as a Soviet Yiddish writer. These circumstances may explain why to date there has neither been a full study of the work he published in Forverts, nor an analysis of how this body of work is situated within his entire oeuvre. As a first step towards this goal, and in an effort to understand the reasons for his eventual resignation from the staff of Forverts, I will brief ly discuss several pieces that appeared there in 1923, when Bergelson was still hopeful that he would be offered permanent employment, and in 1925, by which time he had grown impatient with Cahan’s reluctance to put him on retainer. ‘Erev der shlakht’ (On the eve of the battle) appeared in five instalments in late January and early February 1923.44 Although it carries a separate title, this story actually extends the narrative about the insurgent leader Botshko and his ragtag band of Red Army fighters whom Bergelson had introduced in two series in Forverts in 1922: ‘Botshko: der firer fun vildn polk’ and ‘In a farlozenem hoyf in mitn nakht’ (In a deserted courtyard in the dead of night).45 Set in rural Ukraine in the late autumn of 1918 and the winter of 1919, when the forces of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura were perpetrating pogroms against Jews in many areas, the story foregrounds the experiences of young Jewish wagon-driver, Abe, who joins Botshko’s regiment for protection from the pogromshtshikes (pogromists), only to have his courage and sense of loyalty put to the test in the midst of a murderous rampage. One of the most interesting aspects of this story is Bergelson’s portrayal of the process by which the band of fighters moulds itself into a cohesive unit in which military discipline and loyalty to commanding officers becomes normative. Regarding himself as an outsider, both as a Jew and as a non-Bolshevik, Abe observes these changes while maintaining his alienated stance. Ultimately, however, he realizes that his only hope for survival is to accept full membership in the regiment. The narration introduces several elements that resonate with Jewish folk-beliefs about protection from danger. For example, the ragged red f lag that f lies above

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the insurgents’ headquarters is compared to a kimpet-forhang, a piece of cloth hung round the bed of a lying-in mother that isolates both mother and newborn baby and protects them from evil spirits. Later in the story, Abe lies hidden from the pogromshtshikes in a hole located in a peasant’s garden and concealed by branches through which he can see the sky, as through skhakh, the symbolically protective greenery that serves as the topmost covering of a sukkah. In counterpoint to these and other overtly Jewish images, Abe is portrayed as a pragmatic, selfinterested individual without political allegiances and deeply alienated from the Jewish community of the shtetl in which he was raised. A sign of the depth of his alienation is the fact that he constantly feels sleepy and cannot seem to bring into focus the dangerous reality in which he finds himself. The reader is given a sense of the tenuousness of his identification with other Jews in his apathetic reaction to the murders of several families in the village to which he is sent to spy on the Petliura loyalists. Only after he escapes from the village does he begin to feel guilty about not bearing witness to these deaths. The experience of fighting side by side with non-Jewish revolutionaries against Petliura’s forces leads Abe to relax his dissociation only slightly. The story ends ambiguously, as he signals his decision to stay and fight on with the regiment by grudgingly accepting praise for his bravery — and a pay packet — from its officers. Bergelson later reworked ‘Erev der shlakht’ for the collection Shturemteg (Days of storm), first published by Farlag kultur-lige in Kiev in 1927; it also appeared in volume V of Bergelson’s selected works, which Kletskin brought out in 1928. In this revised version, he included several sections from ‘In a farlozenem hoyf in mitn nakht’ in which Abe appears, retitled the story ‘Eynems a veg’ (One person’s direction), and altered its ending to indicate that Abe finally commits himself wholeheartedly to fighting with the regiment against Petliura. The closing line of the Forverts version has Abe asking the officers impatiently Ven geyen mir af der shtot? ‘When will we get to the town?’, since his original reason for making the dangerous journey through embattled territory was to reach this particular town in order to marry his fiancée. In the Shturemteg version, by contrast, Abe asks. Ven geyen mir mitn polk afn dorf? ‘When will we and the whole regiment attack the village?’, since he knows that a large group of Petliura’s troops have gathered there. When he prepared them for publication in book form, Bergelson revised a number of his Forverts stories, and these changes should be scrutinized in light of his apparent intention to gain the approval of Soviet Yiddish critics for his earlier work.46 Bergelson’s sketch ‘Lenins a vinkl’ (Lenin’s nook)47 appeared in a Sunday edition of Forverts more than two years after ‘Erev der shlakht’.48 Here he used a different sort of image — a portrait of Lenin — as an emblem of the conf licts that arise within a ‘bourgeois’ Jewish family living in the Soviet Union when its youngest member, the seven-year-old Uri, comes to realize that in order to be accepted by other children in his neighbourhood, he must involve himself in the cult of Lenin worship. As in ‘Erev der shlakht’, Bergelson’s emphasis falls on the inner lives of the characters rather than on their political allegiances. His portrayals of the tensions between Uri’s parents and grandparents, and of the confused emotions of the child, who barely comprehends why he has been ostracized by his peers, are compelling.

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The chief characters in both tales are alienated outsiders, and Bergelson focuses the reader’s attention on the way in which each approaches the process of integrating himself into a new social order. However, the two stories differ greatly from each other with respect to their narrative style. As in the two previous stories in the series that Bergelson later consolidated into the novella Birgerkrig (Civil war), the narrator’s point of view in ‘Erev der shlakht’ seems barely distinguishable from that of the chief character, as in the following passage, in which pogromists attack a Jewish home in which he has taken shelter. Abe trembled, opened his eyes and did not recognize any of the people around him. In the little house a pair of hands were being wrung — the old woman’s hands. The hands spoke as if in the voice of a human being: ‘Oy, it’s bad, it’s bad!’ Someone’s eyes rolled upwards with great bewilderment, as though below them, someone was slitting the throat with a knife. At that moment, Abe’s whole body sensed that it could no longer remain in the house. It felt too crowded, as if he were in a cage that was about to be closed forever. If there were one or two of them outside, he would attack them with his bare hands. But he heard the voices of seven or eight men out there. ‘Damn them!’ Nimbly, moving silently off to the side, Abe jumped into the dark entryway, found the ladder in a far corner, and scrambled up to the attic.49

In contrast to ‘Erev der shlakht’, the narration in the sketch ‘Lenins a vinkl’ is quite conventional. The tale is so much simpler and more straightforward than what we have come to expect in a Bergelson story that we may suspect that this was a piece which the author attempted to write in conformity with Cahan’s directives about ‘accessibility’. Uri is seven years old and has many worries. He lives in hope of better times. He has a slender, delicate neck and long hair, and has always been a nimble child. [...] In the morning, at the breakfast table with his parents, if he hears the doorbell ring, he grabs the white rolls, butter, and eggs from the table and quickly hides them in the nearest cupboard. He has seen his parents do this. Besides, he knows all the children in the six-storey building in which his family lives. He is familiar with all the workers’ dwellings, and knows that nobody else in the building has white rolls, butter, and eggs for breakfast. Often the children from those dwellings meet him on the stairs and call him a burzhoy [bourgeois]. And although every morning Uri eats rolls and butter with a healthy appetite, he doesn’t believe that he is really a bourgeois. One day he asked his mother about it. ‘Mama, is it true? Am I a bourgeois?’ His mother responded calmly: ‘No child, you are not a bourgeois; your father wants to enrol in a professional union’. Uri didn’t know what a professional union was; his wide grey eyes — larger than those of other children of his age — stared at a f ly that was crawling up the wall. And because he sensed calmness in his mother’s voice and in the crawling of the f ly, Uri also felt calm. But because of his mother’s justification [...] it remained in Uri’s mind from that moment on that it was truly an ugly thing to be a bourgeois.

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Bergelson also published quite a few pieces of reportage during his four years with Forverts, several of which dealt with generational and ideological conf licts among Jews in the new Soviet state. In a piece entitled ‘Di tsores vos yidishe komunistn hobn nebekh oystsushteyn fun zeyere frume tates’ (The difficulties that Jewish communists unfortunately have to endure from their pious fathers), which appeared on 28 October 1923, we find a good example of the breezy, ironic voice that Bergelson must have felt would appeal to readers of Forverts. The embarrassment that Party members felt when their elderly parents insisted on praying near open windows, wearing traditional Jewish garb in the street, and attending synagogue on the High Holy Days received a lively, humorous treatment. At the same time, Bergelson took the opportunity to poke fun at the communist Yiddish daily Der emes, whose reporter apparently avoided acknowledging the depth of such conf licts for fear of calling attention to the fact that many Jews were still practising their religion. When you read this particular article [...] you can’t help but be surprised that it is so short. It’s a terrible shame, I must say, that the correspondent was so stingy with words and gave us no details. Don’t you get the feeling that these suppressed details play the main role here? It is obvious that the correspondent from Emes observed the scene from outside, from the courtyard, and didn’t even poke his nose into the home of the well-known communist R. This correspondent is a bungler, a loafer: I would take such a correspondent by the collar and throw him right out of the editorial office.50

In addition, Bergelson engaged in vehement polemics with Moyshe Litvakov, the editor of Der emes, and other members of the Yevsektsia in several articles published in Forverts in 1923. These, too, must have held high interest for readers. In an article entitled ‘Yidishe komunistn in Rusland bashlisn az es iz shoyn mer nito keyn yidn af der velt’ ( Jewish communists in Russia decide that there are no longer Jews in the world), which appeared on 4 March 1923, Bergelson derided Jewish communists for their misguided efforts to suppress Jewish religious life as much as possible so as to outdo one another in fervently proclaiming that ‘there is no longer a Jewish nation or Jewish culture — it has died’.51 According to Bergelson, while the Jewish communists were trying to prove their revolutionary fervour by persecuting fellow Jews and making a spectacle of themselves by ‘scratching off their own Jewishness until blood starts to run’, real social change was taking place in the petit-bourgeois stratum of Jewish society: Without doubt, the fossilized notions of the small tradesmen have, in many areas, split apart. In the exposed cracks, new, green blades of grass have begun to grow. We know this from the large numbers of Jews who are eager to settle on and farm available land, from the numbers of Jewish children who enrol in vocational schools, and from the large groups of emigrants who were taught or forced by the revolution to engage in physical work.52

In 1924, Bergelson wrote several articles about literature in response to some of Cahan’s frequent didactic essays, and during 1924 and 1925 he published a number of reports about contemporary Jewish life in Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia.

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Taking Stock of Cahan’s Critique of Bergelson’s Work for Forverts Considering his newspaper’s publishing record in regard to what it called besere literatur, Cahan’s oft-repeated complaints about Bergelson’s contributions were disingenuous. First, we know that Cahan was fond of proclaiming that ‘good literature does not draw a mass audience’, and justified his rather inconsistent patronage of Bergelson on the basis of his intrinsic talent rather than on the saleability of his output. But was Cahan truly convinced that serious fiction played no part in the circulation figures of Forverts? Evidence to the contrary is found in his letter to Lestschinsky of 1 June 1926, in which he compared Bergelson’s writing unfavourably with that of Sholem Asch, asserting that the romanticism in Asch’s works appealed to Forverts readers, while Bergelson’s works, lacking this quality, did not. Additional evidence that Cahan viewed besere literatur as saleable is found in the publishing record of I. J. Singer’s novels. Like those of Asch, Singer’s first novel, Shtol un ayzn (Steel and Iron), was published in weekly instalments. Beginning with Yoshe Kalb (Yoshe the simpleton), however, all of Singer’s novels appeared in daily instalments, a clear sign that Cahan expected them to appeal to his general readers, who were certain to buy the newspaper every day. Both privately and publicly, Cahan repeatedly insisted that the pace of Bergelson’s stories was too slow and his language too difficult for a general audience to appreciate, with the result that his stories were not widely read. But why would it matter to Cahan whether these stories were read or not, unless he expected them to have a commercial as well as an ornamental value? A full evaluation of Bergelson’s writing for Forverts is beyond the scope of the present essay. However the two stories and the two opinion pieces sampled here are far from the plodding, overly sophisticated works that Cahan’s characterization suggests. Although their content is, of course, distinctive, one notices many similarities in subject matter and literary register to pieces by other regular contributors, notably I. J. Singer. It would therefore appear that Cahan was content to have Bergelson’s belles-lettres and journalism grace the pages of his paper on an occasional basis, while continuing to rely on Sholem Asch to provide easily accessible and politically pareve (neutral) long fiction. Though he was initially quite enthusiastic about the prospect of publishing Bergelson’s fiction, no matter what level of difficulty it might present to his readers, this enthusiasm soon dissipated. Cahan’s letter to Lestschinsky of 16 January 1922 must have raised Bergelson’s hopes of finding a source of financial support that would enable him to write novels. Cahan wrote: Tell him also that I would very much like him to be a regular contributor to Forverts. Short stories of his are, of course, welcome. I would also like to have his groyse ertseylung (novella), although I must first read it in order to decide whether it can be published in instalments in a daily paper. I can’t say for sure, but I hope so. I am almost certain.

Bergelson waited more than two years to approach Cahan with a longer work. In his letter of 21 May 1924, he wrote:

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ELLEN KELLMAN I am just about to complete a large work, ‘Tsheka’ (Cheka [the Soviet security agency]), which has been well received at readings before literary and general audiences. It will comprise 50–60 columns, and I believe you will want to publish it in Forverts.

The piece, which was probably an early section of what later became the novel Mides-hadin (The full severity of the law), did not, however, appear in Forverts. We know for certain that Cahan was interested in increasing the number of quality novels to be serialized during this period, so it would have been logical for him to consider Bergelson’s work-in-progress for publication.53 In speculating about why Cahan chose not to offer Bergelson financial support by serializing some of his third novel while he was writing it, it is important to bear in mind that, during these years, Cahan was already grooming I. J. Singer to become the second mitarbeter to publish besere romanen in Forverts. On balance, it seems that the mainspring of Cahan’s ambivalence towards Bergelson’s work was not literary but political. While he was keen to publish provocative material about the revolutionary period and the Soviet Union, his newspaper’s stance was uncompromisingly anti-Bolshevik. Furthermore, it was deeply embroiled in the bitter conf licts between Jewish communists and socialists that rocked the American labour movement during the 1920s, and consistently supported the socialists. Although Bergelson did not declare his pro-Soviet stance until 1926, Cahan was undoubtedly aware that he had begun to publish his work in Soviet Yiddish periodicals much earlier: an abridged version of ‘Botshko’, for instance, had appeared in the Moscow literary journal Shtrom in 1922. In his letter to Lestschinsky of 1 June 1926, Cahan claimed that he had rejected a number of Bergelson’s stories because they were ‘not literature, but propaganda’. While not overtly pro-communist, the works sampled in this essay show that throughout his years at Forverts Bergelson was engrossed in Soviet affairs, and that he was making a considerable effort to shift his artistic focus from the interactions of individuals in a decaying bourgeois society to those of individuals in the process of forming new affiliations within a wholly new socio-political structure. While Cahan initially applauded Bergelson’s new work, he apparently came to mistrust his motives. Bergelson first asserted publicly that the Soviet Union was the only place in which Yiddish culture could best f lourish in April 1926, in his controversial essay ‘Dray tsentren’.54 Citing what he considered the pitiable state of Yiddish culture in America and Poland, and the paucity of material support for Yiddish writers in both countries, Bergelson argued that neither America nor Poland could properly nurture Yiddish writers and artists. Cahan reacted vehemently against this essay, accusing Bergelson of total disingenuousness in order to curry favour with Moscow. In an article in Forverts dated 8 August 1926, he wrote: I am personally well acquainted with Bergelson, as well acquainted as I am with his work. If there is a writer who has not the least bit of interest in political matters and pilpulim (hair-splitting arguments) about political or social questions, it is he. [...] Revolutions, proletariats, and social questions in general lign im in zayn linker peye nit (do not interest him in the least). I know that he doesn’t believe one word of his article ‘Dray tsentren’.55

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Cahan was similarly outraged by the insistence on the part of the editorial board of In shpan that, with the dawn of a new social order, ‘the period that has been liquidated economically and socially has also been liquidated with respect to source material for contemporary art’.56 ‘According to the new Bergelson,’ he fumed, ‘it seems that if a person is not a revolutionary proletarian, not a horepashnik (labouring drudge), he has no significance for literature’.57 But what, he demanded, did such a pronouncement mean in regard to the works of Chekhov, his hundreds of deeply human tragedies, and the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Romain Rolland — and all the artistic treasures of contemporary literature? All of them must be condemned because their characters have no visa from Moscow.58

Thus did Cahan’s equivocal courtship of Bergelson come to an end, without the publication of a novel in Forverts. Letters and other documents suggest that Bergelson’s failure to find a home there played a substantive part in his eventual decision to cast in his lot with Soviet Yiddish writers. Despite his efforts to conform to Cahan’s literary standards, he continued to feel that his place on Forverts staff was uncertain. We can only speculate that had Bergelson been given steady employment and the opportunity to publish major works of fiction in Forverts, the development of Yiddish literature in the twentieth century might have proceeded along quite different lines. Notes to Chapter 8 1. Frayhayt, 29 May 1926, p. 1. 2. Ab Cahan, ‘A nayer glentsnder roman fun Y. Y. Zinger’, Forverts, 21 May 1932, p. 4. 3. Daniel De Leon (1852–1914), a Curaçao-born American socialist and trade unionist of Jewish origin, was educated in Germany and the Netherlands and arrived in the United States in 1874. Having settled in New York City and studied at Columbia University, in 1890 he joined the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), becoming the editor of its newspaper, The People. In 1891 he ran for the governorship of the state of New York, winning 13,000 votes in the process. 4. Ronald Sanders, The Downtown Jews (New York: Dover, 1976), pp. 165–80. 5. The American journalist Joseph Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936) was one of the most inf luential practitioners of the journalistic style called ‘muckraking’. He is best known for his 1921 remark, on returning from the Soviet Union: ‘I have been over into the future, and it works’. Steffens specialized in investigating government corruption, and sought to effect political reform in urban America by appealing to the emotions of Americans. His short-lived enthusiasm for communism had soured by the time he wrote his memoirs, published in 1931. 6. Among these were Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1897), Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis (1899), Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899–1901), and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1903). 7. See, for example, Ab Cahan, ‘Ken a historisher roman hobn an emesn literarishn vert?’, Forverts, 8 June 1924, (section 2), p. 14. 8. Ab Cahan, ‘Ir farshport tsu forn in Varshe, Vilne, Kovne, Rige oder Keshenev’, Forverts, 27 August 1921, p. 4. All translations into English are mine, from all the sources cited. 9. Cahan, ‘Ir farshport tsu forn in Varshe’, p. 4. 10. Cahan, ‘Ir farshport tsu forn in Varshe’, p. 4. 11. Although Cahan wrote of meeting Shneour in Berlin during the summer of 1921, Shneour refers here to Cahan’s visit to Berlin in 1923. Cahan toured France, Germany, and Poland during the summer of 1923, during which he spent a week in Berlin (28 June–4 July).

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12. Zalmen Shneour, ‘Mayn bakantshaft mit Ab Kahan’, Forverts, 7 June 1942, section 2, p. 18. 13. Shneour, ‘Mayn bakantshaft’, p. 18. 14. In a letter to Lestschinsky dated 5 October 1921, Cahan discussed payment for several articles that had already been printed in Forverts and suggested topics for future articles that he hoped Lestschinsky would write. YIVO Archives, Papers of Jacob Lestschinsky, Record group 339, Folder 61. 15. Cahan’s early directives to Lestschinsky are found in a letter dated 17 November 1921. YIVO Archives, Papers of Jacob Lestschinsky, Record group 339, Folder 61. 16. On a number of occasions, Lestschinsky made efforts to help impoverished Yiddish writers publish their work. He wrote to Shmuel Niger on 2 October 1922 with an urgent request that Niger place several poems by Leyb Kvitko in a children’s magazine, and see to it that Kvitko be paid immediately: ‘He’s actually dying of hunger. It’s a terrible pity and a shame — he is certainly no minor talent’. In the same letter, he mentioned that he was not happy in his new position with Forverts: ‘I have no news to give you about myself. I’m working hard and making a living, but I am absolutely not satisfied with my work. There’s a lot to say about it, but this is not the moment’. This letter is found in the YIVO Archives, Papers of Shmuel Niger, Record group 360, Folder 264. 17. ‘Dos kabtsonishe bekherl’, Forverts, 19, 20, 21 March 1922, p. 3. Bergelson included the story, with some changes, under the title ‘A mayse mit gvirim’ (A story about rich people) in the collection entitled Tsugvintn, published as volume VIII of his Geklibene verk (Vilna: Kletskin, 1930). 18. The text of the announcement reads as follows: A story of Jewish life under the Bolsheviks from the famous writer David Bergelson, written especially for Forverts. The story is called ‘The pauper’s goblet’. We find in it a lively portrayal of Jewish life under new conditions, and several lively sketches of individuals. The story tells of how ten wealthy Jews are taken out to be shot because they will not pay a five million rouble tribute demanded of them by the Bolsheviks. The protagonist of the entire story is not, however, one of these ten rich men, but a silver goblet belonging to a Jewish pauper. The story will start this Sunday, and will run in three or four instalments. 19. Lev Bergelson, ‘Erinnerungen an meinen Vater: die Berliner Jahre’, in David Bergelson, Leben ohne Frühling (Berlin: Auf bau Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000), p. 283. 20. See Glenn S. Levine, ‘Yiddish Publishing in Berlin and the Crisis in Eastern European Jewish Culture 1919–1924’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 1997,42, pp. 85–108 and Delphine Bechtel, La Renaissance culturelle juive en Europe centrale et orientale 1897–1930 (Paris: Éditions Belin, 2002), chapter 4. 21. YIVO Archives, Papers of Abraham Cahan, Record group 1139 Part 1, Box 2, Folder 54. 22. Letters from Cahan to Lestschinsky are found in the YIVO Archives, Papers of Jacob Lestschinsky, Record group 339 Folders 61–62. Letters from Lestschinsky to Cahan are found among the Papers of Abraham Cahan, Record group 1139, Folder 91. 23. Ab Cahan, ‘A nayer roman fun Dovid Bergelson’, Forverts, 4 February 1923, section 2, p. 3. 24. Cahan mentioned his willingness to consider serializing Bergelson’s full-length fiction in a letter to Lestschinsky dated 16 January 1922. 25. Cahan, ‘A nayer roman fun Dovid Bergelson’. 26. Cahan was privately very disappointed in many of Asch’s serializations in Forverts, but he was at pains to keep these opinions off the literary page of the paper. 27. Bergelson was then thirty-nine years old, while Cahan was sixty-four. 28. A copy of Bergelson’s letter to Niger made by Daniel Charney, secretary to the editorial board of In shpan, is found in the YIVO Archives, Papers of Daniel Charney, Record group 421, Folder 6. The letter to Opatoshu is found in the YIVO Archives, Papers of Joseph Opatoshu, Record group 436, Folder 24. 29.YIVO Archives, Papers of Daniel Charney, Record group 421, Folder 6. 30. The first issue is actually dated April 1926.

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31. Mordechai Altshuler (ed.), Briv fun yidishe sovetishe shraybers ( Jerusalem: The Hebrew University 1980), p. 47 n. 6. 32. YIVO Archives, Papers of Jacob Lestschinsky, Record group 339, Folder 7. 33. In a letter to Lestschinsky dated June 1, 1926, Cahan stated that he had intended to write to Bergelson to explain that he could not print several of the stories the author had recently submitted because they were ‘not literature, but propaganda’. He had, however, put off writing the intended letter. 34. David Bergelson, ‘Hershl Toker’, Der emes, 29 May 1926. 35. Only one letter from Lestschinsky to Cahan about Bergelson’s status at Forverts is found among the papers of Abraham Cahan in the YIVO Archives, Record group 1139, Folder 91. The letter is dated 9 April 1924. Cahan responded to it in a letter to Lestschinsky dated 5 May 1924. 36. These letters coincide with Cahan’s review of Opgang, which appeared in Forverts on 4 February 1923. 37. This letter is dated 30 March 1923. Cahan was scheduled to arrive in Berlin in late June. The article to which Cahan refers here is entitled ‘Yidishe komunistn in Rusland bashlisn az es iz shoyn mer nito keyn yidn af der velt’. It appeared on Sunday, 4 March 1923 on p. 12 of Forverts. 38. Lestschinsky’s letter to Cahan is dated 9 April 1924 and is found in the YIVO Archives, Papers of Abraham Cahan, Record group 1139, Folder 91. 39. Cahan’s letter, dated 5 May 1924, is in the YIVO Archives, Papers of Jacob Lestschinsky, Record group 339 Folders 61–62. 40. Bergelson’s letters to Cahan of 21 May 1924 and 4 December 1925 provide documentation of his long struggle with Cahan over this matter. In his letter of 21 May 1924, which is excerpted in the previous section of this essay, Bergelson entreated Cahan to give him a regular salary. In his letter of 4 December 1925, he noted that he had begun to receive a regular salary from Forverts on 1 August 1925. 41. Cahan’s letter is dated 1 June 1926. 42. YIVO Archives, Papers of Jacob Lestschinsky, Record group 339, Folder 62. 43. YIVO Archives, Papers of Jacob Lestschinsky, Record group 339, Folder 62. 44. David Bergelson, ‘Erev der shlakht’, Forverts, 29–31 January 1923 and 5–6 February 1923. 45. David Bergelson, ‘Botshko: der firer fun vildn polk’, Forverts, 9–16 May, 12–14 June, 31 July, 1–3 August 1922; ‘In a farlozenem hoyf in mitn nakht’, Forverts, 15–20 October 1922. The final section of Birgerkrig is based on ‘In a farlozenem hoyf in mitn nakht’. 46. See Dalia Kaufman, ‘Fir gilgulim fun Bergelsons dertseylung “Botshko” ’, Yerushalmer almanakh, 4 (1975), 216–21, and Joseph Sherman, ‘From Isolation to Entrapment: Bergelson and the Party Line 1919–1927’, Slavic Almanac, 6.9 (2000), 195–222. 47. The title refers to the custom of placing Lenin’s portrait in the corners of rooms in Russian homes where formerly religious icons had stood above lighted lamps. 48. David Bergelson, ‘Lenins a vinkl’, Forverts, 28 June 1925, section 2, p. 3. 49. David Bergelson, ‘Erev der shlakht’ (instalments 2 and 3), Forverts, 30 and 31 January, 1923, p. 3, my translation. 50. David Bergelson, ‘Di tsores vos yidishe komunistn hobn nebekh oystsushteyn fun zeyere frume tates’, Forverts, 28 October 1923, section 2, p. 2. 51. David Bergelson, ‘Yidishe komunistn in Rusland bashlisn az es iz shoyn mer nito keyn yidn af der velt’, Forverts, 4 March 1923, p. 12. 52. Bergelson, ‘Yidishe komunistn’, p. 12. 53. In his memoir ‘Mayn bakantshaft mit Ab Kahan’, Zalmen Shneour recounts how Cahan had urged him to submit his Yiddish prose works for possible publication in Forverts on several occasions during the early 1920s. Shneour finally did so late in 1926. Cahan accepted the pieces and Shneour became a regular contributor to Forverts in 1927. 54. David Bergelson, ‘Dray tsentren’, In shpan, April 1926 (Number 1). See English translation as Appendix B in the present volume. 55. Ab Kahan, ‘Vos iz in literatur vikhtiker — der mentsh oder der klas, der mentsh oder der ort?’, Forverts, 8 August 1926, section 2, p. 2.

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56. ‘Fun der redaktsye’, In shpan, April 1926, no. 1, last page. 57. Cahan, ‘Vos iz in literatur vikhtiker?’. 58. Cahan, ‘Vos iz in literatur vikhtiker?’.

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CHAPTER 9

❖

David Bergelson in and on America (1929–1949) Gennady Estraikh From Forverts to Frayhayt In a 1922 advertisement marking the quarter-centenary of New York’s socialist Yiddish daily Forverts, David Bergelson’s name, printed boldface, appeared among those of the newspaper’s leading contributors among whom were Sholem Asch, Jonah Rosenfeld, and David Einhorn.1 With its circulation of around 200,000, the newspaper could afford the luxury of keeping on its payroll an international team of correspondents and regular contributors. In Berlin, where Bergelson had settled in the spring of 1921 after leaving Kiev and spending a cold and hungry winter in Moscow, Forverts was represented by Yakov Lestschinsky, who combined the careers of scholar and journalist.2 The honoraria paid by Forverts handsomely provided for literati living in Germany without tradable currency. An entry in the diary of the historian Shimon Dubnov gives some idea of how important it was to have access to American dollars. On 31 January 1923, Dubnov noted that Lestschinsky approached him on behalf of Ab Cahan, the editor of Forverts, inviting him to write a few articles for the newspaper’s literary section. Dubnov admitted that he could not resist the temptation of earning 25 dollars, or what was then the equivalent of 1 million German marks, per article.3 Events in Germany proper did not occupy a central place in Yiddish journalistic writings produced in Berlin. Instead, during the 1920s Jewish-related and general developments in Soviet Russia were regularly discussed in the American Yiddish press, and the Berlin literary community kept recycling newspaper reports and rumours from the world’s first communist state. Initially, Cahan and his fellow literati welcomed the Bolshevik revolution. It is no coincidence, for instance, that Tsen teg, vos hobn oyfgerudert di velt, the Yiddish version of John Reed’s euphoric firsthand account of the revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World (1920), was published almost immediately after its initial appearance under the imprint of Forverts in a translation by Moyshe (Moissaye) Olgin, then one of the newspaper’s leading journalists. Forverts became militantly anti-Soviet only in October 1921, following the emergence of a breakaway group, led by such people as Olgin, who joined the American communist movement. Paradoxically, Cahan himself was responsible for swelling the ranks of Yiddish communists in the United States: many people joined

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the Party when they grew disillusioned with Cahan’s brand of socialism, which stridently preached Americanization and paid scant attention to Jewish nationbuilding. The communists, on the other hand, asserted that their ideology and its practical implementation in the Soviet Union provided the only feasible answer to contemporary Jewish problems of culture and national identity.4 In the pieces he contributed to Forverts, Bergelson appeared chief ly as an acerbic critic of Soviet Jewish communists, comparing them — particularly Moyshe Litvakov, the cantankerous editor of Moscow’s Yiddish daily Der emes — to ‘wild Cossacks’ and leaseholders who failed to cultivate the ‘parcel’ allotted to them by the Kremlin.5 Surprisingly, however, Bergelson did not did not play a prominent role in the newspaper’s literary section. There, in 1923, he was eclipsed by Israel Joshua Singer (1894–1944), while in a review the same year Cahan himself criticized Bergelson’s 1923 novella Opgang (Descent).6 No doubt Cahan’s public recognition was a sweet revenge for Singer and a huge disappointment for Bergelson, particularly since Singer’s successful career at Forverts began when the paper published ‘Perl’ (Pearls), an early short story that Bergelson and his literary coterie had originally rejected for publication themselves.7 In a letter to Cahan on 21 May 1924, Bergelson complained that he, an ‘eminent writer’ (ongezeener shrayber), found himself in a deeply dispiriting situation because the stories he submitted to Forverts remained unpublished for months. Apart from creating serious financial problems for him, he argued, such a negative attitude to his work undermined his creativity.8 Bergelson, Lestschinsky, and Dubnov were all part of the populous Jewish intellectual colony gathered in Weimar Berlin, a city that during the 1920s became the main Western European crossroads of Yiddish cultural life. Even viewed through the prism of so commitedly Bolshevik a visitor as Ber Orshanski, a Yiddish writer and functionary from Minsk, Berlin appeared as ‘arguably the most interesting, energetic, and truly cultural centre of Europe’. At the same time, Orshanski found that the German metropolis was a city of stunning political debility (shofldikayt).9 Indeed, it was neutral territory, where writers, journalists, artists, actors, and political activists from across the political and geographical spectrum would meet around the same tables in the two main haunts of Berlin Yiddishists: the Romanisches Café, where ‘[e]ach group had its table: there were the “Yiddishists”, “Zionists”, “Bundists” and so on, all arguing among themselves from table to table’,10 and the Sholem Aleichem Club. Berlin was also frequented by American Yiddish writers, for many of whom it was a transit station on their way to or from Palestine or other European destinations. On 6 June 1924, Borukh Grazman, an American prose writer, gave a talk on the premises of the Russian Literary and Artistic Circle about ‘Directions of Yiddish literature in America’, an event chaired by Bergelson. On 8 July 1924, the shortlived Berlin Yiddish weekly Yidishe ilustrirte tsaytung ( Jewish Illustrated Newspaper) reported that Sholem Asch had spent a few days in the city. On 4 July 1925, Berl Loker, the leader of Berlin’s Labour Zionists who later went on to become a significant Israeli politician, shared with members of the Sholem Aleichem Club his impressions of Jewish cultural life in America. Bergelson and other Berlin-based Yiddish literati also made a particular point of celebrating the anniversaries of

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their New York colleagues: in January 1926, the 60th anniversary of the Yiddishist theoretician Khaym Zhitlovsky; in June 1926, the 50th anniversary of Avrom Reyzen.11 All this activity meant that the Berlin-based writers were permanently in touch with their American colleagues, a situation that helped Bergelson to crystallize his vision of the American Jewish environment. In 1926 — in many ways a turning point in Bergelson’s life — he concluded that America was one of the places where highbrow Yiddish writers had virtually no readers outside educated proletarian circles.12 He was driven back to the conclusion he had reached in consequence of his experiences before his emigration, when he became convinced that modernist literature in Yiddish had failed to attract a viable readership and that only in the long term would native speakers of Yiddish be compelled to turn to quality literature.13 As an article of faith analogous to the Marxists’ belief in the dialectical inevitability of social transformation from capitalism to socialism, many Jewish intellectuals of Yiddishist conviction believed in the inevitability of society’s dramatic cultural ascent. In America, many such believers, including literati belonging to the cream of Yiddish letters, grouped around such forums as the newspaper Frayhayt. Frayhayt, launched in April 1922, was the youngest of the five Yiddish dailies published in New York.14 Initially it was the newspaper of the communist-affiliated Jewish Federation, which united Yiddish activists looking for an alternative to the cultural and political platform of Forverts. Frayhayt immediately began attracting leading poets and prose writers, chief ly because its editors did not demand from their literary contributors full commitment to the communist cause. The popular writers Joseph Opatoshu and Peretz Hirshbeyn, for instance, remained faithful to the liberal daily Der tog, but were also sympathetic to the agenda of Frayhayt. Both Der tog and Frayhayt rejected Cahan’s policy of force-fed Americanization, and continued that quest for so-called bavustzinike arbeter, ‘conscientious’ — that is, intellectually inclined — workers which had been initiated by Jewish socialists in Russia during the late nineteenth century. This quest was characteristic of members of intellectual Yiddish circles, who refused to make any concessions to ease of understanding, arguing instead that literature could not develop freely if it limited itself by pandering to the taste of uneducated readers. Such ‘fellow travellers’, among them literary celebrities like H. Leyvik and Avrom Reyzen, felt comfortable in the highbrow literary milieu created by Frayhayt and led by its editor Olgin, a seasoned political activist, critic, journalist, and writer, who had studied at the universities of Kiev and Heidelberg and had earned a PhD at Columbia University. Bergelson joined this group in 1926, when he published his controversial essay ‘Dray tsentren’ (Three centres), in which he dismissed the cultural vitality of non-Soviet Yiddish centres, notably those of New York and Warsaw. This essay appeared in the first of only two issues of the journal In shpan (In Harness), launched by Boris Kletskin’s publishing house with Bergelson as the journal’s de facto editor.15 The new journal ‘harnessed’ two other Berlin-based Yiddish literati, Alexander Khashin and Daniel Charney. In Ukraine in July 1919, Khashin (Zvi Averbukh) led the communist faction of the Labour Zionist movement and later lived in Berlin; from the end of the 1920s until his disappearance in the gulag in the late 1930s,

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he worked as a Yiddish journalist in Moscow. Charney — the younger brother of Shmuel Niger, the well-known literary critic of Der tog, and Borukh Vladek, the chief manager of Forverts — had been active as a Yiddish man of letters in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1924. Stuck in Berlin because a health condition prevented him from entering the United States, Charney continued to be involved in Soviet Jewish literary life.16 It would be wrong to view In shpan as a bona fide communist publication. To all appearances, it was simply one of many attempts made by Yiddish activists to find a way out of their particular ideological crisis, especially those activists who rejected Cahan’s view of Yiddish as merely a temporary linguistic vehicle to enable the Jewish masses to fight for, and ultimately to occupy, an equal place in the society of their country of residence. For those who opposed Cahan’s views, it was painful to realize that by the turn of the century their nation was scattered all over the world, that even the Old Country, di alte heym, had been divided up in the remapping of Eastern and Central Europe that followed the end of World War I, and that ideological differences had opened numerous fissures in the Yiddish intellectual world. Given its international character and its unprecedented support of Yiddish culture, communism as a political doctrine, and the new state which followed its principles in the Soviet Union, appeared to many Yiddish activists as their best hope for realizing their national and cultural aspirations. In shpan was conceived primarily as a forum for consolidation rather than as a mouthpiece for the agitprop of the Comintern. As Bergelson explained, in a letter to Opatoshu typed on the letterhead of the forthcoming periodical and dated 25 January 1926, ‘I hope it will be the journal that we are all waiting for, rather than a journal. It is quite possible that the journal will be permitted to enter Russia’ (emphasis in the original). Meanwhile, on 2 March 1926, Der emes in Moscow published a letter from Bergelson dated 24 February in which he did penance for having criticized the communists. Although he expressed his desire to be a Soviet writer, he maintained that he did not yet deserve to return to the Soviet Union and was therefore obliged to ‘suffer exile’ in atonement for his earlier anti-Soviet stance. On 5 March, Cahan cabled a question to Lestschinsky: ‘What are the real facts about Bergelson and his letter for Soviet Russia — please write at once’.17 Bergelson’s condemnation of the anti-Sovietism expressed by Rafael Abramovitsh, a Berlin-based leading Menshevik and a regular contributor to Forverts, signalled the change of his allegiance from Forverts to Frayhayt; his article, entitled ‘His kosher lips’, appeared in Frayhayt on 22 May.18 Bergelson’s short story ‘Hirshl [in other publications Hershl or Hirsh] Toker’ represented his literary debut in communist belles-lettres. Its first instalment appeared in Der emes on 29 May and in Frayhayt one day later.19 In his letter of resignation to Cahan, dated 1 May 1926, Bergelson made no mention of any ideological reasons for his break with Forverts. Instead, he spoke of his constant frustration at the fact that his work, particularly the best of it, was not being published. Hence his decision ‘to find another newspaper, whose spirit corresponds better with the work I write and will write’. By comparison with his

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previous letters to Cahan, which are replete with manifestations of servility, his final letter is dry, albeit respectful. In general, reading this correspondence makes one wonder whether Bergelson’s reorientation had more to do with freeing himself from Cahan’s humiliating, capricious, and cynical manipulations than with seeing the light of communism. No doubt the whole affair of Bergelson’s defection pained Cahan, though — as he wrote to Lestschinsky on 1 June 1926 — it did not come as a complete surprise, because he had detected Bergelson’s communist sympathies as early as 1923; he had deemed some of Bergelson’s stories so pro-Soviet, he said, that he could not publish them in Forverts. In a spirit of self-justification, Cahan further contended that belleslettres, even of the best sort, did not play any role in the circulation of a big daily. In that sense, Bergelson was absolutely unimportant. Forverts, Cahan asserted, did not lose a single reader when it stopped publishing his work. To put the boot in further, Cahan shared some malicious gossip concerning the ‘real’ motives for Bergelson’s reorientation: his desire, Cahan suggested, was to make money in the climate of Russia’s New Economic Policy (NEP), in which rumour had it that Bergelson was seeking to establish a publishing house or to continue his family business of timber trading.20 David Volkenshteyn, a Soviet writer who in the years immediately preceding the revolution had belonged to the same circle of Kiev Yiddish literati as Bergelson, viewed Bergelson’s reorientation as a tactical move rather than an affair of the heart. To the poet Leyvik he wrote on 19 June 1926: Bergelson and [the poet David] Hofshteyn are spiritually people of the same type. They always keep in mind one objective — fame and money. Bergelson is better organized, he is better as a merchant, he knows how to bargain. [...] It’s clear that, in reality, Forverts never needed Bergelson as a great writer. It needed Bergelson’s name, because he had acquired some anti-Soviet reputation. Now Forverts no longer needs Bergelson, so it has spat him out. As a result, Bergelson at the same moment (or a moment earlier, when he realized it thanks to his excellent sense of smell!) became Soviet. That’s all. This is how everyone here understands Bergelson’s letter: as Bergelson’s manoeuvre. Our politicians also understand it.21

Interestingly, on 12 January 1927 the editors of Frayhayt discussed another possible defector from Cahan. Opatoshu informed them that I. J. Singer, who had just returned to Warsaw from a journalistic trip to the Soviet Union, was toying with the idea of writing for the communist newspaper. According to the minutes of the meeting at which this matter was raised, Melech Epstein, then the editor of Frayhayt, recommended that Singer be employed as the newspaper’s Polish correspondent as well as a fiction writer. The conditions of his employment should be ‘the same as with Bergelson’.22 In the end, however, this defection never materialized. In America Readers and fellow literati did not brand Bergelson an outcast following his political re-affiliation. The postcards Bergelson sent to Lestschinsky in 1929 and 1930 show

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that they remained close friends.23 Bergelson, a gregarious man, continued to be the toast of the Romanisches Café. A Yiddish journalist, also a habitué of the café, wittily portrayed Bergelson as its balmusef or cantor officiating only at the additional service on Sabbaths or holidays.24 Indeed, Bergelson was not a reliable attendee at ‘regular services’ because he spent much time elsewhere. In 1928–29, for instance, he spent five and a half months in the United States. On 2 November 1928 he wrote to Opatoshu: ‘On 30 November, at 3 p.m. I’ll arrive in New York on the ship Aquitania. I greatly hope that when I disembark I’ll see you, Leyvik, [Glants]Leyeles, and my other good colleagues. [...] Best regards to the whole literary family’.25 Decades later, Epstein recalled that during his editorship of Frayhayt — known from June 1927 on as Morgn-frayhayt (Morning-Freedom) because it appeared in the morning rather than in the afternoon — it was his newspaper that had brought Bergelson to America and arranged a tour for him.26 On 1 December 1928, when Bergelson arrived in New York as a third-class passenger, he was met at the port by Epstein, Opatoshu, Leyvik, and several other representatives of Yiddish literary circles. A communist Yiddish journalist welcomed Bergelson on the deck of the ship and heard the guest’s first impression of seeing the Statue of Liberty: Aroysgeshtelt ayer lign a naketn far der gantser velt, ‘Your lie is displayed naked before the whole world’. Although Frayhayt was happy to host Bergelson, staunch communists did not regard him as ideologically a fully committed writer. Epstein explained: David Bergelson is not a proletarian writer. Moreover, he is not a revolutionary writer, that is, one who calls or wakes to revolutionary struggle. Bergelson is a writer who leans toward the revolutionary movement. He is a writer who has found the truth in Bolshevism and reveals it in his masterly writing.27

Cahan, who could not forgive Bergelson for his defection to the communist camp, suggested that it would be wrong to take his political re-affiliation seriously.28 Shmuel Niger, who had been following Bergelson’s literary career from its inception in 1909, could detect no radical change in his post-1926 prose. The master critic argued that Bergelson had not succeeded in creating convincing literary images of positive revolutionary heroes. ‘His great artistic power reveals itself in [portraying] crude characters of our present time and genteel characters of the past, rather than in [portraying] fine people of tomorrow’. According to Niger, Bergelson had always disliked his social surroundings, but of late had been trying to convince both himself and others that his dislike was in some way connected to the class struggle.29 A week after his arrival, Bergelson had his first encounter with thousands of American readers and admirers who attended his literary reception in New York’s Central Opera House. Why would people f lock to see a writer whose books had not been published in America and whose articles and stories did not occupy a central place in the American Yiddish press? True, the scandal surrounding his ideological re-affiliation made his name better known — the following year, a ‘Bergelson Library’ was opened in the Brazilian city of Campinas.30 More importantly, however, Yiddish literary receptions and discussions were highly popular pastimes, attracting thousands of New Yorkers. In addition, the Philadelphia-based landsmanshaft

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or association of former dwellers of Bergelson’s home shtetl of Okhrimovo had organized a tour for those who wanted to see the literary celebrity.31 His American lectures, sponsored by the communists, were attended also by his non-communist admirers, and communists would in their turn attend non-communist functions organized in Bergelson’s honour: ‘For the first time in the history of Left and Right in American labour life, political enemies were sitting quietly and cosily side by side and cheered [the writer] together’.32 Such fraternization was not to everyone’s liking. The communists were not happy with those of Bergelson’s pronouncements which had appeared in Der tog, worded by N. B. Linder (pseudonym of Naftoli Blinder), a veteran New York journalist.33 Linder and Bergelson had spoken frankly about anti-Semitism, Yiddish culture, and déclassé Jews in the Soviet Union, and Bergelson’s readiness to admit some problems in Soviet society upset the communists. A ‘counter-interview’ with Nathaniel Buchwald, a Frayhayt heavyweight, argued that Linder had simply misrepresented Bergelson’s words.34 In general, however, Bergelson behaved quite independently, meeting with people belonging to a wide variety of New York cliques and even becoming a member of the Yiddish chapter of PEN International, thus underlining his status as a fellow traveller rather than a zealot.35 At the same time, he felt indebted to Soviet communists for making him and his fellow Yiddish writers useful: Who needed us before the revolution? We trailed after the Jewish people like beggars: ‘Look, this is our literature, you need it!’ The Jewish people answered us: ‘Sorry, but we don’t need you’. Before the revolution, a Yiddish writer was viewed as an impractical bohemian. [...] Now our status is completely different and we have an aim to fight for. [...] We are in harness to the bandwagon of the revolution. We’ll either perish or succeed in building new life!36

Bergelson struck up a friendship with Zishe Weinper, the principal editor of the New York literary journal Der oyfkum (Rebirth), launched in July 1926 as a forum for such American authors as Berl Lapin, Yankev Glatshteyn, Jacob Shatzky, A. Almi, and Yitskhok Elkhonon Rontsh, who announced in the journal’s manifesto that they rejected Cahan’s pessimistic view of Yiddish literature as a dying form of cultural activity. To this journal, Bergelson contributed an article about the first wave of Russian-Jewish emigrants who had settled in the United States. In company with impoverished, hungry and jobless folk, that wave, according to Bergelson, brought also various criminals and young men who had been unwilling to serve in the Russian army. In addition, it swept in Jewish socialists and pseudosocialists (sotsyalistlekh), many of whom spoke a variety of Lithuanian Yiddish, the sabesdiker loshn,37 and who became leaders of the American Jewish masses, preaching ‘physiological socialism, cosmopolitanism and linguistic anarchism’.38 No doubt, among these Bergelson intended primarily to identify the ‘Litvak’ Ab Cahan, the towering figure in American Jewish socialist circles. Time and again, as in this article for Oyfkum, Bergelson criticized his American fellow writers for ignoring the Jewish worker, who was little interested in their socially detached oeuvre, least of all their elitist poetry that generally had nothing to do with American Jewish life. He also ridiculed the American book market, and

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Aaron Glants-Leyeles, the distinguished American poet, educator, and journalist, conceded that the intellectual level of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants was often so low that prior to arrival they had not read ‘even Shomer’39 and in consequence newspapers were their first and only reading matter.40 Around the same time, A. Almi noted tartly, ‘in America, there are no Yiddish publishers any longer. There are Yiddish book-handlers who once in a while put out a book’.41 Epstein reminisced later that Bergelson refused our offer to make New York his home. His refusal might have been motivated in part by his apparent dislike for the American Jewish scene. A European to the core, but an ardent Jew dedicated to his Yiddish literary work, he liked Berlin, its intellectual life and its closeness to East European Jews.42

On the face of it, Bergelson’s schedule in America was not very demanding. He was obliged to make public appearances from time to time, but he also had time to write.43 Thus he reworked his story ‘Baym telefon’ (At the telephone) — the first version of which, under the title, ‘Der royter armeyer’ (The Red Army soldier), had appeared in Forverts on 6 May 1923 — into a play, which was serialized in Frayhayt on 6, 14, and 21 April 1929. On 10 May 1929, at New York’s Webster Hall, the communists organized a farewell gala for Bergelson. The programme, according to an advertisement in Frayhayt,44 included the premiere of ‘Baym telefon’ with Bergelson himself playing the central role of the Russian soldier, Fedor Zozulia.45 Moreover, his trip to America, particularly in respect of the honoraria he received for his lectures, gave him the means to pay off his debts and, more importantly, to become — from 15 May 1929 — a member of the staff of Frayhayt. Since journalism proper was the responsibility of the newspaper’s Berlin correspondent, Leo Katz,46 Bergelson’s chief contractual obligation was to write prose stories and feuilletons; as a result, around this time Frayhayt began serializing Penek, the first volume of Bergelson’s new autobiographical novel, Baym Dnyepr (At the Dnieper). In the event, this was hardly a lucrative deal, because the newspaper did not fulfil its obligations: during the thirty-six weeks between mid-May 1929 and mid-January 1930, Bergelson had received only 400 dollars, or 11 dollars per week. In a letter dated 11 January 1930 and addressed to Paul (Peysekh) Novick, one of Frayhayt’s editors, Bergelson detailed his financial straits, threatening to go public and reveal to Frayhayt readers how shabbily their newspaper was treating its leading writer.47 Although the newspaper later started paying him more regularly, as he admitted in a subsequent letter to Novick on 30 September 1930, the Bergelsons could not live on his literary income alone, and the family’s ability to make ends meet depended on the facts that his wife Tsipe earned a steady wage as an employee of the Soviet Trade Delegation based in Berlin, and that her wealthy relatives provided them with free accommodation.48 It was therefore of particular significance both for himself and for his family that Bergelson’s political reorientation opened the doors to Soviet periodicals and publishing houses for him. Meanwhile, at the end of 1930 Lestschinsky unsuccessfully approached Cahan on Bergelson’s behalf, trying to convince the editor to renew the writer’s contract with Forverts. For his part, although he was prepared to publish Bergelson’s work and pay him honoraria, Cahan wanted no contractual obligation towards the prodigal

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writer. In order to re-establish relations between Bergelson and Forverts, Cahan wanted a letter from Bergelson, albeit not a repentant one: ‘The only thing that I expect from him is the attitude of a well-behaved, respectful person’. At the same time, he reiterated that improving the circulation of Forverts was not the reason he was willing to deal with Bergelson: ‘Being myself deeply interested in literature, I always had ambitions to have in Forverts all talented writers, regardless of the size of their readership’.49 It was neither the first nor the only attempt of this kind. According to Mendel Osherowitch, a leading Forverts journalist, Bergelson asked him to negotiate with Cahan his return to Forverts. These negotiations took place during Bergelson’s American sojourn but brought no results.50 Fateful Decisions It was not by chance that at the end of 1929 and the beginning of 1930 Frayhayt had difficulty in paying Bergelson’s salary. Part of the problem had to do with the expulsion from the American communist movement of its leader Jay Lovestone — the only Jew who ever held the Party’s highest office — who took with him from the Party many sources of financial support.51 Furthermore, following the anti-Jewish riots in Palestine in 1929, when the Soviet Union and the Comintern sided with the Arabs and Frayhayt supported Moscow’s ideological position, the newspaper went through a very trying period. Four decades later, Novick recalled that ‘in 1929 and the years following, practically until June 1941’ [when Germany attacked the Soviet Union], his newspaper ‘was in a crisis in connection with the unrest in Palestine at that time. We came into headon collision with the Jewish community. [...] We paid dearly for our stand, having lost a great many of our readers and having weakened our mass base’.52 Voicing their strong protest against Frayhayt’s stand, Avrom Reyzen, H. Leyvik, and several other leading writers resigned from its staff.53 In October 1929, Bergelson’s old friend Nakhmen Mayzel, then editor of the highbrow Warsaw periodical Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages) which favoured promoting unity in the ranks of Yiddish literati, indicated that the events in Palestine had created a schism in the Jewish world and had driven virtually everyone into bitter differences of opinion.54 Epstein, who had misgivings about the official Party stand, was demoted and dispatched to the Soviet Union, where he was expected to rehabilitate himself ideologically, and Olgin was brought back as Frayhayt’s editor-in-chief. 55 A decade later, following the Molotov– Ribbentrop pact, Epstein severed his links with communism completely. Communists had begun distancing themselves from some of their fellow-travellers even before the riots in Palestine. While in the early 1920s communist editors had been happy to recruit as many literary celebrities as possible without expecting full ideological rapport with them, they now began to demand absolute commitment to the Communist Party line.56 Bergelson was among those who remained a loyal contributor to Frayhayt, to the distress of Menakhem Boraisha, H. Leyvik, and Lamed Shapiro, all of whom, after their departure from Frayhayt, launched a fresh New York newspaper entitled Vokh (Week). As early as the editorial in this new weekly’s second issue, they argued that ‘Berlin was not that far from New York’,

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thus obliquely making the point that the editors of Frayhayt regarded Bergelson as an asset, and exploited his contributions to augment the status of their communist daily. Despite this negative evaluation, the editorial trio of Vokh were pleased that Bergelson, at least, did not condemn them publicly.57 Characteristically, however, some time later Litvakov in Moscow did not fail snidely to recall the ideological sin Bergelson had committed by not criticizing these defectors and Bergelson himself continued to ridicule all non-communist literary production. Thus in a lecture he gave on 3 July 1930 in Warsaw he used an horological allegory, comparing Yiddish literature in America and Poland with beautiful clocks that had no hands; as a result, they did not show time.58 Niger immediately remarked that he personally preferred literature that made no haste to appear and die in rhythm with the cadence of time.59 On the eve of Bergelson’s visit, Mayzel explained the importance of his decision to stop in Warsaw after an absence of some twenty years, interpreting this as an indication that Warsaw was no longer regarded merely as the centre of cheap book production. He also expressed the hope that Bergelson would like Poland and that, coupled with Bergelson’s recent experiences in America, this sojourn would reinforce his old friend’s position as a writer for the whole Yiddish-speaking world.60 Bergelson, however, was not prepared to adapt his position to Mayzel’s carefully worded overture. On 17 July 1930, in a letter to Opatoshu mailed from Warsaw, he complained that it had been difficult, and bearable only thanks to Mayzel, for him to spend fifteen days in the ‘stinking air’ of the Polish capital. On 30 September 1930 Bergelson also wrote to Novick, defending his decision to venture into the hostile territory of the Warsaw Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists, which Frayhayt had lampooned as a bunch of reactionary hacks.61 He argued that he had aimed to use his trip for propaganda purposes rather than to be the Association’s guest of honour. He added, however: ‘As for my friendship with this or that writer, I regard this as a private question. It would be like breaking off a friendship because your friend had married such and such woman’. In his lecture, given on 3 July 1930, Bergelson pointed out that the main deficiency of contemporary Yiddish writing in the West was its Zionist character, and again concluded, as he had in 1926, that the Soviet Union was the only place where Yiddish literature could successfully combine tradition and modernity. Mayzel was obviously disappointed by his friend’s blind pro-Sovietism, and his words sounded uncannily prescient when he warned Bergelson not to play with fire because the Soviet Yiddish literary experiment might yet have a tragic end.62 Bergelson, however, little realized that In shpan had set off a chain-reaction in his life that would ultimately lead to a point of no return in his relationship with communism. Around the same time, Isaac Nusinov, a literary authority in the Soviet academic world, noted in the officially approved Literary Encyclopaedia that Bergelson had emerged from a crisis thanks to the contrast between defeated, enslaved bourgeois Germany and the Soviet Union, and the contrast between the cheap American and Polish Yiddish press, whose rules he attempted to obey, and the Yiddish press and publishing in the Soviet Union.63

Meanwhile, in Bergelson’s newest writing, America was made synonymous with

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the darkest aspects of capitalist society. Thus in his 1931 documentary story, ‘A kranker dolar un a khoylevater galekh’ (A sick dollar and an under-the-weather priest), Bergelson portrays a group of American tourists travelling to Leningrad on the same ship with him. He ridicules the Americans’ belief that their dollars are powerful by depicting the Soviet Union as a country of different, more moral traditions and social norms in which the tourists soon realize that their ‘God-dollar’ does not feel well, as if it has fallen ill in the Soviet environment. Like their dollar, the bourgeois passengers also find that they no longer look healthy.64 In January 1932, immediately on his return to Berlin from the Soviet Union where he had visited Birobidzhan and grown enamoured of it, Bergelson told his friends of his plans to repatriate. In the event, he remained in Berlin until 1933, when Hitler’s rise to power dictated his need to leave Germany. After a stay in Copenhagen, in 1934 he returned to live permanently in the Soviet Union. In a letter written to Novick from Denmark on 4 March 1933, Bergelson again mentioned his financial problems with Frayhayt. He also explained that he had an overpowering desire to write a book devoted to Birobidzhan, even though his Soviet colleagues strongly advised him to complete the second volume of Baym Dnyepr. He gave a rapturous description of the Far Eastern Jewish territory: This socialist construction, which is part of the general socialist construction in the Soviet Union and therefore has the same great scale and great future, the completely new and extremely interesting human material, with these people’s enthusiastic and heroic way of overcoming difficulties, the rapid development of a new multifaceted life on a multifaceted basis — everything was so unexpected and overwhelming for me that, as happens when one is destined to witness an event of great importance, I was simply unable immediately to start portraying the grandeur of what I could see all around me.

No doubt his organized visit to Birobidzhan was the deciding factor in his decision to resettle in the Soviet Union. At the end of 1930, when Epstein had met him once more in Berlin, Bergelson had expressed no desire for a permanent return to Russia, and Epstein later contended that a combination of Birobidzhan and Nazism were the principal factors that subsequently changed his mind.65 The Soviet Union received Bergelson with open arms. In 1934 he was the only former Yiddish fellow traveller permitted to take the f loor at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, which effectively canonized him as the Soviet Union’s leading Yiddish prose writer.66 He also became by far the country’s highest-paid Yiddish writer,67 and his works were made assigned reading in Yiddish schools and university departments. On 6 July 1935, Peretz Markish wrote to Opatoshu: ‘Bergelson lives like a count! He has never in his life had a more prosperous time — both creatively and financially’.68 Six months earlier, on 8 January 1935, also writing to Opatoshu, an activist of YKOR, the left-wing American sponsor organization of Birobidzhan,69 Bergelson had detailed his busy schedule of preparing for the press several Russian editions of his novel Baym Dnyepr, and had described Birobidzhan and its future as ‘one of the most important construction projects in the Soviet Union’, pointing up his Soviet enthusiasm by asserting, ‘I still have no desire to go abroad. So far, so good’.

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After 1933, Bergelson never again left the Soviet Union. In 1937, the Party leadership refused permission for a delegation of five Yiddish luminaries, including Bergelson, to take part in the World Yiddish Cultural Congress, held in Paris in September 1937, which created the leftist Yidisher kultur farband (YKUF); he thus missed the opportunity of again meeting some of his New York friends, notably Leyvik, Opatoshu, and Weinper.70 A year earlier, the veteran Yiddish dramatist and polemicist David Pinski, on a visit to the Soviet Union, described in his travel log the atmosphere of fear at meeting any foreign guest that surrounded and overwhelmed local Yiddish writers. Yet Bergelson and Khashin — the latter would soon disappear into the gulag — behaved differently, and made no attempt to avoid Pinski, from whom Bergelson enquired about the well-being of Opatoshu and Weinper.71 We shall never be able to discover how sincerely Bergelson was devoted to communism or to what degree he was truly repelled by the United States. According to Weinper, who visited him in Berlin in the summer of 1929, Bergelson would sometimes call America his ‘second home’.72 On the other hand, Bergelson was a man who always felt a pressing need to endear himself to every one of his interlocutors, so this recorded enthusiasm for America might well be artificially adulatory.73 Whatever the case, soon after his arrival in the Soviet Union, both the state’s literary critics and Bergelson himself announced that he had undergone a radical ideological transformation and become a totally different person; he was now, they asserted, a one hundred per cent Soviet man. Apart from implementing socialist-realist principles in his new writing, he began to rewrite his previous works, ‘purifying’ them for the contemporary Soviet reader and critic.74 The 1933 season of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre opened with a new version of Mideshadin (The full severity of the law), a play based on the novel of the same title that Bergelson had written in Berlin during the second half of the 1920s. Litvakov was happy to discern that the stage version looked its viewers ‘straight in the eyes’, avoiding the moralizing and impressionist ‘half-faced’ portrayal of the civil war that had characterized the novel.75 Two Worlds ‘Full-faced’ Soviet writings, particularly those produced in the second half of the 1940s, were filled with distaste for America and its non-proletarian citizens who were always presented as negative or, at best, hapless characters.76 Bergelson, too, trimmed his sail to the ideological winds and did not fail to settle scores with America, particularly in his Birobidzhan stories. In his 1934 novella Birebidzhaner (Migrants to Birobidzhan), he created an incorrigible reactionary named Mendel Lifshits who used to make money from writing anti-Soviet letters and publishing them in an American Yiddish newspaper. Bergelson himself always remained an enthusiast of Far Eastern Jewish colonization, and the subject matter of his last novella, Tsvey veltn (Two worlds), is also centred on Birobidzhan. First published in 1947–48 in the Moscow journal Heymland (Homeland), it was reprinted in book form in 1953 by the New York-based YKUF. Mayzel, by then a central

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figure in this organization, could not know at the time that he was preparing a posthumous edition. Niger saw Tsvey veltn as a continuation of Bergelson’s earlier Birebidzhaner, but written by an author who had now virtually devised his own perfect formula for amalgamating art with Soviet ideology.77 The chief character of Tsvey veltn, Kalmens, is a fifty-year-old Chicago-based professor of agriculture who sets out for Birobidzhan in order to find his childhood sweetheart, Khavele Vortman. He comes to the Soviet Union in 1932, the year in which Americans made up fully half the foreign visitors to the Soviet Union.78 Bergelson, who appears in person as the narrator at the end of the tale, mentions that he visited Birobidzhan at more or less the same time and that his itinerary virtually coincided with that of the professor, although they were not fated to meet (149).79 It is strange that Bergelson chose to set his story exclusively in the early days of Birobidzhan, particularly since he did not use hindsight to reveal the past in the light of what it led to, most importantly to the government-sponsored relocation there of Jews dispossessed and displaced by World War II, who began arriving in Birobidzhan from the end of 1946. In 1947 and 1948, the Moscow Yiddish newspaper Eynikayt (Unity) published numerous articles dedicated to the new drive for settlement in Birobidzhan, and the Moscow Yiddish publishing house Emes produced a number of new books either fully or partly devoted to Birobidzhan. Bergelson, however, built his narrative around a naïve armchair scholar in order to point contrasts between capitalist America and socialist Birobidzhan. The disadvantages of America emerge numerous times and in various forms. Even American tinned goods do not suit the taste of the Birobidzhaners: ‘In general, the professor formed the impression that these Jews, though they bred pigs here, nevertheless felt some taste of ritual impurity (treyfs) in the word “America” ’ (16). Bergelson presents Kalmens as a man alien even in appearance, dressed in ‘his odd-coloured waistcoat, the numerous pockets of which appeared to be full of incomprehensible American wisdom’ (24). The professor cannot understand many peculiarities of the Soviet mode of living because he has spent the best part of his life in ‘a country, where freedom means freely to swallow one other’ (131). Yet he can see the merits of a socialist village: to his eyes, the collective farmers, men and women, possess enormous advantages over hired American farm-hands. Almost all of them are young, and they live here in the taiga like one big, very close-knit family: ‘while doing essentially quite simple work, they were apparently certain that they were doing something really big and important’ (40). He is also enraptured by the way the authorities manage the Jewish territory: All of them are enthusiasts. They are over eight thousand kilometres from the centre, but they are led from Moscow. In Birobidzhan they have a district centre and through it they are linked with the Khabarovsk Krai Executive Committee; through the Krai Executive Committee, they are linked with Moscow. (143)

Kalmens begins to think that deep in his heart he has always been a socialist, even when he settled in America — ‘the country where everyone individually carries about his own dimly or brightly burning wick’ (140). Driven by an urge to create something of lasting value, Kalmens nurses the idea of building a furniture factory

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that will establish the economic basis for a model community (133). He believes that the equipment can be brought from America, and that the economic crisis will induce unemployed workers and engineers to decamp to the Soviet Union. Moreover, the same economic crisis could offer the opportunity to buy up very cheaply one of the American factories that has been closed down (27). Wearing thigh-high American boots, he tramps all over the woods until he finds a hill where such a factory might be sited (41–42). The local leaders of collective farms, educated at a Party school, laugh their heads off at this hare-brained scheme. Although they cannot bring themselves to read details of the whole project submitted by their American guest, they feel it to be superf luous and not to their liking. In general, they would be happy to see Americans coming to work with them, but on the strict proviso that these immigrants concentrate on realizing specifically Soviet plans and refrain from bringing their own blueprints (49–54). On the other hand, though, local leaders are not even sure that settlers from America would be able to cope with the harsh conditions of life in Birobidzhan (107). The American professor soon begins to notice that the Birobidzhan settlers are avoiding him, and that as soon as they see him, people check themselves in the middle of sentences (61). They are put on their guard from the time he tells his landlady, an old collective farmer, that he wishes to buy a piece of jewellery as a gift for Khavele Vortman. Wholly unaware that in America it is considered normal behaviour to manifest sympathy, attraction, or love for a woman by spending money on gifts, the new men and women who are the Birobidzhaners deem ugly and profiteering any attempt to purchase privately such things as diamond rings (62–64). An immense abyss thus lies between Professor Kalmens and the Birobidzhaners. He comes from a country in which everything is done only for the sake of money, whereas the Soviet Jewish settlers are ready and willing to perform any task as long as it contributes towards building a society based exclusively on fairness (116). He comes from the world that Bergelson disdained to the world that Bergelson loved. An immense abyss lay not only between the fictional figures of Khavele and Kalmens, but also between Bergelson and America, or between Bergelson and the non-Soviet world in general. Bergelson’s repatriation marginalized him, limiting his readership to the Soviet Union and such pro-communist circles outside the Soviet Union as YKUF, which always hailed him as the greatest modern Yiddish prose writer. To such sympathizers, writers like Bergelson embodied the achievements of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union. In his 1941 poem ‘David Bergelson’, Weinper, who became a leading activist of YKUF and an enthusiast of Birobidzhan, associated the Far Eastern Jewish territory with his Soviet friend.80 In 1956 he mourned Bergelson’s death, recollecting how ot ersht, ot ersht iz ot dos alts geven. Nyu-yorker kafe-hoyz ‘Royal’, in nayn-un-tsvantsikstn yor, ven Shmuel Niger shtelt mikh far im for, un zogt im vos un ver ikh bin. [All this happened recently, a very short time since. In New York, in the Café Royal, in 1929, When Shmuel Niger introduced me to him And told him who and what I was.] 81

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At the time Weinper wrote these lines, the American Jewish Left had sustained devastating collateral damage from Stalin’s suppression of Yiddish culture. In a letter written on 5 September 1957, the novelist Howard Fast (1914–2003), who had by now abandoned his former role as the American Communist Party’s chief literary celebrity, reminded Novick, now editor of Morgn-frayhayt: ‘Neither you nor I even whispered when they murdered Bergelson — doesn’t that bother you?’82 While Bergelson’s commitment to the Soviet Union helped the Communist Party to recruit Jewish intellectuals, his tragic death contributed to the rapid disintegration of Jewish communist cadres in the United States.83 In this regard, it is especially illuminating to record that in June 1957, large numbers of activists previously committed to the Morgn-frayhayt lobby transferred their allegiance to their former arch-enemy, the Workmen’s Circle, a sister organization of Forverts, where they established a separate branch, Number 44, which they called ‘Bergelson Branch’.84 Notes to Chapter 9 1. See, in particular, Bikher-velt, 2 (1922), 223–24. 2. Israel Rubin, ‘E. Tsherikover’, Literarishe bleter, 21 March (1930), 222–23. 3. S. M. [Shimon] Dubnov, Kniga zhizni: vospominaniia i razmyshleniia (St Petersburg: Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 1998), p. 493. 4. William Zukerman, ‘Fundamentale fragn’, Fraye arbeter shtime, 15 October 1926, p. 2; idem, ‘Vegn di yidishe komunistn in Amerike’, Fraye arbeter shtime, 26 November 1926, p. 3; Moshe Olgin, Ab. Cahan: Ver iz er? Vemen fartret er? (New York: Yidbyuro, 1935), p. 26; Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 20005), pp. 219–34. 5. David Bergelson, ‘Yidishe komunistn in Rusland bashlisn, az es iz shoyn mer nito keyn yidn oyf der velt’, Forverts, 4 March 1923, p. 12; idem, ‘Yidishe komunistn fun Rusland makhn vider pogromen oyfn yidishn gas’, Forverts, 15 December 1923, p. 4. 6. Ab Cahan, ’A nayer roman fun Dovid Bergelson’, Forverts, 4 February 1923, p. 4. 7. Anita Norich, The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 4, 9. 8. Bergelson’s letters to Cahan are preserved in YIVO Archive, Papers of Abraham Cahan, MK 498, reel 3, folder 54. 9. Ber Orshanski, ’Revolyutsyonerer daytsher teater’, Der hamer, 3.6 (1928), 55. 10. Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox (New York: Fred Jordan Books/Grosset & Dunlop, 1978), p. 21. 11. ‘Khronika’, Rul´, 6 June 1924, p. 6; 4 July 1925, p. 4; 21 January 1926, p. 4; 26 June 1926, p. 4. 12. Benjamin Jacob Bialostotzky, ‘Vegn Olgin-Bergelson taynes’, Oyfkum, 1 (1926), 5. 13. See Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 35–36. 14. Alter Brody, ‘Yiddish — a Childless Language’, The Nation, 9 June 1926, p. 631. 15. Gennady Estraikh, ‘Dovid Bergelson geyt “in shpan” ’, Forverts, 11 November 2005, p. 11. 16. David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 155–56. 17. YIVO Archive, Papers of Jacob Lestschinsky, RG 339, box 1, folder 16. 18. David Bergelson, ‘Zayne koshere leftsn’, Frayhayt, 22 May 1926, p. 4. 19. David Bergelson, ‘Hirshl Toker’, Frayhayt, 30 May 1926, p. 3; 31 May 1926, p. 5; 1 June 1926, p. 5. See also Estraikh, In Harness, p. 70. 20. YIVO Archive, Papers of Jacob Lestschinsky, RG 339, box 1, folder 16. 21. Mordechai Altshuler (ed.), Briv fun yidishe sovetishe shraybers ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1979), pp. 186–87. David Hofshteyn’s penitential letter was published in Der Emes on 20 April 1926 upon his return to the Soviet Union. He had left the country in 1924 when he was

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ostracized for having been one of the signatories of a memorandum supporting the teaching of Hebrew. 22. Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Old and the New Together: David Bergelson’s and Israel Joshua Singer’s Portraits of Moscow, circa 1926–27’, Prooftexts, 26.1 and 2 (Winter/Spring 2006), 58. 23. YIVO Archive, Papers of Jacob Lestschinsky, RG 339, box 1, folder 7. 24. For the climate of the Romanisches Café, see Israel Rubin’s five vignettes ‘Bay di tishlekh fun romanishn kafe’, Literarishe bleter, 10 January 1930, p. 28; 17 January 1930, pp. 53–54; 14 February 1930, pp. 127–28; 21 March 1930, pp. 222–23; 4 April 1930, pp. 262–63. 25. Bergelson’s letters to Opatoshu are preserved in YIVO Archive. Papers of Joseph Opatoshu, RG 436, folder 34. For Opatoshu’s first encounter with Bergelson in the Romanisches Café see Yakov Shternberg, Vegn literatur un teater (Tel Aviv: H. Leyvik, 1987), p. 131. 26. Melech Epstein, Pages from a Colorful Life: An Autobiographical Sketch (Miami Beach: I. Block, 1971), p. 82. 27. William Abrams, ‘Oyf Bergelsons kaboles-ponem’, Morgn-Frayheyt, 14 December 1928, p. 5; Literarishe bleter, 28 December 1928, p. 1034; Gennady Estraikh, ‘Dovid Bergelson in Amerike’, Forverts, 4 March 2005, p. 16. 28. Ab Kahan, ‘Di yidishe literatur un di frage fun kinstlerisher oyfrikhtikayt’, Forverts, 24 February 1929, literary supplement. 29. Shmuel Niger, ‘Dovid Bergelson’, Der tog, 25 December 1928, p. 5. 30. Literarishe bleter, 1 August 1930, p. 58. 31. Literarishe bleter, 28 December 1928, p. 1034. 32. Zishe Weinper, ‘Dovid Bergelson’, Oyfkum, 22 (1930), pp. 14–15. 33. N. B. Linder, ‘An intervyu mit Dovid Bergelson vegn yidishn lebn in Rusland’, Der tog, 9 December 1928, p. 4. 34. Nathaniel Buchwald, ‘Dovid Bergelson — vegn an intervyu mit Bergelsonen’, Frayhayt, 15 December 1928, p. 7. 35. ‘Khronik’, Literarishe bleter, 29 March 1929, p. 262. 36. Abrams, ‘Oyf Bergelsons kaboles-ponem’. 37. This sobriquet for their Yiddish derived from the fact that its speakers used the hiss-sibilant [s] instead of the hush-sibilant [sh]; hence they said sabes instead of shabes in speaking of the Sabbath; there is a hint of mockery at their perceived snobbishness in this appellation. 38. David Bergelson, ‘Bletlekh (kimat oytobiografye)’, Oyfkum, 5 (1929), 2–6. 39. Shomer was the pen-name of Nokhem-Meyer Shaykevitsh (1849–1905), who wrote ‘exciting’ popular fiction that was very widely read in Europe and America. In 1888, Sholem Aleichem sharply criticized his work in a satirical pamphlet entitled Shomers mishpet (Shomer’s trial). 40. ‘Dos vort funem yidishn shriftshteler in Amerike’, Literarishe bleter, 8 February 1929, pp. 105–06. 41. A. Almi, ‘An ernste sakone far der yidisher literatur’, Fraye arbeter shtime, 8 March 1929, p. 4. 42. Epstein, Heymland, 6 (1962), pp. 108–09; Pages from a Colorful Life, p. 82. 43. See, for example, Avrom Bik, ‘Bergelsons tsvey amerikaner dertseylungen’, Sovetish heymland, 6 (1962), 108–09. 44. Frayhayt, 10 May 1929, p. 2. 45. See also Zalmen Libinzon, ‘Dovid Bergelsons dramaturgie’, Sovetish Heymland, 12 (1984), 151. 46. Epstein, Pages from a Colorful Life, p. 81. A seasoned communist, with a PhD from Vienna, Katz in 1934–38 edited the Paris communist Yiddish newspaper Naye prese (New Press) and subsequently a similar newspaper, Frayvelt (Free World), in Mexico. 47. Bergelson’s letters to Novick are preserved in YIVO Archive. Papers of Paul Novick, RG 1247, folder 14. 48. Weinper, ‘Dovid Bergelson’, 14–15. 49. YIVO Archive, Papers of Jacob Lestschinsky, RG 339, box 1, folder 16. 50. Mendel Osherowitch, ‘Dovid Bergelson’, Forverts, 29 October 1955, p. 8. 51. Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 143; see also Harvey Klehr, The Communist Cadre: The Social Background of the American Communist Party (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), p. 52.

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52. Novick’s letter to the members of the Communist Party’s Political Committee, 22 June 1971. YIVO Archive. Papers of Paul Novick, RG 1247, folder 34. 53. See, in particular, Melech Epstein, The Jew and Communism: The Story of Early Communist Victory and Ultimate Defeats in the Jewish Community, USA (New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1959), pp. 223–33. 54. Nakhmen Mayzel, ‘Nokhveyen’, Literarishe bleter, 11 October 1929, pp. 800–01. 55. Epstein, Pages from a Colorful Life, pp. 72–73. 56. See, for example, A. Almi, ‘Yidishe shrayber in Amerike treyslen zikh op fun di komunistn’, Forverts, 28 July 1929, literary supplement. 57. [Editorial], Vokh, 11 October 1929, p. 3; ‘Kultur un literatur khronik’, Vokh, 18 October 1929, p. 21. 58. Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 91–92. 59. Shmuel Niger, ‘Geyt Bergelson vider “in shpan”?’, Der tog, 27 July 1930, p. 5. 60. Estraikh, In Harness, p. 91. 61. See ‘ “Literarishe” ovntn in yidishn literatn-fareyn in Varshe’, Morgn-frayheyt, 7 July (1930), p. 5; ‘Dovid Bergelson tsvishn di Varshever literatn’, Morgn-frayheyt, 21 July (1930), p. 5. 62. Estraikh, In Harness, p. 92. 63. Isaac Nusinov, ‘David Bergelson’, Literaturnaia entsiklopediia, I (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, 1930), p. 456. 64. David Bergelson, ‘A kranker dolar un a khoylevater galekh’, in Tsvishn lebedike mentshn (Minsk: Melukhe-farlag fun Vaysrusland, 1936), pp. 81–85. 65. Epstein, Pages from a Colorful Life, p. 82. 66. Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 139–43. 67. Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, p. 165. 68. Altshuler, Briv fun yidishe sovetishe shraybers, p. 315. 69. YKOR is an acronym of Yiddish kolonizatsye organizatsye in Rusland, Organization for Jewish Colonization in Russia. For further details, see Henry Srebrnik, ‘Diaspora, Ethnicity and Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communities and the Birobidzhan Project’, in Yiddish and the Left, ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2001), pp. 96–97. 70. Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 99–100. See also Ershter alveltlekher yidisher kultur-kongres (New York: YKUF, 1937). 71. David Pinski, Rayze-bukh, II (Warsaw: Dovid Pinski Bikher Inkorporirt, 1938), pp. 230–39. 72. Zishe Weinper, ‘Dovid Bergelson in Amerike’, Literarishe bleter, 19 September 1929, 723–24; Weinper, ‘Dovid Bergelson’, Der oyfkum, 22 (1930), 16. 73. See, in particular, Shternberg, Vegn literatur un teater, p. 130. 74. See Estraikh, In Harness, p. 139. 75. Moyshe Litvakov, ‘Mides-hadin’, Der Emes, 24 October 1933, pp. 2–3, and 26 October 1933, pp. 2–3. 76. See, in particular, N. I. Nikolaeva, ‘Deiateli sovetskoi literatury i iskusstva i antiamerikanskaia propaganda v gody “kholodnoi voiny” ’, Dialog so vremenem: Al´manakh intellektual’noi istorii, 9 (2002), 214–30. 77. Shmuel Niger, ‘Tsu D. Bergelsons tsvey veltn’, Di yidishe tsaytung, 20 May 1949, p. 7. 78. Aleksandr Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii: Rossiia i America v travelogakh i intertekstakh (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), p. 175. 79. All quotations are from the 1953 New York edition. 80. Zishe Weinper, Shrayber un kinstler (New York: YKUF, 1958), pp. 145–48. 81. Weinper, Shrayber un kinstler, p. 150. 82. YIVO Archive. Papers of Paul Novick, RG 1247, folder 55. 83. For more on the disintegration and transformation of American Yiddish-speaking communist circles, see Gennady Estraikh, ‘Metamorphoses of Morgn-frayhayt’, in Yiddish and the Left, ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2001), pp. 144–66. 84. Y. Shmulevitsh, ‘Der nayer “Dovid Bergelson brentsh” 44 arbeter ring’, Forverts, 11 June 1957, p. 3.

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‘Why I am in Favour of Birobidzhan’: Bergelson’s Fateful Decision (1932) Boris Kotlerman Bergelson’s return to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1934 seems prima facie the logical outcome of the process he had affirmed publicly in his 1926 essay ‘Dray tsentren’ (Three centres), when he called upon Yiddish cultural activists to ‘orientate themselves towards Moscow’.1 At the same time, having become a welcome guest in Moscow, Bergelson must have been fully aware of the reality in the Soviet Union and the complex situation there of the Yiddish culture whose future he praised so highly. Notwithstanding the facts that Soviet publishing houses and journals printed his works, the Moscow State Yiddish theatre staged two of his plays, and his writings were even included in the curriculum of Jewish schools, Bergelson still felt the need to secure his position as the doyen of Soviet Yiddish writers in the ‘proletarian homeland’. In order to transform this wish into reality, he had in effect two options. The first was to create a monumental literary masterpiece, while the second was to become a part of yidishe arbet ( Jewish labour), as it was known in the terminology of the time, and accept the Soviet Union’s policy in regard to national minorities, including Jews. There is no doubt that Bergelson tried to realize both of these options simultaneously; a recent critical contention that it was actually his novel Baym Dnyepr (At the Dnieper) that gained him entry into the socialist paradise does not ref lect the whole picture.2 During his visits to the Soviet Union from his home in Berlin, Bergelson undoubtedly became aware of that potential in ‘Jewish labour’ for transforming literature into effective political activism, and was conscious of the authorities’ increasing interest in himself, especially as part of their propaganda drive. It would seem that this interest reached its peak in the autumn of 1932 when, during one of his visits to the Soviet Union, the Gezerd (Gezelshaft far aynordenung af erd arbetndike yidn in FSSR [Society to settle Jewish toilers on the land in the USSR])3 arranged for him to visit Birobidzhan, the area in the Russian Far East where the authorities intended to build an autonomous Jewish entity4 and for which they were keen to enlist broad international support. Some sort of verbal agreement of cooperation between the writer and the Soviet authorities was drawn up, one that paved the way for his return to the Soviet Union and for his public declaration of his decision to settle in Birobidzhan.

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Bergelson arrived in the Birobidzhan region on 29 October 1932 for a six-week stay, and was given a royal welcome. A plenary session of the settlement council of Birobidzhan was held in his honour, he was afforded an opportunity to tour the recently established Jewish settlements, and at the fifteenth anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik revolution — an event of supreme importance — he participated as a guest of honour, despite the fact that he was a foreign national.5 It is doubtful that on this occasion Bergelson held serious talks with the authorities regarding the possibility of his moving to Birobidzhan permanently, for the region’s status was still far from clear, but immediately after he returned to Berlin, he postponed all his other plans, and devoted himself to the challenging task of praising the Soviet programme for solving the Jewish problem. The result of this effort was the novella Birebidzhaner (Migrants to Birobidzhan) which drew on the impressions its author had formed during his recent visit to the territory. The plot of Birebidzhaner does not centre on one single conf lict but rather splits into many directions as the author traces the destiny of each of the new emigrants. They encounter dramatically contrasting climatic conditions and other difficulties, all intended to test their suitability for carrying out the grandiose programme devised for setting up a ‘Jewish state’. Those plastic descriptions so typical of Bergelson’s style are here harnessed to one single, overarching idea — that of a new beginning in the history of the Jewish people, fresh, clean, and full of light, behind which may perhaps lie also the author’s attempt to make a fresh start in his own life: Shimke iz shteyen geblibn a fargliverter, zayn moyl — ofn, zayne tseefnte oygn ... zey aleyn fregn, zey aleyn entfern: — Dos iz es? ... — Birebidzhan? ... Arum tsien zikh keytn hoykhe, gekrayzlt-kaylekhike berg, hiln zeyere shpitsn in ruike bloye volkndlekh — aponem tog-un-tog azoy, shoyn toyznter yorn azoy. Ale dray vayte horizontn — ful mit ot di berg. Der frimorgn zeyerer — loyter laykhtndiker krishtal, filfarbiker biz gor. Zun fun hoykher varem, fun groyser shayn. Umgehayer hoykher bloyer himl on shum volkns-shpurn. Yamen likht dergreykhn tsu di bloye roykhelekh in vaytn horizont, makhn zey shiter. Fun tsvishn bloy-tsegangene roykhlekh blikn aroys bloye krayzlekh fun di berg, kukn oys di fil vayte un noente zunik-shtralndike taykhn, shmole un breyte toln, taygishe un halb-taygishe gegntn un alts in eynem iz es dos land, vos ratnmakht hot oysgeteylt far arbetndike yidn, alts in eynem iz es mitn nomen: — Birebidzhan.....6 [Shimke was left stunned, his mouth agape, his eyes wide open ... they themselves asked the question, and they themselves gave answer: — So, is that it? — Birobidzhan? All around chains of mountains rose up, high and rounded, their summits mantled in peaceful blue clouds, as though this was the way it had always been, for thousands of years. All three distant horizons were filled with these mountains. Their dawn was a crystal of pure light, shimmering in every hue. The sun offered powerful heat and an expansive glow. In the blue, marvellously lofty skies there was no trace of cloud. Oceans of light caught at the pale

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Did this rush of enthusiasm truly spring from within the author himself, even to a small extent, or was it simply a token of his willingness to satisfy his hosts? This question troubled the Jewish public in the West who followed Bergelson’s metamorphosis with concern. On this subject it is enlightening to read the opinion of the New York critic Shmuel Niger, normally one of Bergelson’s admirers, who was somewhat discomfited by what he called ‘this collective creation’ crafted by two Bergelsons: the artist and the communist. Niger attempted to disguise his unease behind an ironic tone: When we see that [Bergelson’s] opponents pull a righteous face and bristle: ‘How can this be! Clothed in his artistic tales [prayer-shawl] and tfiln [phylacteries], he is oiling the political wheels of the [Communist] Party’, we grow even more righteous and say in the manner of R. Levi Yitzhok of Berdichev: ‘Even when he helps the Party wheels to turn, he uses artistic devices and reaches artistic fulfilment.’7

Bergelson’s artistic work was unquestionably approved in the Soviet Union, because even before his final return there in the spring of 1934,8 the Moscow Yiddish publishing house Der emes had already prepared his book for publication in a print run of 10,000 copies. The book appeared just as Birobidzhan was declared an autonomous Jewish region,9 and it became, naturally, the new citizen Bergelson’s calling card as a proponent of the Birobidzhan project. Birobidzhan officially achieved autonomy on 7 May 1934 and on the very same day a grandiose Yiddish language-planning conference was opened in Kiev.10 Three weeks later, on 28 May, Mikhail Kalinin (1875–1946), chairman of the allSoviet Executive Committee (VTsIK), spoke for the first time of the government’s intentions regarding Birobidzhan in a meeting with representatives of Moscow’s Jewish press and workers. Bergelson was the only Yiddish writer who took part in this event.11 Yet for some reason, he was not among a group of the Soviet Union’s leading Yiddish writers — Shmuel Nissan Godiner (1893–1942), Yekhezkel Dobrushin (1883–1953), David Hofshteyn (1889–1952), Izi Kharik (1898–1937), and Peretz Markish (1895–1952) — who were present as guests of honour at the first conference of regional Soviets (councils) convened from 18 to 21 December 1934, an event that effectively confirmed the autonomy;12 it appears that his absence was purely technical. During the conference, Lavrenti Lavrentiev, the first secretary of the Party committee of the Far Eastern district, who represented the Party’s chief authorities, met with its writers and intelligentsia to issue a call to strengthen the theatre, to train local writers, to establish institutes of science and a Yiddish-language journal; he also mentioned the possibility of transferring to Birobidzhan several Yiddish cultural institutions from the European part of the country, in order to turn the autonomous region into ‘a strong centre of socialist, Jewish-Soviet culture’.13

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Bergelson elegantly made up for his absence at the conference in the ‘international’ arena by publishing a series of articles praising the Birobidzhan plan and denouncing other imperialist ‘paradises’ for Jews, among them Palestine; these articles were synchronized with the date of the conference and appeared in late 1934–early 1935 in the Warsaw-based communist newspaper Fraynd. By contrast with other leading writers, none of whom had explicitly expressed a desire to settle in Birobidzhan, even in the foreseeable future, Bergelson’s position was astonishing for its decisiveness. It must have been formulated even before the conference, as attested in September 1935 by the chairman of the executive committee of Birobidzhan, Professor Joseph Liberberg (1898–1937): ‘Already a year ago he [Bergelson] informed us of his intention to move here permanently’.14 This decision is further authenticated in the final article of the aforementioned series, ‘Why I am in favour of Birobidzhan’, in which the writer enumerates eight reasons for moving to Birobidzhan, implying that he had already made the decision to settle there: 1. All activity on behalf of Birobidzhan, which is part of the great Soviet Union, is activity on behalf of the socialist enterprise in its entirety. 2. Birobidzhan is one of the most important and prominent fronts in the establishment of a classless society. 3. The desire to become a ‘mirror’ of what is being accomplished in Birobidzhan, with every clod of earth, every new house, and every manufacturing plant becoming an ‘open book’ where I plan to expend all of my working hours. 4. Birobidzhan, which is an undeveloped region on the border of ‘the imperialist world’, gives one the pleasure of creating history, in the fullest sense of the word. 5. As a Jew, I feel more intensely in Birobidzhan, the only autonomous Jewish region and a future [sic] Soviet republic, the purpose of the national Soviet policy, under which all of the Soviet Union’s national cultures will develop under equal conditions. 6. In Birobidzhan I will help build a glorious Jewish culture, socialist in form and national in content, which can serve propaganda purposes as well as a concrete model for the liberation of nations in the Soviet Union and for other nations in capitalist countries. 7. Refusing to work in and on behalf of Birobidzhan would be both against my own personal interest and against the interests of our entire Soviet collective. 8. I want to work in and on behalf of Birobidzhan, because I wish to partake of those fascinating, delectable juices of life that our Soviet regime bestows upon me.15

The Soviet authorities unquestionably regarded Bergelson’s articles as a tremendous propaganda coup, despite the fact that they were published in an almost totally marginal forum. The government had clearly succeeded in ‘capturing’ a prominent Jewish artist with the proper political orientation who had agreed to settle in the young autonomous region. At the same time, negotiations regarding the development of ‘a strong centre of socialist Jewish-Soviet culture’ in Birobidzhan were still in mid-air with Bergelson in company with them, solitary in his brave resolution. Was he steamrollered into fulfilling his promise as quickly as possible? According to his

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view, any refusal to move to Birobidzhan at that time was a betrayal of his personal interest and a crime against both himself and the socialist way of life. Did the use of such pejorative terms as ‘betrayal’ and ‘crime’, which smack very strongly of the terms so frequently employed in the political trials mounted against the ‘enemies of the people’ from the late 1920s onwards, betray that sense of entrapment that began troubling him after his move to the Soviet Union? The Soviet authorities conducted negotiations not only with Bergelson but also with other ‘celebrities’, although these had hitherto been unsuccessful. In this regard it is interesting to read the account given by Peretz Markish, in his letter dated 6 July 1935 to Joseph Opatoshu (1886–1954) in New York: We are all waiting for you to come to us and settle here in Birobidzhan! That would be an international sensation; we would also go. Bergelson is going again in August; I am going a bit after that. In general, we shall have there the beginning of a Jewish-socialist culture. They are already moving our institutions of Jewish culture there, the universities, research institutes, museums, and other academic chairs. This is good! [...] Your plan to come here in a few years to settle in Birobidzhan was received with tremendous enthusiasm. Don’t abandon the idea.16

Bergelson did indeed leave Moscow for Birobidzhan in August 1935, and was there by early September. Despite the fact that he had already agreed to declare his intention of settling in the autonomous region, he came there formally on a press assignment on behalf of the editorial board of the Yiddish anthology Tsvey finfyorn (Two five-year plans), dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution and scheduled to appear in 1937. This status must have made it easier for him to negotiate with the heads of the region. On 24 September 1935, at a festive meeting of the ‘proletarians of Birobidzhan’, he was still content to express the hope ‘that among the builders of the Jewish autonomous region, work might be found for a writer like myself ’.17 Over the next few weeks, Bergelson enjoyed the vigorous courtship of the region’s leadership, who paid him great honour. He accompanied two district heads, first Party secretary Matvei Khavkin (1897–c.1967) and executive committee chairman Liberberg, to various official functions such as the gala reception held on 12 October to welcome a special migrants’ train from Kiev; he was invited to sit in the ‘government box’ at the local theatre; and he received other similar marks of respect. He eventually succumbed to the pressure. On 13 October, at a celebratory presentation at the theatre in honour of the new arrivals, he declared, to thunderous applause, his decision permanently to become ‘a resident of Birobidzhan’.18 In a special interview later he listed six motives that had led him to this ‘fateful’ decision: 1. The transformation of Birobidzhan into a Jewish autonomous region despite numerous difficulties. 2. The achievements of the previous year that had surpassed anything he had imagined from a distance. 3. Only there could a Jewish Soviet writer work effectively. 4. The hope that his decision would accelerate the process of turning the district into a republic.

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5. The opportunity to do interesting and efficient work alongside [first Party secretary] Comrade Khavkin [sic]. 6. The desire to bring about a revolution in the minds of the Jewish intelligentsia so that they would start to move to the autonomous region.19

It would seem that this declaratory statement, which unlike the previous one carries no reference to the overall socialist enterprise and this time was intended more for internal Soviet use, had been stipulated in his contacts with the district leadership so as not to bind him in any practical way or to impede his planned return to Moscow. Both sides came away profiting, at least at the time of the declaration. On the one hand, Bergelson had ensured his position of leadership in the event that the Birobidzhan project succeeded, and perhaps he even believed that this was going to happen in the near future. In his enthusiastic letter to the American Yiddish poet Zishe Weinper (1883–1957), published in the pro-Soviet New York journal Naye lebn (New Life), he expressed the hope that within a few years no fewer than one million Jews would be living in Birobidzhan.20 On the other hand, the declaration created the impression that the regime was acknowledging Bergelson’s ability not merely to change public opinion vis-à-vis Birobidzhan, but — incredibly — even to inf luence important decisions of state, such as turning the region into an autonomous republic, and in so doing, it certainly contributed towards increasing his status in Soviet Jewish culture. The local authorities also profited substantially, particularly since no prominent writer had heretofore expressed an unequivocal desire to settle in the autonomous region. The decision was immediately taken to build Bergelson a house and give him the use of an automobile,21 despite the fact that he had already purchased a co-op apartment in Moscow.22 In his speech marking the eighteenth anniversary of the revolution, Birobidzhan Party chairman Khavkin defined Bergelson’s decision as one of the district’s most impressive achievements: ‘We need great artists like this in every field’.23 To all appearance, Liberberg, the chairman of the executive committee and the inspiration behind ’Jewish creation’ in the autonomous region,24 did not particularly like Bergelson’s somewhat devious behaviour. According to the account given by Hershl Vaynroykh (1903–83), who was also living in Birobidzhan at that time, Liberberg hot gut gekent opshatsn Dovid Bergelsonen als ‘mentsh’ mit zayne egoistishe dreydlekh — un falshe reklames far der velt, ‘knew very well how properly to assess David Bergelson as a “decent person” with his egotistical manipulations — and his phoney declarations to the whole world’. On the other hand, Vaynroykh attests that when Bergelson was introduced to the ill-educated Party secretary Khavkin as ‘the Jewish Maksim Gorky’, Khavkin immediately took Bergelson under his wing.25 This is confirmed by the praise that Bergelson heaped on Khavkin in the letter to Weinper mentioned earlier: We have had great fortune that the Party has appointed Comrade Khavkin as [first] secretary of the regional Party committee, a deeply and exceptionally devoted comrade, a likeable fellow, a former tailor, a Bolshevik who grew up to become a person of eminence. I am entranced by his genius, his talents, his marvellous energy, and the tremendous idealism that this man of the people carries with him. It is our fortune to work with him.26

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On the other hand, Bergelson consistently ignored Liberberg in his speeches and interviews. Despite these games, Bergelson’s arrival caused a general uplift of spirits in Birobidzhan. The local newspapers were filled with reports about his activity under such headlines as ‘Bergelson meets with the workers’, ‘Bergelson visits schools and orphanages’, and the like.27 The local Yiddish daily Birobidzhaner shtern immediately began publishing a regular literary column, and Bergelson even contributed a Yiddish translation of a chapter from Isaac Babel’s book Konarmia (Red Cavalry).28 The newspaper’s editorial board introduced a literary counselling service for beginner writers, and it was reported that a workshop for young writers had been established, thanks to Comrade Bergelson.29 On 4 October, the local Yiddish theatre held an evening in honour of Bergelson which included some scenes from the stage version of his 1927 novel Mides-hadin (The full severity of the law).30 During the course of the evening, the theatre’s artistic director Avrom Aizenberg (1899–1941) spoke of Bergelson’s strong inf luence on the theatre’s actors. If truth be told, at that time this inf luence was manifested only in their dramatization of his novella Birebidzhaner as part of the montage Royvarg (Raw material), which was being prepared for the first anniversary of the promulgation of autonomy in May 1935, a presentation that also included Biro-Bidzhan, the travel notes of Meyer Alberton (1900–47), and the story Baym Amur (At the Amur river), by the Birobidzhan prose writer Hirsh Dobin (1905–2001). The event ultimately fell somewhat f lat on account of the unsuitability for stage presentation of the material chosen, according to the young Birobidzhan actor and director Yankev Rozenfeld, who directed it.31 In his reply, Bergelson promised to assist the theatre with its repertoire, and it seems that to keep his word, alongside his intensive work on the second part of his novel Baym Dnyepr, he began writing a play on a theme of local interest. He never abandoned his earlier plans, however, so at the end of 1935 he undertook a tour of the Crimean peninsula, planning to return ‘home’ only some nine months later, in August 1936.32 From a distance, he continued to maintain contact with ‘home’,33 and was even elected a member of the organizing committee of Birobidzhan’s regional branch of the Soviet Writers Association.34 Meanwhile, important changes were taking place in Birobidzhan. On 29 August 1936, Mikhail Kalinin, the chairman of VTsIK, officially declared: [...] the transformation of the Birobidzhan region of the Far Eastern district into the Jewish autonomous region has justified itself completely and fully. [...] For the first time in the history of the Jewish people, its burning desire to create its own homeland, to create its own national state structure, has been realized [...]. The Jewish working masses are developing and strengthening their Soviet state structure in forms corresponding to the national and everyday life conditions of their people [...]. The Jewish autonomous region has become the centre of Soviet Jewish national culture for all the working Jewish population.35

This proclamation paralleled the change in the political climate of Birobidzhan. In early September 1936, Liberberg was arrested as a ‘secret Trotskyite’, together with many of his close circle. It may well be that these arrests were what delayed

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Bergelson’s return to Birobidzhan, which took place only in the late autumn of 1936. At the Moscow train station on 24 October, there was a gala send-off for Bergelson, David Hofshteyn, and the chairman of the Ukrainian Gezerd M. Katel, who had been appointed chairman of the executive committee in place of Liberberg. Among other Jewish luminaries attending this farewell was the head of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, Shloyme Mikhoels.36 Bergelson’s third visit to Birobidzhan was his longest, lasting over four months. Immediately on his arrival he and Hofshteyn, together with the writers Meyer Alberton and Note Lurie (1906–87) who had arrived in the region several days earlier, were elected members of the presidium of the second conference of regional Soviets, held on 4–6 November 1936.37 This conference somewhat dispelled the sombre mood that had prevailed since the arrest of Liberberg, and for a while infused renewed energy into Jewish cultural activity there. The need for this ‘cultural enterprise’, to use the terminology of the time, was felt very strongly: courses in Yiddish were opened for non-Jews in the region,38 there was discussion about the necessity of casting Yiddish type fonts to meet the growing need for printed material39 and the preparation of Yiddish subtitles for all the films coming to the region,40 and the authorities of the Russian Far Eastern district, to whom the authorities in Birobidzhan were subordinate, even passed a resolution to organize a Jewish puppet theatre.41 In January 1937 the talented theatre director Moyshe Goldblat (1899–1974) settled in Birobidzhan and, with the support of the authorities, developed a programme to set up an ‘artistic conglomerate’: a Jewish opera house, conservatoire, school of music and ballet, theatre studio, symphony orchestra, and more.42 Unquestionably at the centre of all this activity, however, were preparations for an all-Soviet conference on the Yiddish language which was intended to establish Birobidzhan as the centre of Soviet-Jewish culture.43 Bergelson played a key role in this wide-ranging activity. He participated as host at many literary evenings, where he presented the works of Alberton, Lurie, Hofshteyn, and others; he began writing a series of short novellas under the general title Birebidzhaner motivn (Birobidzhan themes) and even published one of them,44 and he took an active part in editing the first issues of the literary and publicistic periodical Forpost (Outpost), to the editorial board of which he had been appointed while he was still in Moscow.45 His public activity in ‘the Red Zion’ seems to have reached its peak in January 1937 when he exchanged telegrams with the German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958) who was visiting Moscow at that time and met with Stalin. In the name of the Birobidzhan intelligentsia, Bergelson welcomed Feuchtwanger and congratulated him on this august meeting; Feuchtwanger in turn thanked him and expressed a desire to visit Birobidzhan.46 Inevitably, Bergelson devoted all his energy to preparing the planned language conference, which was scheduled for the end of February 1937. Slated to speak on the subject ‘The language of literature’,47 Bergelson appeared on many occasions as an expert on the development of literary Yiddish in the Soviet world. In addition, he prepared a series of lectures for participants in the literary workshop he himself had established: lectures on meaning, and on the characteristics of an effective

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opening in literary writing, on introspection, on the individual, on the senses through which the reader absorbs the literary creation, on the dialectic between vocabulary, image, and content; on the characteristics of the work of worldrenowned writers.48 In the fervour of the excitement prevailing in Birobidzhan in those days, Bergelson even called for the establishment there of an institution to oversee the grammatical rules of the Yiddish language.49 He summed up his burst of language-planning activity in an article entitled ‘Lexical problems in literary Yiddish’ that appeared in Forpost shortly after he left Birobidzhan.50 The totally unanticipated postponement of the language conference from February to the end of May spoiled the ‘celebration’ and portended evil. The country was suddenly hit by a wave of calumny and accusation against ‘Trotskyite traitors’, primarily directed against such former leaders of the Communist Party as Georgy Pyatakov (1890–1937), Karl Radek (1885–1939), and Grigory Sokolnikov (1888–1939), whose trial was held in Moscow during February 1937. Bergelson felt obligated to stand up in support of the regime and published an aggressive article against ‘low treacherous provocateurs’ in both the local and central press.51 However, he soon decided that it did not pay to wait for the conference, which was ultimately cancelled at the end of May, and he left Birobidzhan hastily in early March. Before his departure, he managed to honour his promise to the Birobidzhan theatre by completing the script of his play Birebidzhan,52 which was published later53 and included in the repertoire though never actually staged. One of the play’s central characters, the American emigrant Max, declares at a celebration marking the anniversary of the October Revolution: ‘America is so vast, but I found it crowded there, and here in Birobidzhan, which is small, here I feel like a free man, free and at ease’.54 It would appear that these words no longer corresponded to the new reality in Birobidzhan in 1937–38, since all the leaders of the autonomous region had been arrested and most of them executed; Bergelson’s patron, Party Secretary Khavkin, was deposed in early May 1937. Considering the many arrests that had been made among ‘Jewish labour’ activists, his close connection with Khavkin almost cost Bergelson dearly, since as early as the end of 1937, he had been dubbed a ‘professional sycophant’ in the Gezerd’s Moscow journal Tribuna.55 His Birobidzhan writings — which had probably been left behind in the editorial office — continued to appear in Forpost,56 but his name was removed from the journal’s editorial board. He himself took pains not to identity himself with Birobidzhan during this period, and he certainly made no further mention of the idea of returning there. His place as the dean of the Jewish intelligentsia in Birobidzhan was taken by the director Goldblat, who received official recognition for directing Moyshe Kulbak’s play Boytre. After the wave of purges during 1937–38 had subsided, Bergelson was once again seen as an asset in Birobidzhan, as is clear from an account given by a teacher in the Jewish high school in the village of Amurzet named Rapaport, who complained in the Birobidzhaner shtern about the lack of textbooks for teaching the Yiddish language. In passing, Rapaport mentioned that for the national test of proficiency in the Yiddish language taken in both Grade 7 and Grade 10 during the school years

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of 1938–39, the regional department of education had sent texts for dictation drawn from Bergelson’s writings.57 Since Soviet-Jewish schools at that time had no official curriculum,58 the choice of texts was made at the sole discretion of the department of education, and the inclusion of Bergelson’s work among them was proof that he was still persona grata with the regime. For a short time longer, Bergelson continued to be identified with Birobidzhan. For instance, it was he — in collaboration with the former Birobidzhan poet Emanuel Kazakevitsh (1913–62) — who was entrusted in late 1939 with writing a Party policy booklet entitled Birebidzhan.59 Published not in official Soviet but in a more conventional orthography because this booklet was intended for distribution abroad, the name of its distinguished co-writer was again used for propaganda purposes. All the same, there is no evidence that Bergelson renewed any old contacts in connection with his return ‘home’ in those years. It may be that the new Birobidzhan leadership had in its own way signalled its willingness to host him, but if so, he did not respond to the offer. In April 1940, official celebrations were held to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Bergelson’s creative activity. In the absence of the guest of honour, in many of the region’s towns meetings and readings of his works were held, which were crowned by a gala evening on 25 April when the local Yiddish theatre staged excerpts from his works ‘Der toyber’ (The deaf man), Baym Dnyepr, and the aforementioned Birebidzhan.60 After this, however, the Birobidzhan project entered a period of stagnation, the central authority lost interest, and Bergelson felt that he had been released from promises he had made in the past. This stagnation lasted until 1943. During the war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Birobidzhan remained a closed military zone even to Jewish refugees. But in April 1943 the authorities showed signs of renewed interest in the Jewish autonomous region. The head of the district was an energetic Party secretary named Aleksandr Bakhmutski (1911–61), who fanned life into the plan that had been abandoned. While Jewish migration to Birobidzhan, including several immigrants from abroad, only was renewed in early 1946, the new wave of settlers brought fresh forces to the autonomous region and revived the old slogans promoting notions of developing Jewish nationalism and turning the region into a republic, of developing Soviet-Jewish culture, an educational system in Yiddish, and everything else that had been mooted a decade earlier.61 Once again prominent Yiddish writers such as Der Nister (1884–1950) began visiting Birobidzhan, as did other cultural activists, and theatre directors planned to open a studio62 and pursue other cultural and artistic endeavours. This time Bergelson attempted to contribute to the atmosphere of renewal from a distance without making himself conspicuous. According to the testimony of Esther Markish, when the subject of a Jewish republic in the Crimean peninsula was raised at a meeting of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee ( JAFC) at the beginning of 1944, Bergelson, a member of the committee’s presidium, contended that he saw no alternative to the autonomy of Birobidzhan.63 According to a Ministry of State Security (MGB) report, however, Bergelson was reported to have said at the same time that ‘such an opportunity [of settling the Crimea] will not come again’.64 According to the writer Khaym Maltinski (1910–86), in 1946 Bergelson was working to have an official delegation from Birobidzhan accredited

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in Moscow, as was the case with every other official autonomous republic in the Soviet Union.65 In the absence of any other supporting evidence, however, it would appear that in both cases these were personal assertions only. At the same time, in his writing Bergelson once again turned to the subject of Birobidzhan and began composing a novella entitled Tsvey veltn (Two worlds), parts of which were published in the Moscow periodical Heymland in 1947 and 1948, and in 1953, by New York’s YKUF publishing house.66 Since he was no longer sufficiently well informed about what was currently taking place in the region, Bergelson described once more that period of early settlement with which he was thoroughly familiar. Against a background of simple Jewish workers he ‘exposed’ the f laws in his chief character, Kalmens, a Jewish professor of agriculture from Chicago who arrives in Birobidzhan. Kalmens is viewed through the prism of the Cold War that was beginning to build up during the late 1940s, as can be seen in narrative assertions such as this: bikhlal ober iz baym profesor geblibn der ayndruk, az ot di yidn, khotsh zey tsien do oyf khazeyrim, filn zey dokh inem vort ‘amerike’ epes a tam fun treyfs, ‘In general, the professor formed the impression that these Jews, though they bred pigs here, nevertheless felt some taste of ritual impurity in the word “America”’.67 Kalmens is shown to be incapable of integrating into the new society; that he is an alien both in citizenship and in values is revealed at the very beginning of the story when he tries, quite contrary to Soviet norms, to acquire a piece of diamond jewellery as a gift for his former childhood sweetheart, who has since become an agronomist in Birobidzhan. According to all indications, this was Bergelson’s last tale and he was working on it until his arrest at the end of January 1949. During his interrogation, he tried to enlist in his defence his Birobidzhan past. Among other things he claimed in his testimony before the court: My arrival in the USSR came at the same time that the Amur region was being set aside for Jewish settlers and declared a Jewish autonomous region. I regarded this as a desire on the part of the [Communist] Party and the Soviet government to give Jewish working people the opportunity to establish a feature of nationhood that they lacked — a shared territory. Once the government found this to be necessary, that meant it was a good thing. Is there nationalism in this? Let the court determine that. But I am telling the truth, that this corresponded with my desires. I was in Birobidzhan three or four times, and I came to love this little piece of the Soviet Union very much, sang its praises in quite a number of my works, told about its people, and praised not only Jews, at that. But I felt that language was not the whole point, but rather it was a question of political systems. [...] I am saying all of this so that my ‘nationalism’ will be clear to the court. I wanted the Jews to make the transition from one way of life to another, not in some large city like Leningrad, Kiev, or Odessa, but in their own little corner. Let the court decide whether this looks like an attempt to fight assimilation.68

His connection with Birobidzhan did not stand to Bergelson’s credit, however. On the contrary, it appears to have produced the opposite reaction. He was accused of espionage: that in meetings with the left-wing American activist and journalist Benzion Goldberg (1895–1972), who visited in the Soviet Union in 1945–46 and who

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was later denounced by the state investigators as ‘an American intelligence agent’, ‘[Bergelson] provided him with information [in particular] about Birobidzhan’. When sentence was passed on him, the ‘Birobidzhan’ chapter in Bergelson’s life was summed up laconically: ‘Returning to the USSR in 1934, he continued his nationalistic activity’.69 Neither the ‘agreement’ with which he had left the West eighteen years earlier, nor the plan for a Jewish autonomous region in the Soviet Union was in effect any longer. Notes to Chapter 10 1. David Bergelson, ‘Dray tsentren’, In shpan, 1 (1926), 84–96. See also Avrom Novershtern, ‘Hundert yor Dovid Bergelson, materialn tsu zayn lebn un shafn’, Di goldene keyt, 115 (1985), 54–58; Joseph Sherman, ‘Creative Freedom and the Party Line: The Case of Dovid Bergelson’, Midstream, 8 (2001), 20–23. 2. Dafna Clifford, ‘Dovid Bergelson’s Bam Dnieper: A Passport to Moscow’ in The Politics of Yiddish, ed. by Dov-Ber Kerler (London: AltaMira Press, 1998), pp. 157–70. 3. On Gezerd, or OZET in Russian (1925–38) see Allan Laine Kagedan, Soviet Zion: The Quest for a Russian Jewish Homeland (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 21 passim. 4. For more on Birobidzhan, see Jacob Lvavi [Babitzky], Ha-hityashvut ha-yehudit be-Birobidzhan ( Jerusalem: The Historical Society of Israel, 1965); hereinafter cited as Lvavi. 5. ‘Kh. Bergelson in Birebidzhan’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 30 October 1932; Lvavi, p. 376. 6. David Bergelson, Birebidzhaner (Moscow: Der emes, 1934), pp. 45–46. 7. Shmuel Niger, Yidishe shrayber in Sovet-Rusland (New York: S. Niger Book Committee, 1958), pp. 307–12. 8. According to Professor Lev Bergelson, son of the writer, the family came to Moscow in May 1934. I interviewed Professor Bergelson on 28 December 2004 in his home in Ma’ale-Adumim, Israel. 9. See the resolution of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR (7 May 1934): ‘O preobrazovanii Birobidzhanskogo evreiskogo natsional’nogo raiona Dal’nevostochnogo kraia v Evreiskuiu avtonomnuiu oblast’, Tribuna, 5 (1934), 1; Lvavi, p. 357 10. See Gennady Estraikh, ‘Pyrrhic Victories of Soviet Yiddish Planners’, Eastern European Jewish Affairs, 23.2 (1993), 25–37. 11. Lvavi, p. 59; M. I. Kalinin, Ob obrazovanii Evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti (Moscow: Der emes, 1935). 12. ‘Grunt-ufgabn nokhn tsuzamenfor’, Der emes, 9 January 1935. 13. ‘Fortrog fun khaver Y. Y. Liberberg’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 5 January 1935. 14. B.B., ‘Birebidzhaner arbetndike bagrisn dem groysn sovetishn vort-mayster’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 27 September 1935. 15. D. Bergelson, ‘Birebidzhan — di yidishe avtonome gegnt’, Fraynd, 27 November 1934, p. 6; ‘Taykhn in Birebidzhan’, Fraynd, 11 December 1934, p. 4; ‘Farvos bin ikh far Birebidzhan’, Fraynd, 4 January 1935, p. 4. 16. Y. Lifshits, ‘Briv fun yidishe shrayber’, in Pinkes far der forshung fun der yidisher literatur un prese, III, ed. by Khayim Bez (New York: Alveltlekher kultur kongres, 1965), p. 349. 17. B. B., ‘Birebidzhaner arbetndike bagrisn dem groysn sovetishn vort-mayster’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 27 September 1935. 18. ‘Bagegenish-ovnt’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 15 October 1935. 19. B.V., ‘Farvos blayb ikh af shtendik in der yidisher avtonomer gegnt’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 24 October 1935. 20. David Bergelson, ‘Birebidzhan tseblit zikh vi a vunder’, Naye lebn, July 1936, p. 16. 21. Birobidzhaner shtern, 27 October 1935. 22. Y. Lifshits, ‘Briv fun yidishe shrayber’, in Bez, p. 349. 23. M. P. Khavkin, ‘Di yid. avt. gegnt vert a firndiker tsenter fun der yidisher sotsialistisher kultur’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 7 November 1935. 24. For more about Liberberg see Ester Rozental-Shnaiderman, Naftulei drakhim, III (Tel-Aviv: Hakibuts ha-meyuhad, 1989), pp. 9–112.

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25. Hershl Vaynroykh, Blut oyf der zun (Yidn in Sovet-rusland) (New-York: Mentsh un yid, 1950), pp. 76–77. 26. David Bergelson, ‘Birebidzhan tseblit zikh vi a vunder’, Naye lebn, July 1936, p. 16. 27. B. Vaysman, ‘An eygene heym’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 16 October 1935. 28. I. Babel, ‘Ariber dem zbrutsh’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 12 October 1935. 29. ‘Far an ufshteyg fun der litarbet in gegnt’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 18 September 1935. 30. ‘Bergelson-ovnt in shtot-teater’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 8 October 1935. 31. See Rozenfeld, ‘Mayn tsveyte rezhi-arbet’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 6 March 1936. 32. David Bergelson, ‘Birebidzhan tseblit zikh vi a vunder’, Naye lebn, July 1936, p. 16. 33. See Bergelson’s telegram in Birobidzhaner shtern, 22 November 1935. 34. Birobidzhaner shtern, 1 June 1936. 35. ‘Vegn der sovetisher, virtshaftlekher un kultureler boyung fun der yidisher avtonomer gegnt’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 15 September 1936. 36. A. Kirzhnits, ‘Kh´´kh Katel, Bergelson un Hofshteyn — aroysgeforn keyn Birebidzhan’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 27 October 1936. 37. ‘Zikh geefnt der tsveyter gegntlekher ratn-tsuzamenfor fun der yidisher avtonomer gegnt’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 5 November 1936. 38. ‘Kursn fun yidish far rusishe arbeter’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 14 January 1937. 39. Sh. Zenger, ‘Mir darfn sheyne, farsheydnartike yidishe shriftn’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 5 January 1937. 40. ‘Vu tuen zikh ahin di filmen mit di yidishe ufshriftn?’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 2 October 1936. 41. ‘A lyalke-teater in Birebidzhan’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 6 April 1937. 42. About Goldblat and his plan see B. Kotlerman, ‘The Prewar Period of the Birobidzhan State Jewish Theater, 1934–1941’, Jews in Eastern Europe, 1.44 (2001), 40–50. 43. ‘Di shprakh-konferents in der yidisher avtonomer gegnt’, Der emes, 17 December 1936; N. Rubinshteyn, ‘Far a guter un aynhayntlekher shprakh-sistem’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 5 February 1937. See also G. Estraikh, ‘Yiddish Language Conference Aborted’, East European Jewish Affairs 25.2 (1995), 91–96. 44. D. Bergelson, ‘Birebidzhaner motivn’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 18 December 1936. 45. Tribuna, 12 (1935). 46. ‘Telegram fun Lion Feykhtvanger tsu Dovid Bergelson’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 20 January 1937. 47. See the advertisement ‘A visnshaftlekhe konferents iber der yidisher shprakh’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 9 January 1937. 48. D. Bergelson, ‘Mayne sheferishe plener’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 12 January 1937; ‘A shul fun literarishe kadren’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 18 February 1937. Participants in this literary workshop included the future Yiddish writers Aaron Vergelis (1918–99), Buzi Miler (1913–88), Henekh Koifman (1915–42), Arl Hofshteyn (1920–43), Velvl Shulman (?–1943), Moshe Gershteyn, Itsik Bronfman (1913–78), and others. 49. D. Bergelson, ‘Vegn naye verter far naye bagrifn’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 17 January 1937. 50. D. Bergelson, ‘Leksik-problemen in der yidisher literatur’, Forpost, 2 (1937), 140–53. For more about this article, see Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 94–96. 51. D. Bergelson, ‘Nidertrekhtike provokaters un fareter’, see Birobidzhaner shtern, 30 January 1937. This article was also published in Russian in Moscow: see Literaturnaia gazeta, 1 February 1937, p. 5. 52. ‘Kh. Bergelsons naye piese’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 5 March 1937. 53. D. Bergelson and Y. Dobrushin, ‘Birebidzhan’, Forpost, 3.5 (1937), 72–119. 54. Bergelson and Dobrushin, ‘Birebidzhan’, 119. 55. Tribuna, 8 (1937). 56. D. Bergelson, ‘Tsugast’, Forpost, 1.6 (1938), 64–72. 57. R. Rapoport, ‘Di muter-shprakh — a shtif kind ba di bildungs-organen fun der gegnt’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 23 June 1939. 58. B. Kotlerman, ‘Yiddish Schools in Birobidzhan, 1939–1941’, Jews in Eastern Europe, 3.49 (2002), 109–20. 59. D. Bergelson and Em. Kazakevitsh, Birobidzhan (an algemeyne iberzikht fun der yidisher avtonomer gegnt) (Moscow: Der emes, 1939).

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60. F. Arones, ‘Bergelson der dramaturg’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 26 April 1940. 61. A. Bakhmutski, ‘Der kraft fun der stalinisher natsionaler politik’, Eynikayt, 21 March 1946. 62. A. Shteyn, ‘Undzere sheferishe plener’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 21 December 1946. 63. Esther Markish, Stol´ dolgoie vozvrashchenie: vospominaniia (Tel-Aviv: Esther Markish, 1989), p. 172. 64. Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented History of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxemburg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), p. 45. 65. Khaym Maltinski, Der moskver mishpet iber di birobidzhaner (Tel-Aviv: Nay-lebn, 1981), p. 21. 66. David Bergelson, Tsvey veltn: kapitlekh fun a greserer dertseylung (NewYork: YKUF, 1953). 67. Bergelson, Tsvey veltn, p. 16. 68. Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov (eds), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 452. 69. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 488.

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C H A P T E R 11

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Memory and Monument in Baym Dnyepr (1932–1940) Harriet Murav For David Bergelson, time is organized as ‘always already/not yet’. The present moment is situated between destruction that always occurs and has already occurred, and the future moment of renewal, which has not yet occurred. To extend a metaphor Bergelson himself used in 1930, we remain on the station platform while the train bringing justice and renewal rushes by, leaving us behind. In a brief speech he made during his visit to Warsaw in 1930, Bergelson remarked that literature from the Soviet Union was like an orchestra playing on an express train. He continued, mir vos shteyen afn vokzal hobn dem kheyshek zikh arayntsukhapn on ot dem aylindikn tsug, ‘We who stand at the station want very much to jump aboard this speeding train’.1 We fail, however, to catch the train and, what is more, we always fail: we are too late for the train that has just left and too early for the next one. Belatedness and the deferral of renewal amount to the same thing. Bergelson’s aim in his 1930 remarks was to criticize Yiddish writers for their lack of timeliness, for their failure to keep up with new developments in the Soviet Union. The greatest defect of Yiddish literature, he said, was its dependence on the past, and its failure to see the coming of the new world. Despite this criticism, however, it was precisely this intermediate position between past and future that he himself inhabited and explored in his own artistic works. This essay focuses on the problem of being caught between past and future in Baym Dnyepr (At the Dnieper), his massive and most explicitly socialistrealist novel, in particular its second volume, published in 1940. I will argue that Bergelson undermines the socialist-realist and socialist project of building the bright future by positioning the present moment, the ‘now’ of the novel as ‘always already/not yet’.2 Before turning to Baym Dnyepr, it is important to sketch out the theme of belatedness, or ‘missing the train’ in Bergelson’s work as a whole. Missing the train is not a new problem in Baym Dnyepr. The theme of belatedness stands out in Bergelson’s early works and permeates the consciousness of his key characters. Mirele, the chief figure of Nokh alemen (When all is said and done, 1913), comes to the realization that someone else has lived out the ‘springtime’ of her life. The title alone positions the novel in a time frame of ‘afterwards’, or ‘too late’.3 Whereas in works written by Bergelson during the early part of the century, metaphors of time

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suggest purposeless and missed opportunity, in his works dating from the 1920s, time splits apart, severing the connection between past and future. The present moment falls in between the monumental destruction that has already taken place and the unknowable future. His short story ‘Birger-krig’ (Civil war) is a prime example. In ‘Birger-krig’ the present moment is located between ‘already’ and ‘not yet’. The protagonist Botshko has already had his love affair with Frosia and has not yet met up with her again, although he pines for her and tries to return to her. The chicken in the opening of the story has not yet laid its egg. The present moment is not merely one of a series of events that are predictable in advance — this is not Walter Benjamin’s empty homogeneous time, but rather time that is full of the possibility of something extraordinary. The ‘greatest sin’ has already been committed, but at the same time, an aveyre greyt zikh dortn, an umgeherte, tsi a mitsve, a nisht gevezn groyse, ‘an unheard-of sin is ripening there, which, if it were a pious act, would be the greatest ever’.4 To give another example from work published in the 1920s, in ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ (Among refugees) the would-be assassin says, yeder zeyger a keyver, a yortsayt, ‘every clock is a grave, the anniversary of a death’.5 A technological apparatus designed to indicate the forward motion of time marks instead a succession of deaths and the anniversaries of deaths. The present moment only has meaning in relation to the destruction and suffering of the past. I will note in passing that the time structure of catastrophe and deferred redemption emerges even more powerfully in those of Bergelson’s writings that date from after World War II. Throughout his writing career Bergelson experimented with forms of time, and throughout as well the dominant form is linked to catastrophe and the sense of the catastrophic. By 1930, when Stalin proclaimed himself ‘dizzy with success’, the rhetoric of the speeding train of progress was almost obsolete: the new emphasis was on perfection achieved. The 1930s comprised a decade of massive projects, huge displacements, and rearrangements of land, water, and human beings, resulting in the deaths of millions. The Soviet empire was in the early stages of its formation. On the literary front, writers no longer sought to throw the classics off the steamship of modernity. Instead, they ‘learned’ from the classics, particularly the nineteenth-century realists. The builders of the new Soviet empire sought to insert their own accomplishments into a grandiose historical narrative, and historical novels celebrating the great events of the recent and more remote past were in favour throughout the 1930s. The ‘historical-revolutionary novel’, which Evgeny Dobrenko calls one of the ‘metagenres of Soviet literature’, became established at this time.6 Alexei Tolstoy, for example, won the Stalin prize for Petr pervyi (Peter the Great) in 1941. The projected mass scale of Baym Dnyepr — five volumes — suggests Bergelson’s attraction to the kind of vast project that was key to the five-year plan mentality.7 In a brief critical article on Bergelson published in 1930, Nakhmen Mayzel describes the first volume of Baym Dnyepr as the foundation of a vast building, and the subsequent volumes, only one of which was completed, as so many ‘f loors’ or ‘storeys’ (shtokn), in which di vayterdike shtokn, zayne hoykhn veln bli-sofek dergeyen, dergreykhn tsu di hoykhn-shpitsn fun dem groysn, komplitsirtn yidishn zayn, dem zayn fun di

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HARRIET MURAV letste tsvansik yor, ven undzer tragish-gliklekher dor hot adurkhgemakht aza raykh, shafndik lebn. [the heights of the subsequent storeys will unquestionably succeed in reaching the high points of the great, complex Jewish existence, the existence of the last twenty years, during which our tragic-fortunate generation experienced such a rich, creative life.]8

Mayzel’s language points to the major trends of the socialist and socialist-realist project of the time: massive scale, verticality (di hoykhn-shpitsn), and the affirmation that perfection had already been achieved. Mayzel’s metaphor suggests the image of Baym Dnyepr as a verbal monument. I aim to show how it structures its own collapse. As Mikhail Yampolsky and Michael Holquist, among others, have argued, Stalinist culture structured time around the opposition between temporality and the eternal. The Leader and the places associated with the Leader participated in the eternal and the trans-historical, as embodiments of perfection achieved, or what Yampolsky, in his discussion of Soviet monuments, calls ‘islets of eternity’. According to the logic of Stalinist culture, the realm of the merely human, temporal, contingent, and corporeal belonged to a lower, profane order. Every artistic work published in the 1930s had to participate in disavowing the other side of utopia achieved: the destruction and suffering that took place in the realm of the merely human, lower, and profane order. The double dimension of socialist-realist time is at the heart of my analysis of the second volume of Baym Dnyepr. To restate my fundamental theme, this essay explores the tension between the monumental and that which disrupts it: the contingent, the corporeal, and the chronotope of ‘always already/not yet’. Baym Dnyepr arguably embodies Bergelson’s new emphasis on renewal, or, as he says in his 1930 speech, the coming of a new world. Out of a projected five volumes of this major work, only two were published: the first, subtitled Penek, in 1932, and the second, subtitled Yunge yorn (Early years) in 1940.9 The first volume, set thirty years before the revolution as its opening tells us — and in this way orients the past in relation to the future — describes the world of the shtetl from the perspective of Penek, the unloved youngest child of the wealthy Levin family whose members live in the ‘white house’. Penek’s story, as Susan Slotnick shows, is the story of the boy’s education, his gradual rejection of his father and his father’s world, and his eventual filiation with the servants and the poor workers from the hintergeslekh, the back streets of the town.10 The second volume of Baym Dnyepr picks up the action some ten years after the events described in the first. Penek is now eighteen, living in Kiev, around the time of the Kishiniev pogrom of 1903. The time structure of the novel follows the model of ‘back to the future’ or, to put it more precisely, back to the bright future that the Soviet Union had already built.11 The future will be the triumph of Soviet power and the construction of socialist society, in which anti-Semitism is a thing of the past and a new form of Jewish culture, which is both Yiddish and Soviet, will thrive. Hence the novel shows all Jewish movements, including the Bund and the cultural autonomists, to be impotent and cut off from reality. For example, the young disciples of the

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Hebrew writer Elkhonon Kadison distribute his pamphlet Hellenism or Judaism on the day that a pogrom is about to take place, as if this leaf let alone could protect the Jews. The Jews’ plans for self-defence are inadequate. The novel depicts Jewish liberals and Jewish businessmen in league with anti-Jewish government officials. Only the socialist democrats, and only those close to Lenin, are bold and decisive. Critics have noted how closely Bergelson’s novel conforms to the ideologically shaped contours of Soviet historiography of the early years of the twentieth century, and have used this conformity as grounds to dismiss the work’s interest and importance. Superficial acceptance of the Soviet version of history is not, however, the end of the story in Baym Dnyepr. Regardless of some evidence of ideological conformity, Bergelson uses a number of literary devices to challenge the characteristic Stalinist tenet of the decade, the slogan of perfection achieved, as in, for example, Stalin’s ‘Dizzy with success’ article of 1930.12 It is not only that the young hero, Penek, feels the powerful grip of his own recent past, his childhood, or that when he learns of the Kishiniev pogrom, he quotes Jeremiah in Hebrew, ‘Though I cry and call for help, he shuts out my prayer’ and ‘Thou has made us offscouring and refuse among the peoples’ ( Jeremiah 3:8;45).13 In the first part of my analysis, I argue that the novel stages the problem of not catching up as a problem of writing, as a selfref lexive commentary. The novel’s musings on the construction of key historical tropes disrupt the forward motion of the narrative toward the ‘bright future’. In the second part, I show how the problem of ‘always already/not yet’ emerges in the novel’s ref lections on commemoration, memory, and the monumental. History Early in Yunge yorn we learn that Penek has read Josephus’ History of the Jews in Graetz’s German translation. According to Michael Stanislawski, Josephus’ writings reveal his twofold desire to be ‘a loyal Jew and a loyal subject of Rome’.14 Similarly, Bergelson tried at one and the same time to be a loyal subject of the new Soviet Union and a good Jewish writer, according to a model that he himself was continuously developing and revising. Recent critical discussions of socialist-realist literature of the 1930s show it to possess a greater degree of complexity than has been previously argued.15 Bergelson’s novel in particular undermines its own pretensions to closure. The novel never catches up with the bright future of 1917, and not only because Bergelson never completed it. The text stages the failure of the hero to write the new Jewish history. Bergelson’s Yunge yorn is full of contingency, starts and stops, literary devices, and explicit ref lections on the way in which that narrative serves to construct the reality beyond the work. Magidovitsh, Penek’s former tutor, an autodidact and a Yiddish author who works as a typesetting corrector at a Russian liberal newspaper, is another embodiment of the writer himself. In an important passage, Magidovitsh ref lects on the relation between events — what the text calls a shver geplontert shtik lebn, a greatly tangled fragment of life, and the construction of historical narrative: bay Magidovitshn in shleferikn zikron hobn, vi in a finsterer kamer, zikh

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HARRIET MURAV gevalgert shtiklekh un breklekh gedekhenishn fun alts, vos arum im hot di letste teg do in shtot zikh opgeton, — s’ara shver geplontert shitk lebn! (181) [In Magidovitsh’s sleepy brain, as if in a dark room, wandered bits and pieces of everything that had happened around him here in the city — what a tangled fragment of life!]

Magidovitsh remembers the suspicious murder of the policeman’s daughter who was repeatedly stabbed and whose body was found in a Jewish house; he recalls a young man who was pasting up socialist proclamations in the neighbourhood; disparate images of the editor of his own newspaper, a lawyer, and an informant all come to his sleepy mind. Suddenly, however, Magidovitsh sees the outlines of the story that will pull all these disordered fragments of memory together into a coherent plot: un denstmol vert er, Magidovitsh, oyf eyn oygnblik biz gor klug — es tsefalt far im oyf shtiklekh ot der shverer shtik lebns-konglomerat, un in shleferikn halbn kholem derzet er, vi es vert organizirt un tsugegreyt dos, vos me ruft ‘stikhie’, ‘pogrom’, ‘vidershtand’, ‘blut-bilbl’ — ‘geshikhte’. (181) [And suddenly, in the blink of an eye, Magidovitsh grew very smart — this massive chunk of life, this conglomeration, shattered into pieces for him, and in a sleepy, half-dream he saw how what is called ‘elemental forces’, ‘a pogrom’, ‘an uprising’, ‘blood-libel’ — ‘history’ — would be organized and prepared.]

Both the socialist project and the socialist-realist project were intended to bring about an unreal condition of perfection in history. The socialist-realist narrative typically emphasized linearity, transparency, and predictability. By contrast, in Bergelson’s text the term ‘history’ is given in quotation marks, emphasizing history as narrative, as a story that is made up by individuals. All the events that comprise ‘history’, including uprisings, pogroms, and the action of elemental forces, are disorganized, chaotic bits and pieces of life that are later transformed into the familiar sequence called ‘history’. This emphasis on the constructedness of history undermines the realism of the socialist-realist aesthetic, breaking down the illusion of the seamless chain of predictable cause and effect. The passage offers a critical self-ref lection on the process by which the tropes of history are created and deployed. Rewriting the Self and the Rewriting of History The problem of writing history, expressed abstractly in the passage cited above, receives concrete realization in the development of Penek as a character, in terms both of his own life-history, and of his ongoing project of writing about the life that unfolds around him. What Magidovitsh states theoretically, Penek puts into practice by continually rewriting his own story and his stories about others — unlike Bergelson, who was reported as saying that he had abandoned his former practice of rewriting in the second volume of Baym Dnyepr.16 In Yunge yorn, Penek must learn to organize the shtiklekh un breklekh, ‘bits and pieces’, of life into a properly Marxist geshikhte, ‘history’ and ‘narrative’ in which the key term is ‘class’. Yunge yorn is not a novel like Philip Roth’s Counterlife, in which readers read the

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story of how the author and the characters rewrite the story. Nevertheless Yunge yorn stages the problem of its own writing, to the extent that Penek — a figure who represents Bergelson himself — and Penek’s notebooks are subject to extensive revision. When Penek tries to write in Hebrew, a gefil iz bay im, az nit er shraybt mit hebreyishe verter, nor hebreyishe verter shraybn mit im, ‘he had the feeling that he was not the one writing with the Hebrew words, but rather that the Hebrew words were writing with him’, using him as their instrument (118). The two processes — the rewriting of the self and the rewriting of recent history — are intertwined. Penek tears up his Hebrew notebooks because he decides that he must write in the simple language of such figures from his childhood as Yankl the coachman, a man who speaks Yiddish, not Hebrew. Penek has a heartfelt wish: ven me kon oykh zikh aleyn tseraysn un onheybn banays a nayem Penek! ‘If only one could also tear oneself up and begin afresh with a new Penek!’ (115). But he has to content himself with remaining as he is, and without his notebooks, he feels in gantsn farvildevet — a bashefenish on a nekhtn un on a morgn, ‘completely uncivilized — a creature with neither a yesterday nor a tomorrow’ (115). A preoccupation with the past is Yiddish literature’s greatest defect, Bergelson remarked in 1930, but to be without a record of the past — in this case, Penek without his notebooks — is to descend into a less than human state. For Bergelson, as for his child — and later, his adolescent — hero, the project of remaking the self involves overcoming his bourgeois past. In the first volume, the fact that Penek is disinherited permits him to see the reality, and hence the truth, of life in the back streets, and the hellish underbelly of the brewery that is one of the sources of his father’s wealth. In the second volume, Penek comes to see the truth preached by the iskravitses, the socialist democrats working under Lenin, and realizes that anti-Semitism is a by-product of class exploitation.17 As his views evolve, his writing changes; nevertheless, layers of the earlier version of Penek and of the earlier version of his writing remain in the text like so many archaeological deposits.18 This is not the smooth surface of socialist realism, in which each stage of development contains the seeds of the next in an unbroken narrative line. The commentary on the process of writing disrupts the reader’s experience of being transported back to the past in socialist-realist terms, a past which ought to have been heroic, filled with the dawning of class consciousness, and marked by the beginning of the class struggle.19 In Yunge yorn, by contrast, we read about these developments, but we also read about Penek’s attempts to describe them in narrative form. For example, Penek’s first try at describing the city results in an absurdly idyllic portrait of a bright day in the park, complete with a pond, a waterfall, and majestic swans (109). This excerpt from Penek’s notebook is a far cry from the dirt, noise, crime and social ferment that fill the pages of the novel. The clearest example of the process of rewriting and the subsequent layering of one account on top of another centres on the courtyard on Zhukovski Street, walled in on three sides by multi-storeyed tenement buildings containing a bagel bakery, a smithy, a laundry, and other workplaces. These buildings house the poorest and most disenfranchised workers including, among others, Magidovitsh; the cleaning woman Liuba, whose mistress sends her to the streets to make extra money as a prostitute; Lipe the wagon-driver; and the widower Meyer Lapidus, a gaiter-maker, who takes work

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home because he has no one with whom to leave his children. Illness, robbery, rape, and death are frequent occurrences here. In the same neighbourhood, criminals murder the corrupt policeman Novitski, and not far from here, the body of his daughter is found, with multiple stab wounds, in the basement of a Jew’s house, setting in motion a ritual murder charge and anti-Jewish unrest. It is in the courtyard on Zhukovski Street that the socialist democrats gather, and here that the development of Penek’s class consciousness takes a series of decisive turns. The Zhukovski courtyard is his Jewish people, Penek ultimately declares. He realizes that dos lebn in ‘hoyf’ oyf Zhukovski — oyserlekh tsebreklt un tserisn, iz tif in zikh fareynikt un gants, ‘life in the courtyard on Zhukovski, outwardly fragmentary and ripped apart, is unified and whole deep within’ (254). This discovery takes place near the middle of the novel, in Chapter 12, but it is not the final truth about the courtyard. Near the end of the novel, in Chapter 22, Penek tears up what he has written about Zhukovski: oyb inem ershtn teyl iz der ‘hoyf’ an oremer un shiltndiker, vet er inem tsveytn teyl zayn a shlogndiker un geveltikndiker — di shtot vet a tsiter ton, ven di mentshn funem ‘hoyf’ veln zikh a loz gebn in gas, ‘if, in the first part, the courtyard was poor and cursing its lot, in the second part it would be fighting and a force to be reckoned with — the city would shudder when people from the courtyard broke out into the street’ (476). This idealized picture of the courtyard, however, is a far cry from what readers opening the pages of Yunge yorn actually find. At the beginning of the novel, the courtyard is ongefilt mit shotns, ‘filled with shadows’, reeking with the smell of kerosene, wet laundry, and mit kaptsonisher dervorgnkayt, ‘with the choking stench of poverty’ (15–16). Bergelson describes Penek’s first encounter with the courtyard as follows: fun di optretn hot zikh gehert a krekhtsn fun mentshn, vos laydn oyf atsires oder af durkhfal. Vi a nekome in arumikn raykhn shtot-lebn, hobn dort fun di tirlekh gekukt afn yingl di fil pornografishe afshriftn, vos shendn dem protses fun mentshn-geburt. (16–17) [From the outhouses could be heard the groans of people suffering either from constipation or diarrhoea. As if to exact revenge from the surrounding wealthy life of the city, from the doors of the outhouses numerous pornographic sketches mocking the process of human birth stared out at the boy.]

This is not a picture of reality in its ‘revolutionary development’. This is a picture of reality in its carnivalesque development, with emphasis on the grotesque lower body, and without a trace of the dawn of class consciousness. The courtyard on Zhukovski, Bergelson writes, iz kimat aleyn a gantse shtot, ‘is itself practically a whole city’ (15). Its massive scale and the ideological message it bears make it a monument within the monument of the novel as a whole. It is a monument to the simple and good men, women, and children whom Penek adopts as his new Jewish people, as he says. It embodies the transformation from oppression to power, the ‘force to be reckoned with’, as Penek, durkhgedrungen mit nayer yontevdiker oyfgeregtkayt, ‘imbued with new festive exhilaration’ — the prescribed emotion of the 1930s was joy — will write many chapters later (476). The outhouses, however, with their smells and sounds and pornographic graffiti, disrupt the high seriousness of the place,

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dragging both Penek and readers of the novel down into the lower bodily stratum of defecation and the messiness of childbirth. Monuments, the Monumental, and Commemoration Yunge yorn ends with two contrasting rituals: a yizkor service for the Kishiniev victims and a May Day demonstration. This juxtaposition shows up the impotence of the traditional Jewish response to catastrophe by comparison with the efficacy of political action. For example, the congregants in the vast, high-ceilinged synagogue look like karlikes, ‘dwarves’. Penek, who, as the narrator reminds us, grew up in the world of traditional Jewish observance, feels profoundly alienated from the Jews gathered there, and demands to know: ver zaynen di mentshn? a sakh fun zey veysn, az mit zeyere tfiles do veln zey gornisht nit poyeln, ‘Who are these people? Many of them know that they will achieve nothing with their prayers here’ (532). The Torah scrolls, removed from the Ark for the service, are described as a simbol fun umbaholfnkayt, ‘a symbol of helplessness’. The attack on religion, however, is not the only thing that this juxtaposition of religious service and political demonstration reveals. The May Day demonstration, in which Penek participates as his inaugural political act, culminates in a memory. The last sentence of the novel reads: aza iz yene tsayt farbliben bay Penekn in zikorn: di ‘nahayke’ hot geshmisn un mentshn hobn dokh gezungen, ‘This is the way that time remained in Penek’s memory: the knout lashed out, yet people sang’ (539). The present moment, the May Day demonstration, has meaning and value only for the sake of the future, when it will be a memory. ‘Now’ is preserved as a picture for the future — a melodramatic, socialist-realist piece of kitsch that uses a form of verbal chiaroscuro to contrast the darkness of the tsarist whip with the bright hope of the communist song. The time structure of the novel’s final sentence reveals the dilemma of ‘always already/not yet’. Penek has the experience of marching in the demonstration, but somehow manages to miss its peak moment. It has meaning only when it is over, as if its chief actor, Penek, arrived on the scene too late to experience it himself. A parallel moment occurs earlier in the novel, when the typesetter Matosov dies while printing revolutionary proclamations. Matosov, like Penek at the demonstration, misses the meaning of his own life. Matosov’s colleague Yosl produces an instant verbal memorial just minutes after his death: aynkukndik zikh inem umgevalgertn kerper, hot er bloyz umklor gefilt, az er kukt oyf epes vikhtiks, akurat, vi Matosovn volt shoyn fun zayne oygn farshtelt a matseyve mit an oyfshrift: ‘do ligt a mentsh, vos mit zayn aropnidern arbetn aher in grob hot er zikh aropgeshribn funem diskont fun a tsayt an umvirdiker un batsaytns zikh arufgeshribn afn diskont fun a tsayt a kumendiker, a zoyberer un virdiker. (297) [Looking at this fallen body, he felt only dimly that he was looking at something important, as if Matosov were already shielded from his view by a gravestone inscribed with an epitaph: ‘Here lies a man who, by descending to work here in the pit, had paid his subscription in the account book of the present, unworthy time, and had inscribed himself in advance in the account book of the time to come, the pure, worthy future.]

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The gravestone with its commemorative inscription makes the individual invisible. Yosl feels as if he cannot see Matosov, even though his still warm body lies directly in front of him. What looks like progress — the leap into the future — only masks the accumulation of disaster. The imaginary gravestone shields the corpse from view, leaving only the problem of how to get rid of it. The inscription relies on an incoherent mixed metaphor of the capitalist instalment plan and the socialist bright future. Matosov paid for the remaining instalments on his account with his life, and in so doing leapt into the bright future ahead of time. Bergelson has Yosl produce a gloss on his imaginary gravestone inscription: un plutsling hot Yosl mitn gantsn hartsn banumen, ver Matosov iz geven — oyf azoyne-o farruft men zikh mitn vort ‘mentshlekhkayt’, ‘Suddenly Yosl understood with his whole heart who Matosov was — when you say the word “humanity” you mean those like him’ (297). Yosl’s epiphany erases Matosov the individual and replaces him with a generic, abstract value. He is simply a placeholder, a sign for that value. The problem of time, ref lected in the gravestone inscription and its commentary cited above, is endemic to monuments in general, and to Soviet monuments in particular. In his essay, ‘In the Shadow of Monuments’, Mikhail Yampolsky writes: The monument has an utterly unique function. It does not so much portray someone as it serves as a sort of vertical centering axis that spatially organizes the hierarchy of social signs. In monuments of the Soviet epoch [...] a monument is not so much meant to imitate one or another person as it is to express the idea of not being subject to time, of extrahuman temporality, of ahistoricity. Thus, the monument finds itself literally at the center of the totalitarian project, which, according to Hannah Arendt, is constructed as endless movement centered around an unattainable core.20

Yampolsky’s analysis of the monument and time takes us back to Bergelson’s speech of 1930, in which he compared the literature of the present to music played on a speeding train. According to Yampolsky, Stalinist culture is not about boarding the express train leading to the future, but rather about stopping time altogether. The monument marking perfection in history is really marking the end of history, or, as we have just seen, the end of the living individual, his death. The monument is death-dealing, and it hides what it does, as in the episode of Matosov. The penultimate scene of Baym Dnyepr is the yizkor service. Earlier I noted that Bergelson uses this juxtaposition to emphasize the futility of religious ritual by contrast with the efficacy of political action. There is, however, another way to look at this juxtaposition, which sets the traditional Jewish memorial service in a far more positive light. The structure of anticipatory memory eviscerates the present moment and, as the episode of Matosov shows, the Soviet monument to the bright future screens from view the corpses which it accumulates. The emotions of the congregation at the yizkor service, however, as distinct from what are presented as the exploitative machinations of the rabbis, provide a counterpoint to the bad memorializing of the monument, as may been seen from a close focus on the language employed to describe the congregants. As the prayers are recited, iz di shul ful gevorn mit a geroysh fun a vald, vos vet geshturemt mit shtarkn vint, ‘the synagogue was filled by a great noise, as if it were a forest disturbed by a stormy wind’ (533).

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The congregants grieve for those murdered in Kishiniev, and at the same time they remember their own particular sufferings: this one’s sick husband, that one’s crippled child — do oyf ot der velt fun umbashtrofter royberay un umrekht, ‘here in this world where extortion and injustice go unpunished’ (533). The world of injustice is the world in which the Jewish people live in the ‘now’ of the novel: restitution has not yet taken place; perfection is not yet achieved. There is no tricky time-travel in which the compensation of the bright future is purchased in advance on the instalment plan. Bergelson continues in the same vein: ale gedenken di groyse payn un dem umgeheyern elnt funem folk, tsu velkhn zey, di farzamlte do, gehern, ‘all remember the great anguish and immense desolation of the people to whom they, the ones gathered here, belong’ (534). Bergelson evokes the concept of a people or folk, a community, but this is no abstract, generic value for which individuals must die and then be erased from view and memory, as in the case of Matosov, who is a placeholder for ‘humanity’ generally. The language is specific: the people gathered there, in that place, remember the collective suffering of the nation to which they belong. Finally, unlike Matosov, whose corpse is shielded from view by his gravestone, the congregation sees far di oygn, ‘before their eyes’, not only the Kishiniev dead but also all those who have died from the time the pogroms first began. The yizkor service, impotent though it may be in the world of political action, accomplishes the act of memorializing without killing the dead all over again. The yizkor service memorializing the Kishiniev victims anchors the congregants — the Jewish people — in the ‘always already/not yet’ of ongoing reality. In 1930, as I noted earlier, Bergelson attacked Yiddish literature for its preoccupation with the past. In the second volume of Baym Dnyepr, however, Bergelson is himself preoccupied with the problem of how to write about the past: the process by which the lebns-konglomerat is written as the coherent (historical) geshikhte. Penek’s search for a subject matter, a language, and an autobiography all ref lect this central concern. The story of Yunge yorn is the story of how Yunge yorn came to be written, but the story never quite catches up with its own bright future. It remains situated between the destructions of the past and the promise of justice that is yet to be fulfilled. Bergelson’s writings after the Holocaust, such as ‘An eydes’ (A witness) and ‘Der skulptor’ (The sculptor), confront the problem of catastrophe and deferred redemption in even more powerful terms than his earlier work. One of his last writings to address this theme was his 1945 play, Prints Ruveni (Prince Reuveni). Set in the sixteenth century, the play’s title character, David Reuveni, the false messiah, seeks an alliance with the Pope against the Turks. He claims to have an army of 300,000 men and a country named Khaybar. What is important, however, for our purposes, is Reuveni’s attitude towards the moment in which he finds himself, the ‘now’ of his immediate world. Reuveni characterizes his own time as one of oyflebung, ‘renewal’, but wonders whether the possibility for renewal will extend to his people, the Jews: ikh shtoyn un freg bay ot der tsayt der groyser: tsi den oykh du vest alemen bashenken un nor mayn yidish fok aleyn farteyln?

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HARRIET MURAV [I stand amazed before this great time and ask: Will you bestow your gifts on all and everyone Depriving only my Jewish people of their share?]21

Reuveni’s question ref lects Bergelson’s chief concern about the relationship between Jews and their time. No matter where we look, no matter in what era, Jews find themselves missing the gift of renewal — and not because they are backward or stubborn. Their perspective as a people resembles that of the failed assassin of ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ for whom ‘every clock is a grave, the anniversary of a death’. This alternate reading of time’s forward motion, this other perspective on progress, is best expressed in Walter Benjamin’s famous ninth thesis on the philosophy of history: This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.22

The ‘pile of debris’ is what Soviet monumentalism would like to obscure and what Bergelson, even in his most monumental Soviet style novel, refuses to forget. Notes to Chapter 11 1. David Bergelson, ‘Problemen fun der yidisher literatur’, Literarishe bleter, 24 (1930), 438. 2. All references to, and Yiddish quotations from, Baym Dnyepr are taken from David Bergelson, Baym Dnyepr (Moscow: Der emes, 1940). Subsequent page numbers cited in parentheses through the text refer to this edition. The Yiddish text is romanized according to the YIVO system. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 3. For a discussion of this work, see Mikhail Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 4. Bergelson, Geklibene verk, V (Vilna: Kletskin, 1930), p. 45. 5. Bergelson, Geklibene verk, V, p. 182. 6. Evvgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 370. 7. For a discussion of the plans for the work, see Nakhmen Mayzel, ‘Dovid Bergelson tsugast in Varshe’, Literarishe bleter, 22 (1930), 402. 8. Nakhmen Mayzel, ‘Dovid Bergelson tsugast in Varshe’, 402. 9. David Bergelson, Baym Dnyepr (Moscow: Der emes, 1940). Chapters from this work were published earlier in both Yiddish and Russian. The work as a whole went through multiple editions in Yiddish as well as in Russian translation. See Susan Slotnick, The Novel Form in the Works of David Bergelson (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1978), p. 455; and Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), p. 143. 10. See Slotnick, The Novel Form, p. 341. 11. For a discussion of the uses of the past in early Soviet culture, see Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), pp. 148–55. 12. The article, devoted to a discussion of collectivization, was published in Pravda on 2 March 1930.

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See Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit Books, 1986), p. 240. 13. All citations from the Bible are from The Revised Standard Version, ed. by Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 14. Michael Stanislawski, Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), p. 31. 15. Régine Robin argues that socialist-realist novels of the early period show the complexities of the novel generally. She discusses their carnivalesque features and the pleasures of the text as examples of a ‘textual resistance to f lattening’. Regine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 283–90. 16. See Estraikh, In Harness, p. 140. 17. The name of the group derives from the title of Lenin’s newspaper, Iskra (The Spark). 18. Allusions to Bergelson’s own earlier works, specifically the Berlin stories ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ (Among refugees) and ‘Far tsvelf toyznt dolar fast er 40 teg’ (For 12,000 bucks), appear in the text. For English translations of these stories, see Bergelson, The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights, 2005), pp. 21–44, 57–64. 19. In an article published in 1933 in the Kharkov Yiddish journal Di royte velt (The Red World), the proletarian critic Khaym Gildin declared that Soviet literature was obliged to depict the ‘heroics of the historical class struggle’; see Gildin, ‘Tsayt-fragn’, Di royte velt, 1.3 (1933), 5. 20. Mikhail Yampolsky, ‘In the Shadow of Monuments: Notes on Iconoclasm and Time’, trans. by John Kachur, in Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia, ed. by Nancy Condee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 98. 21. David Bergelson, Prints Ruveni (New York: YKUF, 1946), p. 103. 22. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 258.

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From Mourning to Vengeance: Bergelson’s Holocaust Journalism (1941–1945) David Shneer — Lo amut ki ekhyeh va’asaper ma’asei Yah: yasor yisrani Yah ve’lamavet lo netanani. — Ikh vel nit shtarbn nor lebn, un dertseyln di maysim fun Yah. Shtrofn geshtroft hot mikh Yah, ober tsum toyt hot er mikh nit gegebn. — I will not die, but will live to tell the great deeds of God. The Lord hath chastened me sore, but He hath not brought me to death. PSALM 118. 17

In the Soviet Union, the story of the Nazi war against the Jews was subsumed into the overarching narrative of total war between the Soviet Union and its fascist enemy, a conf lict that took between 20 and 30 million Soviet lives, 2 million of them Jews. Many of those who told the Soviet story of war were themselves Jewish. With Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) and Vasily Grossman (1905–64) writing for the important military newspaper Krasnaya zvezda (Red Star), Jewish photojournalists visually recording the battles, and many Jews serving on the editorial staff of most major newspapers, Soviet Jews were the ones charged with telling the war to all their countrymen. At the same time, this was a Soviet war recounted in all the diverse languages of the Soviet Union — in Ukrainian, Georgian, Uzbek, and Yiddish, the official language that identified Soviet Jews as a nationality. Who would be called on to tell the story of the war in Yiddish? That task fell to many important twentieth-century Yiddish writers, among them David Bergelson. Bergelson was not a journalist. He had never learned to write quickly and simply to ‘tell the facts’, but in truth, most Soviet journalists were not trained simply to ‘tell the facts’. Moreover, since Bergelson had made his reputation as a writer of impressionist fiction, he had a keen eye for describing, or at least envisioning, scenes, a talent that served him well as a wartime essayist. In the four years he spent writing in Yiddish about this very Jewish and very Soviet war, Bergelson crafted a narrative that placed the Jewish story at the centre of his Yiddish readership’s narrative universe, while also situating it within the universal tragedy unfolding around him. His was a story of victimhood and revenge and, ultimately, a story of the loss and destruction that Bergelson personally lived through.

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Jewish Heroes and Jewish Victims On 6 July 1944, as Red Army soldiers crossed the Soviet border and moved into western Poland, Bergelson published an interview with General Yakov Kreyzer (1905–69), a Hero of the Soviet Union and the victor of the battle of Sevastopol who, by 1944, was easily one of the most popular and visible of Soviet Jews. In addition to his military position, Kreyzer was also an honorary member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee ( JAFC), the organization established in 1941, along with four other outreach organizations, to foster international support for the Soviet war.1 Passing through Moscow in the summer of 1944, Kreyzer attended one of the JAFC’s meetings, where Bergelson met him; he described their encounter on page two of the JAFC’s newspaper, Eynikayt (Unity), the only remaining national Yiddish newspaper in the country.2 To judge from the tone of his account, Bergelson seemed shy, almost intimidated, by being in the presence of probably the greatest living Soviet Jewish hero. Bergelson claims that by 1944, as the Soviet Union extended its western front and the Allies opened a second front in France, the war had turned from one of survival and defence to one of revenge: zey veysn, az er iz a yid, un az akhuts dem groysn khezhbm, vos er hot mit zey far zayn sovetish land, hot er mit zey a khezhbm far zayn folk. [They [the Germans] know that he [Kreyzer] is a Jew, and that aside from the great need to get even with them for what they did to his Soviet country, he also has to get even with them for his people.]3

Although by 1944 revenge was a common trope in the Soviet press, such an article laying claim to the need for a specifically Jewish revenge would never have appeared in the Russian-language press, which was in general reluctant to highlight the particular suffering of any ethnic group.4 One month later, on 17 August 1944, Bergelson presented the other side of this very Jewish war — not one of Jewish pride, but of Jewish victimization and German criminality on a scale unprecedented in history. In an essay entitled ‘Dos hobn geton daytshn!’ (The Germans did this!), Bergelson described Majdanek, the first extermination camp liberated by the Allies on 25 July 1944. This was the only article about the Nazi extermination camps to appear in the Soviet Yiddish press, and it was one of the most powerful pieces Bergelson wrote during the war. Together, these two pieces show how, out of the universal Soviet experience, Bergelson crafted a particularly Jewish war in Yiddish. Bergelson as War Essayist and Soviet Jewish Propagandist During the war, Bergelson was called on to become more than a novelist; he was asked to become a public Jewish cultural figure and a leader of Soviet Jewry. From his home in Moscow he began writing essays about the conf lict as soon as it broke out on 22 June 1941, but when the German army reached the city’s outskirts, in October 1941, he was evacuated to Kuibyshev (now Samara), 500 miles from

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the capital.5 There he became one of the editors of Eynikayt when it first started appearing. As the most famous Yiddish writer in the Soviet Union, Bergelson took on the responsibility of crafting an account of the war that trod carefully between several emerging narratives. On the one hand he was a Soviet writer, called upon to denounce the violent invasion of his country. On the other hand he was a highly visible Jew in this most Jewish of wars. He set out to synthesize the universal and the particular, the Soviet and the Jewish. He began by publishing essayistic accounts of the invasion both in the United States, through the Organization for Jewish Colonization in Russia (YKOR), and in the Soviet Union with the publishing house Der emes. His 1941 YKOR pamphlet, Yidn un di milkhome mit Hitlern ( Jews and the war with Hitler) opens in the style of a short story: In der nakht fun 21tn oyfn 22tn yuni [...] es iz geven a regndike nakht. A varemer nepl hot ayngehilt di mayrev-grenetsn fun Sovet-rusland. Oyf ale arumike noente un vayte shtrekes hot gehersht a groyzame un nit-geveznshvere shilkayt, akurat vi in groys dervartenish voltn ale mentshn un ale bashefenishn zeyer lang un on oyf her zikh ayngehert alts tifer un tifer in der antshvign-gevorerner nakht. (3) [The night of 21 and 22 June [...] was a rainy night. A warm fog enshrouded the western borders of Soviet Russia. In all surrounding directions, near and far, a menacing and unprecedentedly heavy silence reigned, as if, in great suspense, all mankind and all creation were listening attentively long and unceasingly, deeper and deeper into the night that had fallen silent.]6

Similarly heightened language depicts the way the German army invades the western frontier, driving Jews from the places they had occupied for centuries, and is followed by Bergelson’s brief history of the Jewish diaspora, from Alexandrian Egypt and Italy to the tsarist empire where, Bergelson argues, Jews were still in exile. Not until the establishment of the Soviet Union were Jews truly set free. His rhetoric describing the move from exile to home echoes established Zionist tropes of the move from old to new, even to Zionist denigration of the Jew’s body that grew weak in exile: aza iz geven [...] in Rusland inem tsars tsaytn [...] [der yid] hot gedart fun tog tsu tog, di brust iz bay im ayngefaln, di pleytse hot zikh ayngehoykert, di musklen hobn zikh opgeshvakht, ‘that’s how it was [...] in Russia in tsarist times [...] Over time the Jew wasted away, his chest sunk in, his shoulders hunched over, and his muscles grew weak’. He even talks about persistent illness among Jewish children. Pointing up the contrast between the old and new Jew was a feature common to ideologically driven Jewish modernizing literature of the time, whether socialist or Zionist. With this essay, Bergelson was not engaged in a polemic with Zionism per se, but was instead showing how the Soviet Union built and gave a home to the new Jew: In der yidisher avtonomer gegnt Birebidzhan, in Krim, in gegntn fun Ukraine blien fil hunderter yidishe farmen, ‘In the Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan, in the Crimea, and in areas of Ukraine, hundreds of Jewish farms are blooming’. For an American Jewish socialist readership, this foray into Jewish history, with its telos not in Palestinian Zionism, but in Soviet socialism, stirred up support for a war that the United States had still not entered. With Nazism threatening this greatest

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of social experiments in history, Bergelson called on Jewish mothers to send their Jewish sons to the front and, if they themselves were young enough, urged these mothers to volunteer as well (10). Further to inspire his readers, Bergelson lists and celebrates Jewish military heroes. Despite rumours that Jews f led the front and were shirkers, Bergelson shows them as important Red Army commanders, with Yakov Kreyzer as the chief example: fargest nit, az in di reyen fun der rumfuler royter armey shlogn zikh ayere layblekhe brider un kroyvim, vi di leybn, mitn grestn mesires-nefesh, vi es past far di heldishe zin fun undzer groysn libn foterland un far di heldishe zin fun undzer yidish folk. (16) [Do not forget that in the ranks of the glorious Red Army your f lesh and blood brothers and relatives are fighting like lions, with the greatest devotion, as befits the heroic sons of our great beloved fatherland and the heroic sons of our Jewish people.]

Virtually simultaneously, Bergelson published a pamphlet entitled Yidn un di foterlendishe milkhome ( Jews and the war for the Fatherland) in Moscow where, amazingly enough given the harsh conditions now prevailing, the sole Yiddish publishing house Der emes, which also produced Eynikayt, continued operating. In the first three months of the war, even as bombs were falling on Moscow, the publisher put out thirty-five books and pamphlets.7 Addressing a Soviet Jewish audience who knew the paradise they lived in, Bergelson urges his readers to stop complaining about wartime hardships and take up arms against the greatest enemy the Jews have ever faced. Having personally experienced Hitler’s rise to power from living in Berlin, he outlines Nazi ideology to his readers, many of whom were ignorant of it because the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop pact had virtually cut off any discussion of Hitler and Germany. He pays particular attention to Hitler’s racial ideology. If you think the whole concept of racial superiority is evil, he tells his readers, milyon mol erger bageyen zikh di fashistn mit yidn, ‘the fascist treatment of Jews is a million times worse’ (5) — worse than the Inquisition and worse than the tsarist-era pogroms: dem mentshn-fantazye iz tsu kleyn oyf oystsumoln zikh di akhzorishe maysim, vos zey trakhtn oys. Homen iz geven a hunt akegn zey, ‘The human imagination is too limited to paint a picture of the atrocities they have thought up. Haman was nothing but a dog compared to them’ (6). Returning to that theme of Jewish hardship in exile and Jewish salvation in the Soviet Union which he developed for his American audience, Bergelson relies frequently on the words of Stalin to make his point for his Soviet readers: organizirn an umrakhmonesdikn kamf kegn ale, vos dezorganizirn dem til, kegn dezertirn, kegn panikmakher, kegn di, vos farshpreytn klangen, mir darfn farnikhtn di shpionen, diversantn, dem soynim parashutistn [...]. S’ara derhoybener nomen — Stalin! — er vet rateven di velt! (19) [We must organize a merciless fight against everyone who destabilizes the home front, against deserters, against panic-mongers, against those who spread rumours. We must exterminate the spies, saboteurs, and the enemies’ infiltrators [...] It’s such a sublime name — Stalin! — he will save the world!]8

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Regardless of whether his readers were in New York or Moscow, in the first year of the Soviet–German war, Bergelson wrote with conviction about the Jewishness of this war, placing what was happening in Europe — what he repeatedly called a khurbm, the Yiddish word that would eventually encompass the Holocaust — in the context of the long history of anti-Jewish persecutions. In a 1941 article entitled ‘Dos gehoybene vet zign’ (The exalted will be victorious), he compared the Nazi onslaught on European Jewry — significantly not the attack on the Soviet Union — to the viciousness of the Inquisition, suggesting that Hitler is worse than anything known in the medieval period. He even uses cannibalistic imagery to describe fascism, a trope he repeatedly deployed throughout the first part of the Soviet war with Germany.9 On 24 August 1941, leading Jewish cultural figures, including such famous writers as Ehrenburg and Bergelson, participated in a major rally at Gorky Park in the centre of Moscow to call on the Jews of the world to fight fascism. Like Ehrenburg’s,10 Bergelson’s speech, ‘Lo amut ki ekhye’ (I will not die but will live),11 was a call to Yiddish-speaking Soviet and American Jewry. Opening with an echo of the famous Marxist slogan, ‘Dear brothers and sisters, Jews of the whole world’, Bergelson quickly formulates the tension between a universal ideological war that targeted all ‘peace-loving’ people of the world, and a very particular onslaught on world Jewry: aza iz oykh zayn plan oystsurotn ale felker, un in der ershter rey — dos yidishe folk, ‘It is also [Hitler’s] plan to wipe out all peoples, and in the first place, the Jewish people’. This grammatical phrase, ale felker un in der ershter rey — dos yidishe folk, ‘all peoples and in the first place [or ‘in particular’] the Jewish people’, would become the mantra of Bergelson’s wartime Soviet writing. It was his way of synthesizing the universal with the particular. Like Ehrenburg, Bergelson expressed Jewish pride throughout his speech, celebrating the ‘great thinkers’ whom the Jewish people had given to humanity, among them Spinoza, Heine, Mendelssohn, Brandeis, and Einstein, a who’s who of acculturated, assimilated, and secular Jews, many of whom were German-born. Perhaps this was a direct reminder that the true German legacy lay not in crude German nationalism but in German-Jewish universalism.12 The question of Jewish identity profoundly interested Bergelson, especially since Hitler and Nazism had so radically altered the relationship between Jewish self-identity and the way others ascribed identity to Jews. He reminded his listeners that in this new world order, Jewish secular universalism was not enough: der gazlen Hitler makht derbay nit keyn untersheyd tsvishn arbeter un fabrikantn, tsvishn fraydenkendike un frume, tsvishn yidn asimilirte un nit-asimilirte, ‘the bandit Hitler makes no distinction between workers and manufacturers, between freethinkers and religious people, between assimilated and unassimilated Jews’. This call was specifically intended to create an international sense of unity between American and Soviet Jews, since the destruction of Jews worldwide was Hitler’s aim. The title of Bergelson’s speech, ‘I will not die but will live’, is drawn from Psalm 118, part of the traditional Hallel service which pays homage to God’s power in the world and is recited on major Jewish holy days. After the Holocaust, this psalm was commonly recited to commemorate its victims and celebrate both its survivors and the Jewish people as a whole. The theologian and philosopher Emil Fackenheim

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even suggested that Psalm 118 should be recited on Israel’s Day of Independence.13 For Bergelson, living through the Holocaust as it unfolded, it was a bold reminder to his Yiddish-speaking, psalm-reading audience that this was, in the words of Lucy Dawidowicz, a war against the Jews, which is why he deliberately evoked the verse first in its original Hebrew, and then in its translation into the vernacular. Bergelson pressed home his message by turning his worldwide rallying call to live into a play entitled Kh’vel lebn (I will live), published originally in 1941.14 Set in a contemporary Russian-Jewish town where the inhabitants experience the atrocities of the war, one of the play’s characters, Professor Kornblit, a GermanJewish refugee, decides to commit suicide in the face of imminent Nazi destruction. Responding to this bleak reaction to catastrophe, Avraham-Ber, the ‘old Jew’ of the play, responds: ‘We, the ordinary Jews, have seen many dead people in our lives [...] Yet the more they multiply, the greater our desire to live [...] they did not commit suicide [...] they did not stop proclaiming, “I shall not die but live”.’15 Writing the Holocaust Narrative By 1942, the Soviet war effort was looking bleak and for Bergelson the Jewish catastrophe was gathering momentum with no end in sight. Eynikayt, which had been given permission to start appearing in June of that year, became the media outlet that created the Soviet Jewish war narrative in Yiddish.16 Bergelson’s first essay for this newspaper directly engaged with the khurbm, the Jewish catastrophe. In ‘Zol di velt zayn an eydes’ (May the world be a witness), Bergelson envisioned the kind of revenge Jews would seek once the tide of the war turned. He imagines Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels pacing in his room in fear.17 At a time when the Nazi death machinery was in full operation, Bergelson visualizes a world after the Soviet victory, when Jews will be able to rewrite history once again: Zol-zhe di velt zayn an eydes, az azoy vet zayn. Dos yidishe folk hot amol geshafn a bukh, vos iz in farloyf fun toyznter yorn geleyent gevorn mer vi ale andere bikher. Dos zelbe yidishe folk vet gefinen in zikh genug kraft tsu shafn a bukh, vos vet in farloyf fun toyznter yorn nit oyf hern tsu dertseyln der velt vegn di fashistishe akhzoryesn umetum, in yeder vinkele fun yene lender, vuhin der natsistisher shtivl iz farkrokhn. [May the world bear witness that the following will take place. The Jewish people once created a book that, for thousands of years, has been read more often than any other book. That same Jewish people will find within itself sufficient strength to create a book that, for thousands of years, will tell the world about fascist atrocities everywhere, in every corner of every country where the Nazi jackboots have trampled.]

He calls for revenge by bearing permanent witness to Nazi atrocities through writing. The editors of Eynikayt illustrated Bergelson’s angry call for revenge and textual memory by publishing a photograph of an impoverished, hungry man in the Warsaw ghetto, the only mention or visualization of Jewish weakness in the entire article. This call for vengeance was echoed by many other Soviet — usually Jewish — writers from 1942 through 1944. Ehrenburg, for example, was famous for the

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bloodthirsty columns he published in Krasnaya zvezda that, as lore has it, Red Army soldiers would keep in their pockets in order to intensify their anger at the front.18 But Ehrenburg’s Russian-language call was very clearly about Red Army revenge against fascism. Bergelson could speak about Jewish national revenge, about Jewish history, and about the Jewish tradition of bearing witness. Some things could better — or more easily — be said in Yiddish. By late 1942, the nadir of the Soviet counter-offensive, he turned from demands for revenge to the articulation of deep depression with the state of affairs. In a new series of articles, he began writing the story of the Holocaust, of mass Jewish loss and the need to name the perpetrators. In a piece dated 5 September 1942 entitled ‘Gedenkt’ (Remember), Bergelson began introducing Holocaust narratives into the general storyline of the war. This two-column article told the story of the city of Vitebsk, in Byelorussia. It is a shocking story of mass murder.19 He claims that of the 100,000 Jews in pre-war Vitebsk, the Red Army successfully evacuated 78,000 of them, leaving 22,000 to face the fury of the ‘Hitlerite beast’. Here his population statistics were somewhat inf lated: according to the 1937 Soviet census, there were 77,000 Jews in the entire Vitebsk province.20 I mention this not to show that Bergelson got his facts wrong. No one ever claimed that he was a hard-core journalist or that Eynikayt had a team of fact checkers correcting reports that were filed. Rather it shows instead Bergelson’s vision of what happened. So many Jews were saved, but still there were so many Jews killed. In this mass destruction, one of the first to occur after the German invasion, Bergelson discovered a central means of representing the Holocaust to his reading public. A ghetto had been established in Vitebsk immediately after the German occupation in July 1941 and this was ‘liquidated’ on 8 October 1941.21 According to Bergelson, ‘by 12 October 1941, not more than eleven people were left alive, mostly medical workers, and of those, four managed to escape with help from partisans’. It must have been difficult for Bergelson to detect heroism in September 1942, with the German army on the banks of the Volga at Stalingrad, Leningrad under continued siege, and nearly all of Ukraine and Byelorussia under occupation. In celebrating the evacuation of three quarters of Vitebsk Jewry and reminding his readers that partisans were active in the area, Bergelson did his best. Yet despite this Soviet optimism, the Holocaust overwhelms the heroism. Bergelson interviews two of the Vitebsk survivors, Esther Sverdlov and Khaye Polman, both medical professionals, who related to him the megiles Vitebsk, the story of Vitebsk. His description is grim: Beyde — hoyt un beyn. Zeyere bakn un shterns, farshvartst nit fun zun, hobn lang shoyn zikh opgevoynt fun oyskneytshn a shmeykhl. Zeyere kerpers hobn zikh tsugevoynt tsu zitsn gants lang on a shum bavegung — mistome derfar, vos yeder iberiker rir zeyerer hot gekont tsutsien tsu zikh dos oyg fun a fashist, un dos fashistishe oyg shtralt oys fun zikh toyt. [...] Ester Sverdlov and Khaye Polman hobn oysgehaltn hunger, kelt, shrek un payn — payn on a breg un on a sof — un zaynen tsu yeder tsayt geven greyt tsu bagegenen durkh di vildste laydn dem toyt, vos kon ale rege on a klap in tir tsu zey araynkumen. [Both are skin and bone. Their cheeks and brows, darkened but not by the sun, have long grown unaccustomed to squeezing out a smile. Their bodies have

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grown used to sitting for long periods of time without the slightest movement — perhaps because the slightest superf luous movement on their part might have caught the eye of a fascist, and death f lashes from a fascist eye. [...] Esther Sverdlov and Khaye Polman endured hunger, cold, fear, and pain — pain without limit and without end — and they were ready at any moment to encounter, through the most extreme forms of suffering, death that could come sweeping down on them without warning.]

Bergelson describes the kind of work each of them did in the service of the Germans and reminds his readers that although these women were nearly worked to death, they still had eyes and ears that could bear witness to Nazi atrocities. He describes ‘German tourists’, usually German soldiers, who would roam through the empty streets laughing and yelling in German. Sof yuni hot in Vitebsk zikh ongehoybn der same brenendiker ‘turistn sezon’. Zey kumen arop spetsiel zen, vi azoy me tseshist groyse partyes mentshn [...]. Ale Vitebsker yidn zaynen shoyn geven fartribn afn rekhtn breg fun der Dvine [...] [The ‘high tourist season’ began at the end of June. They come especially to see the shooting of huge masses of people [...]. All of Vitebsk Jewry had been driven to the right bank of the Dvina [...].]

He then moves the story forward and describes the October liquidation of the ghetto: In farloyf fun fir teg — funem 8tn bizn 12tn oktober 1941 — hot eyn [...] shtrof-komisye gemakht a sof [...] fun geblibene Vitebsker yidn. Di [...] fashistishe turistn [...] zeyere eygene oygn hobn zey gezen [...] eynmol zaynen umgekumen [...] yidn. Vos iz vert aza oygn? [...] fun di farvundete un di kinder, vos vern lebedikerheyt geshlaydert ineynem mit di toyte in ‘Tulaver roy.’ Vos iz vert aza oyer?22 [In the course of four days, from 8 to 12 October 1941, the punishment task force brought an end to the remaining Vitebsk Jews. The [...] fascist tourists [who had stayed behind] [...] saw the shooting of the [remaining] Jews with their own eyes. What becomes of such eyes? [...] And they heard the cries of the wounded and the screams of children who were thrown alive, along with corpses, into the Tulav ravine. What becomes of such ears?]

He calls on ‘Jews from all countries’ to remember what kind of eyes, ears, and hands threw living children and elderly people into the ravine that lay on the outskirts of Vitebsk.23 The essay’s title, ‘Gedenkt’, is a command to the reader, one of the earliest demands for Holocaust memory in the Soviet, and indeed in the global, press. It is shocking to recognize that as early as the autumn of 1942 — with Europe occupied, Jews driven to extermination camps, and ghettos liquidated — Bergelson is already talking about memory. But unlike what would later come to be called ‘Holocaust memory’, or remembering the Jewish dead, Bergelson’s call is to remember the perpetrators, those who f lung living children into a ravine. This is angry memory, retributive not ref lective. And this kind of memory made sense in the autumn of 1942, especially in a newspaper that potentially reached people in New York, London, and elsewhere.

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But Bergelson did not only write about loss. He also began developing a narrative of Jewish pride, vengeance, and heroism. On 7 November 1942, for the twentyfifth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, he published a short story entitled ‘Der yunger sovetisher yid’ (The young Soviet Jew), which contrasts a Jew from the ‘old world’ with one from the new. He opens his tale with a quotation from a recent edition of the Communist Party’s central newspaper, Pravda (Truth): Dray komunistn — leytenant Shoykhet, serzhant Tkatshenko un der roytarmeyer Tshernetsov — hobn oyfn Stalingrader front zikh gelozt in shlakht kegn 85 hiterlistn un hobn zey bazigt. [...] [On the Stalingrad front, three communists — Lieutenant Shoykhet, Sergeant Tkachenko, and a Red Army soldier Chernetsov — engaged in battle and defeated 85 Hitlerites. [...]]

The narrator invites his Yiddish readers to reminisce with him: ver fun undz gedenkt nit fun di kinder-yorn in der heym a yidn mit der familye-nomen shoykhet? ‘Who of us from our youth in our home towns does not remember a Jew with the surname Shoykhet?’ He himself remembers a Shoykhet, one Moyshe-Leyb, who chopped wood for a living, not meat, which his name shoykhet (ritual slaughterer) might suggest. He was a heyser yid, a devout Jew, ‘with beard and peyes (sidelocks), who prayed fervently and petitioned God on anyone’s behalf ’ who went off into the forests of Byelorussia and came home only for the holy days. The townspeople said that the real Jew Moyshe-Leyb had gone off and become a real Russian but, according to the narrator, dos iz, farshteyt men, geven a hipsh bisl ibergezaltst. Moyshe-Leyb iz geblibn Moyshe-Leyb, ‘obviously this description was considerably exaggerated. Moyshe-Leyb was still Moyshe-Leyb’.24 Instead, Bergelson goes on to discuss what it meant to go from being an old Jew to a new one: zayn gang iz gevorn mer fest, di bavegung — ruiker, zayn kol — mer brustik. Er hot baym reydn veyniker gemakht mit di hent, gehaltn di brust un di akslen mer oysgeglaykht, getrogn dem yidishn kashket on a zayt un di bord — breyt tsekemt. [...] [His gait was more assured, his movements calmer, his voice deeper. When speaking, he gesticulated less with his hands, he put his shoulders back and chest out, wore his Jewish cap cocked to one side, and his beard — carefully groomed. [...]]

Moyshe-Leyb and Pravda’s hero may have shared common familial roots as ritual slaughterers, but zey zaynen dokh vayt eyner funem andern, zayer vayt. Moyshe-Leyb Shoykhet hot getrogn af zayne pleytses dem ‘tkhum’ shtendik [...] der komunist leytenant Shoykhet hot keynmol in zayne oygn dem ‘tkhum’ nit ongekukt. [they were sundered from one another, greatly sundered. Moyshe-Leyb carried the Pale of Settlement on his shoulders all the time [...] the communist Lieutenant Shoykhet had never in his life laid eyes on the Pale.]

Bergelson defines a deep generation gap between those who were born and raised in the Soviet Union and those, like himself, who will always carry the remnants of their diasporic, shtetl past with them. In other words, ‘the communist youth

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Shoykhet will never have to dream of freedom.’ He was born into it. Bergelson then paints two contrasting portraits of these two different Jewish youths. The first would have gone to kheyder, had limited job options, been drafted into the tsar’s army. The second would have been an equal member of the Communist Youth and would have gone on to pursue any career he wanted — working on a collective farm, a factory, or even qualifying as a professional. This description of both the physical and mental metamorphosis of the new Soviet Jew is ironically reminiscent of stories of the same era that celebrated a new Zionist Jewish youth, equally untainted by the past. Then Bergelson brings the story back to the war — how it is possible, twenty-five years after the October Revolution, to have a formerly despised Jew fighting on the front lines side by side with a Ukrainian and a Russian, each of whom is fighting for the Soviet Union. Idealistically, he suggests that both the new and the old might co-exist in Comrade Shoykhet: punkt vi inem fayer un inem mesires-nefesh, mit velkher er nemt fun di hitleristn nekome far zayn foterland un far zayn yidish folk, iz faran epes grintlekh-geyarshnt funem heysn yid Moyshe-Leyb Shoykhet [...]. [ Just as in the fervour and self-sacrifice with which he wreaks revenge on the Hitlerites for his fatherland and for his Jewish people, there is something fundamental that he has inherited from the fervent Jew, Moyshe Leyb Shoykhet [...].]

The entire piece centres on the tension between old and new, between tradition and innovation, between the Jew as different and the Jew as one of many Soviet peoples. Bergelson does not elide this tension. Instead he argues that this tension is what defines the Soviet Jew as he fights this Soviet–Jewish war. The narrative’s opening address, ‘Hey reader, don’t you remember that super-Jew Moyshe Leyb Shoykhet who now shoots fascists?’, suggests a Jewish intimacy expressed openly in Yiddish that lies beneath the seemingly universal Pravda headline. Bergelson’s Jewish readers know that like the Soviet hero Shoykhet, all Soviet Jews have a little bit of Moyshe-Leyb in them. The story makes no mention of the Holocaust. So distressing a topic would be inappropriate on such an important day of national celebration as the silver jubilee of the Bolshevik revolution. Instead Bergelson chooses to highlight what the Soviet Union gave the Jews — human freedom and physical health. In return the Jews fight wholeheartedly with their compatriots for a shared motherland. Nevertheless, one curious fact is thrown up by the date of this story’s publication. We can never know whether this was intentional or not, but Bergelson’s Holocaust articles all appeared in September during the Jewish High Holy Days — ‘Gedenkt’ itself appeared on the Sabbath before Rosh ha-Shanah, while the narrative celebration of the new Soviet Jew appeared on the communist holiday of 7 November. It would seem that Bergelson provided his Yiddish readership with different Jewish narratives for different Jewish occasions, expressing different aspects of their Soviet Jewish identities.

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Ambivalent Liberation From January 1943 through late 1944, as the course of the war turned dramatically, so too did Bergelson’s writing. With the defeat of the German army at Stalingrad on 2 February 1943 and the Germans’ rapid retreat, the Soviet Jewish story began to look more optimistic and the picture painted of the enemy became even more graphic and vicious. Bergelson demonized the German enemy, viewing him as evil, inhuman, and barbaric, even as he engages in everyday human activities. In one sentence Bergelson calls him a cannibal, and in the next, mentions that he sends gifts to his wife and children back home. In his January 1943 essay ‘Dos iz er!’ (That’s him!), he portrays the German Everyman, captured by the Red Army at Stalingrad. This one, Bergelson remarks, is called Helmut, though he could answer just as readily to such names as Erich, Hans, or Friedrich. What distinguishes him is the fact that, carefully packed among his belongings and neatly gift-wrapped, is a piece of soap: oyfn ort fun an etiket iz [...] geven tsugeklept an oyfshrift mit tsikhtike gotishe bukhshtabn: ‘yidishe zeyf’, ‘in place of a label [...] was pasted an inscription in neat Gothic letters: “Jewish soap” ’. In two words, banality is transformed into horror. Nazi ideology perverts normal human behaviour into bestiality: Bazunders shvakh iz bay Helmutn der zikorn. Gedenken gedenkt er bloyz yene zakhn, vos brengen im perzenlekh nutsn oder shodn. Ref lektorish, vi a hunt, gedenkt er, vi azoy es zeen oys di erter, vu er hot fil gefresn, fil geshikert un fil genoyfet, un oykh di erter, vu er hot fil aynvoyner gekoylet. [...] Im iz lemoshl zeyer shver tsu dermonen zikh, vi azoy heyst dos ort in Poyln, fun vanen er hot mit zikh gebrakht dos ‘yidishe shtikl zeyf ’. [...] bay Helmutn fregt men, vu hot er genumen dos shtikl zeyf. Helmut entfert kalt ‘Dort.’ ‘Af a zeyf-fabrik?’ ‘Ober natirlekh.’ Fun Helmutn vil men, er zol dertseyln genoy vegn di protsesn dort af der ‘fabrik’, vuhin me brengt di kerpers fun getoyte yidn un me makht zey iber af zeyf. Nor vegn ot di ‘protsesn’ veyst Helmut gornisht vos tsu zogn. Zey interesirn im nit. Im hot bloyz interesirn tsu bakumen eyns fun di same ershte yidishe shtiklekh zeyf un es, vi an antikl, opshikn zayn Ilzen tsu ir geburtstog un ir mit dem, vi er aleyn iz zikh moyde, ‘farshafn shpas’. [Helmut’s memory is exceptionally poor. He remembers only those things that were personally useful or painful to him. Instinctively, like a dog, he can visualize only those places where he pigged out, got drunk, and raped, and also those places where he slaughtered many people. [...] But, for example, it is very difficult for him to remember the name of the place in Poland from which he brought his ‘piece of Jewish soap’. [...] Helmut is asked where he got his soap. Helmut answers coldly, ‘Over there.’ ‘From a soap factory?’ ‘Of course.’ One really wants Helmut to talk more precisely about the process that takes place there in the ‘factory’ where bodies of dead Jews are brought and converted into soap. But Helmut has little knowledge of these processes. They hold no interest for him. He is simply interested in getting his hands on one of the first pieces of that Jewish soap, so he can send it, as a curiosity, to his Ilse for her birthday and, as he would admit to himself, give her pleasure.]25

Bergelson’s prose here is dry, sarcastic, and angry, and at the same time haunting and evocative. Whether or not he actually interviewed a German prisoner of war

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is beside the point. He is not a reporter, but an essayist depicting what he takes to be the Nazi ‘mentality’, one that focuses on ends, not means; outcomes, not ethics. The instinctual animal Helmut loves his dear Ilse, and these human feelings create the morally dead monster who is the subject of the essay. In 1943, the Red Army began the long and painful process of liberating city after city from German occupation. Its discoveries of Nazi atrocities and mass ruin made front page headlines across all the Soviet press. Eynikayt viewed these events through its particular Soviet Jewish lens. For Bergelson, as for many wartime Soviet writers, liberation did not bring joy. Although he celebrated the Soviet recapture of these centres from Nazi oppression, he questioned whether the stories to be told were acts of joy or of mourning. Of the many accounts of this kind that he wrote, two which touched him most personally are worth close examination here: his essays on the imagined and real liberation of Kiev, the city in which he first developed as a writer, and the liberation of Majdanek, the first extermination camp entered by the Allied forces. On 1 May 1943, more than six months before the Red Army drove the Germans from the city, Bergelson published his homage to Kiev, an essay that, given its Workers’ Day publication date, should have been sheer celebration. Instead, Bergelson gave his readers a sorrowful portrait of this cultural capital in ruins, opening with a loving description of the city and a lively personification of the Dnieper, the river on whose banks it is built: Fun hoykh-hoykhn Kreshtshatik lozt men zikh arop tsum zeyer niderikn Podol. Beser iz geyen tsu fus eyder forn. Rekhts, baym same rand fun hoykhn breg, bavegt zikh oyf un op der tramvay un zet oys, vi a ritmish-poyzndiker funikulyor. A bisl vayter shpilt in der tif der Dnyepr. An alter taykh, shoyn afile, dakht zikh, a groyer un dokh a shpilevdiker. Er shpilt mit der zun in heyse zumer-teg. Er shpilt mit di khmares in shpet osyen. Er shpilt mit shifn un mit barzhes, vos glitshn zikh iber im un oykh mit ale klenste shpendlekh, vos vign zikh af zayne khvalyes, ven er heybt shoyn on tsu frirn. Er iz an alt-yunger taykh. Fun noente hoykhe hoykhkaytn un tife niderikaytn shpiglt zikh op in im Kiev — oykh a shpilevdike shtot, an alt-yunge. [From high up on Kreshtchatik one can descend all the way down to Podol. It is better to go on foot rather than drive. On the right, at the very edge of the hill’s peak, the tram-car goes up and down, like a rhythmic, creeping funicular. A bit farther away you can see the Dnieper playing with its depths. An old river, perhaps even greying a little, it seems, but none the less still playful. It plays with the sun on hot summer days. It plays with the storm-clouds in late autumn. It plays with ships and barges that glide over it, and it plays with all the smallest splinters that skip along its waves when it is just beginning to freeze over. It is an old-young river. From its highest of heights and lowest of depths it ref lects the image of Kiev, also a playful, old-new city.]26

Like the contrast he drew earlier between old and new Jews, Bergelson’s use of the phrase ‘old-new’ (alt-yung/alt-neu) recalls the title of Herzl’s 1902 Zionist novel Altneuland, which depicted a future Jewish state as a socialist utopia. From the time of his 1926 essay ‘Dray tsentren’ (Three centres), Bergelson had posited the Soviet Union as the future hub of Jewish life, and his writings during the 1930s had offered

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Birobidzhan as the true socialist Zion. In this piece, he echoes Zionist tropes about the land of Israel in order to represent Kiev as a place of ancient roots and modern visions of the future, as the birthplace both of Slavic culture and of an assured Jewish future. He celebrates the regions around Kiev in particular, and Ukraine in general, by positively inverting a pejorative phrase from German textbooks and maps that damned the region because of its large Jewish population; Bergelson rejoices that they are gedikht bavoynt mit yidn, ‘densely populated with Jews’. His romance with the past includes the traditional Jewish past: ‘From the Black Sea to places beyond Kiev, in all cities and towns, every Friday at sunset, at exactly the same hour, at exactly the same minute, at exactly the same instant, Jewish windows were af lame with candlelight’. He dwells on tsarist-era restrictions on Jewish residency that prevented Kiev from becoming as openly Jewish as other cities of Ukraine, until of course the Soviet Union freed Jews in Kiev to live as they wanted. And then the Germans came, and nothing was left of his beloved city, least of all of the Jewish neighbourhoods of Podol and Demievka: Puste khurves iz geblibn fun Podol. Fun oysgekrimte balkonen, hengen arop shtrik un shleyfn fun tlies. In a grubn lebn yidishn shpitol lign dershosn un lebedik-bagrobn zeks un fuftsik toyznt yidn. In Goloseyever vald, in ek Demievke, hobn daytshishe soldatn bay banakhtike fayern bakumen zeyer henkerloyn far trefn in shtam fun a boym mit di keplekh fun hunderter un hunderter geshlayderte yidishe kinder — far yedn tseshmetern kindershn sharbndl, a fule gloz shnaps. [...] Kiev, shtot gepaynikte, geshokhtene un nitdershokhtene, oyf dayne farviste berg! Du vest dokh avade fregn, ‘vu zaynt ir itst, mayne kinder?’ [All that’s left of Podol are empty ruins. From twisted balconies hang the ropes and nooses of gallows. In a grave near the Jewish hospital lie fifty-six thousand Jews, shot to death or buried alive. In the Goloseyev forest at the edge of Demievka, by the glow of nocturnal fires German soldiers receive their hangman’s pay for smashing the heads of hundreds and hundreds of Jewish children against the trunks of trees — for each smashed child’s skull, a full glass of schnapps. [...] Oh Kiev, tortured city, slaughtered but at the same time not slaughtered, on your devastated hills! You will surely be asking, ‘Where are you now, my children?’]

In this personal expression of grief it is noteworthy that, for the first time, Bergelson designates the subhuman murderers not as fascists, Hitlerites, or as any other of the politically correct pejoratives of the day that designated politics and government rather than nations and individuals, but explicitly and unambiguously as Germans. The language he chooses throughout is violent and bleak, and it describes the murder of Jews, not of faceless Soviet beings. The Kiev of Bergelson’s romanticized past is dead but, as he concludes the essay, he promises that it will be newly rebuilt. Bergelson wrote about Kiev again after the city’s liberation in November 1943, and painted an almost messianic vision of its reconstruction:27 Un vider veln kumen di zumerfarnakhtn, ven di shtot vet zayn ibergefult mit shafung, vi a bekher mit vayn, un ibergisn vet zikh der bekher. Un shtark royshn vet der tsurik-oyfgeboyter Kreshtshatik. Finklen veln dort fun far fri on di fil elektrishe fayern un, tsunoyfgegosn mit der shayn funem farnakht,

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loykhtn tsuzamen, vi um yontev. Un dakhtn vet zikh alts, az in der tif fun der breyter sheyner gas kumt for ot der groyser yontev — er rukt zikh fun dort, vi a khupe mit likht, in a farkisheft gliklekher melukhe, un dernentert zikh alts in eynem mit shalung fun trompeytn un mitn gehilkh fun litavren. [And summer twilights will come again, when the city will be filled to excess with creativity, like a goblet of wine, and the goblet will overf low. And the newly rebuilt Kreshtchatik will rumble noisily. From very early on, many electric lights will twinkle, and, merged with the glow of the sunset, together they will illuminate everything as though on a holiday. And it will seem to everything around that in the depths of the broad, beautiful street this great holiday is taking place. From there it will form a procession like a wedding canopy accompanied with candles, in an enchanted, joyous country, and it will approach in company with the blaring of trumpets and the echoing of drums.]

In this vision of liberated Kiev, Bergelson subtly suggests that the outcome of the war may be divinely ordained, like the vengeance both Soviets and Jews will wreak upon their enemy. By introducing clear biblical references in a story of liberation published during the very month in which the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution was commemorated, Bergelson judaized the Soviet narrative of liberation to view the rebuilding of Kiev through the prism of Jewish prophecy. As in his Gorky Park speech, his novel Baym Dnyepr, and other essays for Eynikayt, Bergelson specifically deployed biblical discourse to render the war between Soviets and Germans as a divine war against the adversaries of God’s people.28 The opening image of a city filled to excess with creativity and a goblet overf lowing with wine echoes the prophet Joel’s vision of divine retribution on the enemies of Judah: Let the nations rouse themselves and march up to the valley of Jehoshaphat; for there I will sit in judgment over all the nations round about. Swing the sickle, for the crop is ripe; come and tread, for the winepress is overfull, the vats are overf lowing, for great is their wickedness [...]. Egypt shall be a desolation, and Edom a desolate waste, because of the outrage to the people of Judah, in whose land they shed the blood of the innocent. ( Joel 4. 12–13; 19)

The closing image of trumpets and drums evokes Psalms 149 and 150, as Bergelson importantly connects the music of praise in Psalm 150 with the thanks offered to God in Psalm 149 for deliverance and for the possibility of revenge: For God delights in His People. He adorns the lowly with victory. Let the faithful exult in glory; let them shout for joy upon their couches, with paeans to God in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands, to impose retribution upon the nations, punishment upon the peoples, binding their kings with shackles, their nobles with chains of iron, executing the doom decreed against them. (Psalm 150. 3–5)

Bergelson’s savage condemnation, not of ‘fascists’ but unequivocally of Germans, reached its peak in the summer of 1944, when the first extermination camp, situated just outside the Polish city of Lublin, was liberated or, more precisely, revealed to the world. By this stage in the war, the exposure of mass murder, with its sites of hangings and burial pits, must have become almost routine as the Red Army liberated place after place that had formerly been a Jewish centre, but that

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now lay in ruins. It is clear from the extensive press coverage of Majdanek that the discovery of an extermination camp, with its warehouses packed with human hair, valises, shoes, and eyeglasses, was an atrocity on a scale that even these hardened reporters and essayists who had already coined the term khurbm could not fully grasp. In the Russian-language press, Vasily Grossman and Konstantin Simonov both wrote about Majdanek for Krasnaya zvezda, although Simonov’s stories were the ones published on 12 August 1944. Soviet Jewish filmmaker Roman Karmen made the first Holocaust film, Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe, shortly after the camp’s liberation, and Soviet Jewish photographers had their images of empty haunted wastelands published in all the major Soviet newspapers and journals.29 Bergelson was given the task of writing about Majdanek for the Soviet Yiddish press. ‘Dos hobn geton daytshn!’ (The Germans did this!), his profoundly outraged essay about Majdanek, turns this first uncovered extermination camp into the grand symbol of German depravity and human loss. It also marked a significant turn in the tone of his Holocaust narrative, one that had been evolving for three years. In mid-1944, Bergelson began the process of universalizing the story of the Holocaust by steadily ceasing to speak only in an angry Jewish voice, as he had often done in his earlier wartime essays, and starting to write from a more universal perspective in relation to victim and vengeance. He does this, however, not by simply making the crimes against Jews disappear. Instead, he renders crimes against Jews as ‘crimes against humanity’, foreshadowing the Nuremberg trials that would do the same shortly after the war. In zikorn bay der mentshhayt vet dos zikh shoyn aynkritsn af eybik ... — In Maydanek! ... Dos iz der shpay in ponem yedn eynem, vos filt un trakht un zet ayn in lebn epes seykhldiks un guts, un gleybt in mentshns meglekhkayt ayntsuordenen dos lebn nokh beser, nokh shener. — In Maydanek! [This will be engraved on the memory of humanity for ever.... — In Majdanek! ... This is the spit in the face of everyone who feels and thinks and sees in life something rational and good, and who believes that it is in man’s power to make life better and more beautiful.30 — In Majdanek!]

In the first part of this essay, Bergelson never uses the word ‘Jew’. Instead, rather than focusing on the ethnic or religious identity of the victims, he turns his eye on the perpetrators: un muters un lerers veln muzn klor un daytlekh mitn fuln moyl oyfklern di kinder, az dos hobn geton nit keyn mentshn ... — Dos hobn geton daytshn! ... ‘Mothers and teachers will have to declare to their children, clearly and explicitly, that this was not done by human beings ... It was the Germans who did this!’ He goes on to name the crematorium director who hot gevoynt in krematorye gufe un hot gezogt, az im gefelt der reyekh fun toyte gepreglte mentshn, ‘lived inside the crematorium itself, and said that he loved the smell of dead fried people’, and the man who tore a four-year-old child in two. He rages against the nayntsnyoriker oder tsvantsikyoriker daytsh mitn tsartn meydlshn ponem, vos

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hot fun tsvishn di umgliklekhe korbones oysgeklibn a yungn gezuntn yidn un im befoyln onbeygn dem kop. Un az yener hot zayn kop ongeboygn, hot er genumen im shlogn mit a shtekn ibern haldz. [nineteen- or twenty-year-old German with the tender girlish face who selected a healthy young Jew from among the ill-fated victims and ordered him to bow his head. And when the one chosen had indeed bowed his head, he began beating his neck with a rod.]

Bergelson’s descriptions grow ever more crude, more graphic, more seemingly unbelievable, until he reaches his final condemnation: Zey hobn dokh in zeyer Daytshland heym muters, vayber, kales, eygene un bakante, vos veln zey mit tseshpreyte orems arumnemen baym tsurikkumen aheym un veln zikh mit zey kushn un haldzn. [After all, back home in Germany they all have mothers, wives, brides, relatives, and acquaintances, who will welcome them home with open arms and will kiss and embrace them.]

By opening the next section with the assertion, ‘It was the Germans, and only the Germans, who did this’, Bergelson damns the entire German nation. Until this point in this most powerful article, his tone had changed little from his other angry indictments of Nazi atrocities, indictments that had become familiar by mid-1944. How many more bodies, how many more scenes of destruction? But in ‘Dos hobn geton daytshn!’ Bergelson changed the way he addressed his Jewish readers. No longer was the khurbm just about Jews: Shoyn-zhe bloyz Munfeld un bloyz Tuman? Azoy hot gemuzt fregn yeder undzer roytarmeyer baym derzen far zikh a feld, farf leytst mit hunderter toyznter por shikh fun mentshn, vos zaynen derfirt gevorn biz kukn, vi oyf an oyf leyzung, fun toyt, vos kumt fun an elektrishn shtrom, biz [...] zikh betn, vi me bet a nedove: ‘tut a toyve, hengt mikh oyf ’ ... Iz ver ken den in aza moment avekshteln zikh tseyln, vif l por shikh oyf ot dem feld hobn gehert tsu yidn, un vif l hobn gehert tsu Polyakn, tsu Rusn, tsu Ukrainer, tsu Grikhn, tsu Frantsoyzn, tsu Holender, tsu Norveger un tsu Serbn? Undz, yidn? ... Kimat biz eynem hot er oysgerotn undzere brider in di okupirte gegntn. A pust ort hot er undz gelozt dort, vu gelebt un geshafn hobn poylishe, litvishe, letlendishe yidn, un mit a vildn tsinizm hot er arayngeshribn in ot der putskayt: — Vilne on yidn! — Kovne on yidn! — Varshe on yidn! Un dokh, nit mir aleyn kenen zayn bekoyekh optsutsoln far undzer groysn brokh, un nit bloyz undzere aleyn iz di plog, vos heyst ‘Daytsh’ — zi iz di plog fun a gantser velt. [Was it only Manfeld and Tuman [who ran the camp] [who did this]? This is the question each of our Red Army soldiers had to ask himself when bearing witness to a field strewn with hundreds of thousands of people’s shoes, soldiers who were led to see a decaying body killed by an electric current, who were led to [...] [a person] begging, as though for alms, ‘Please, hang me.’ Who can, in such a moment, attempt to work out how many pairs of shoes

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DAVID SHNEER on that field belonged to Jews, and how many belonged to Poles, to Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, to Norwegians, or to Serbs? We Jews? ... Almost to the last person he [the German] exterminated our brothers in the occupied regions. In the places where Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian Jews used to live and create, all he left behind was vacancy, and with an abandoned cynicism he inscribed into that vacancy: — Vilna without Jews! — Kovno without Jews! — Warsaw without Jews! And yet we alone do not have the power to gain restitution for our great tragedy, and the plague called ‘Germans’ is not ours alone. It is a plague on the whole world.]

The Soviet authorities used the unprecedented scale of the Majdanek atrocities, available for all to see, to stir the Red Army to anger. At the same time, the Soviet occupation authorities forced local townspeople and German prisoners of war to bear witness to the remains of Majdanek. For the local townspeople it was to show them what went on in their own backyard. For German POWs, it was to remind them of the nature of the regime for which they were fighting. Bergelson, however, though acknowledging the need for vengeance, also warns his Jewish readership against its tendency to turn revenge and memorialization into parochialism and nationalism. This was an unusual turn, given how angry Bergelson’s Jewish voice had been until the discovery of Majdanek. His earlier work for the Yiddish-language Eynikayt had the tendency to foster Jewish particularism, even as Russian-language journalism was fostering universalism. But with the impending end of the war, and with rising Soviet state suspicion of Jewish national expression, Bergelson tempered his Jewish national voice. Too much nationalism, he now began to argue, would be harmful to the Jews’ own long-term interests. Suggesting that Jews are asking the wrong questions about Nazi atrocities, he calls on them to see the mass murder of their European brothers and sisters as a problem for humanity, not for Jews alone, for both ideological and practical reasons. He reminds his Yiddish readers that this war will eventually end, and vengeance would indeed be exacted from Germany only if Jews saw the khurbm as a universal problem, an assault against all humanity. Although there was much coverage of the horror in the Russian-language press, Bergelson’s article on Majdanek was the only major essay about extermination camps published in Eynikayt. In the Soviet press, both Russian and Yiddish, the implication of these camps was universalized. It is true that of all six extermination camps Majdanek was the most ‘international’: about 50 per cent of its victims were not Jews.31 But something larger was going on. Majdanek began the process of de-Judaizing the khurbm. Karmen’s film mentioned Jews only in passing; and the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya zvezda identified Soviet prisoners of war as a victim group targeted as viciously as Jews. Soviet Jews were themselves drawn into the process of universalizing the Holocaust, in film, photography, and print in both Russian and Yiddish.32 Perhaps by 1944 Bergelson was responding directly to the Black Book project, for which Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg were collecting the narratives of Jewish survivors and other remnants of Soviet Jewish

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communities as a way of documenting the tragedy. Perhaps he now took it upon himself to rein in Jewish national mourning projects that were intensifying at both local and national levels. Perhaps he was instructed by Sovinformburo, the state information organization overseeing Eynikayt, that it was time to stop rallying international Jewry and start promoting general Soviet suffering in Yiddish. Perhaps it was because extermination camps, unlike burial sites, were so much more appalling that they had to be figured universally rather than particularly. And perhaps the reality was that Red Army soldiers would be more likely to wreak havoc on a Germany that had murdered not merely Jews but Russians, Ukrainians, and other Soviet peoples as well. Whatever the complex reason, Bergelson was still developing deeply nationalistic Jewish themes at the same time that he was urging the universal significance of Majdanek. Although his important essay was part of the Soviet regime’s move to universalize the khurbm in the last year of the war, at the same time — also in 1944 — Bergelson was completing a play entitled Prints Ruveni (Prince Reuveni) on commission from the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (GOSET), which drew on events in Jewish history to glorify the victory of heroic Jews, united in brotherhood with non-Jews, over a savage common enemy.33 This much we do know. After the war, the Soviet government went even further, not only by universalizing the Nazi death camps, but also by erasing the Jewish specificity of Nazi atrocities, by blocking the publication of Grossman and Ehrenburg’s Black Book, and by ensuring that Prints Ruveni was never staged in the Soviet Union. Bergelson’s Jewish khurbm had a short window of opportunity to circulate in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Bergelson was one of the chief creators of a Holocaust narrative that emphasized the Jewish specificity of what was happening for Soviet Yiddish readers. He made this Great Patriotic Soviet war Jewish. Epilogue In 1985, the Soviet publishing house Sovetskii Pisatel´ published a short collection of Bergelson’s wartime writings entitled In der sho fun oyspruv (In the hour of our tribulation). This volume contains reprints of many of his articles and essays for Eynikayt and from his brochures that circulated before Eynikayt came into existence in 1942. For the most part, the essays have simply been cut and pasted. But a number of editorial interventions are designed to make the republished text more ‘politically sensitive’. The editors changed the titles of articles, removed many references to Jewish revenge, and most frequently redesignated the enemy throughout as ‘fascist’, whereas Bergelson’s original texts alternated between ‘fascist’, ‘Hitlerite’, and ‘German’, depending on Bergelson’s mood and purpose. The most egregious and telling rewriting appeared in the reprint of ‘The Germans did this’, which was retitled, ‘The Fascists did this’. The editors rewrote several passages in the article and, importantly, deleted the entire section describing how the Germans had warm, happy families waiting at home for them to tell stories of their bloodthirsty deeds. Even the rhythmic cry in the original, dos hobn geton daytshn! ‘The Germans did this!’, was removed entirely.

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Jewish revenge was a touchy subject after the war, as was blaming the Germans much beyond the 1949 partition of Germany into West and East. Cold War imperatives took precedence, which necessitated the rapid rehabilitation of former enemies. For the West, this meant spending more time talking about totalitarianism and the similarities between Nazism and Stalinism than about the particulars of Germany. And in the Soviet Union, this meant redeeming ‘good’ socialist East Germans by turning the war into an indictment of fascism. Bergelson’s anger at the Germans and his call for Jewish revenge faded into silence. Although the comparison is, in many ways, not totally fair, Bergelson was not the only one to have his Jewish rage silenced. As Naomi Seidman has shown in her comparison of the Yiddish and French versions of Night, Wiesel removed short passages about Jews rampaging through Germany that appear at the end of the Yiddish version. Instead, the 1958 French version, from which all subsequent translations have been made, emphasizes existentialism and man’s theological crisis in general. Jewish rage was sublimated into philosophy.34 Soviet literary authorities erased Bergelson’s rage, both immediately after the war and in his literary legacy. But so too have other critics, who find it easier to see Bergelson as a victim of a Soviet regime that silenced him during the anticosmopolitan campaign, rather than as an angry patriot stirring up Soviet Jewish anger to get revenge. His rage has been silenced, and so too has his engagement with the war and the Holocaust. Biographies of Bergelson often either skip over the war period entirely, or merely note Bergelson’s work with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and perhaps mention his play, Prints Ruveni. Yet the war by no means interrupted Bergelson’s productive literary career. During its painfully long years, he carved out for his Yiddish readership intellectual, textual, and memorial space for Jewish loss and revenge against the Germans as part of the grand narrative of Soviet victory over Nazi evil.35 Notes to Chapter 12 1. The history of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee has been well documented in recent years. See, for example, Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust, and Stalinism: A Documentary Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee of the USSR (Luxemburg: Harwood, 1995); Vladimir Naumov and Joshua Rubenstein (eds), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 2. Der emes, the original central Soviet Yiddish newspaper, had been closed down in 1938, after the arrest and subsequent execution of its editor-in-chief, Moyshe Litvakov, and many of his colleagues. 3. David Bergelson, ‘Der general Yakov Kreyzer’, Eynikayt, 6 July 1944, p. 2. All translations are my own. 4. For more on wartime correspondence, see Ilya Ehrenburg, The War: 1941–1945 (Cleveland: World Publications, 1965); Ehrenburg and Konstantin Simonov, In One Newspaper: A Chronicle of Unforgettable Years (New York: Sphinx Press, 1985); V. Grossman, A. Beevor, and Luba Vinogradova, Vasily Grossman: A Writer at War, 1942–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005). 5. Each edition of the newspaper published the address of the editorial offices, which is one way of tracking where the editorial board, and therefore Bergelson, was located. 6. David Bergelson, Yidn un di milkhome mit Hitlern (New York: YKOR, 1941). This is a reprint of the pamphlet that first appeared in Moscow under the imprint of Der emes publishing house

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in 1941; see Shaul Esh, ed., Jewish Literature in the Soviet Union during and following the Holocaust ( Jerusalem: Jerusalem Post Press, 1960), p. 58. 7. Leonid Smilovitsky, ‘Izdanie religioznoi evreiskoi literatury v Sovetskom Soiuize na primere Belorussii, 1921–1964’ (Tel Aviv: Diaspora Research Institute) as found on www.souz.co.il, a Russian-language Israeli website on which Dr Smilovitsky has posted many of his published and unpublished scholarly articles. 8. David Bergelson, Yidn un di foterland-milkhome (Moscow: Emes Melukhe-farlag, 1941). 9. David Bergelson, ‘Dos gehoybene vet zign’, as found in In der sho fun oyspruv (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1985), pp. 3–5. 10. Ilya Ehrenburg, ‘Speech made at the mass Jewish rally in Moscow’, 24 August 1942, as cited in Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), p. 201. 11. David Bergelson, ‘Lo amut ki ekhye. Ikh vel nit shtarbn. Ikh vel lebn’, in Brider yidn fun der gantser velt (Moscow: OGIZ, Der Emes farlag, 1941), pp. 17–19. 12. Pravda published excerpts of the speeches made at the Gorky Park rally in the next day’s issue. Of Bergelson’s speech, the editors included much about the call to arms and even included the list of ‘famous Jewish thinkers’, but no mention was made either of Jewish vengeance or of Bergelson’s biblical call to live. ‘Bratia evrei vsego mira: vystuplenie predstavitelei evreiskogo naroda na mitinge, sostoiavshemsia v Moskve 24 avgusta 1941 g.’, Pravda, 25 August 1941, p. 3. 13. David Blumenthal, ‘Emil Fackenheim: Theodicy and the Tikkun of Protest’, as found on http:// www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Fackenheim.html. 14. Shmuel Rozhansky (ed.), Dovid Bergelson: oysgeklibene verk (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1971), p. 8. 15. Ben Ami Feinfold, ‘The Hebrew Theatre between the War and the Holocaust’, Israel Studies, 8.3 (2002), 183–84. 16. It took nearly a year after the invasion for Eynikayt to start appearing. Calls for a central Soviet Yiddish newspaper came from Bergelson and others as early as July 1941. The Soviet Information Agency, Sovinformburo, did not give permission until spring 1942. See Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, pp. 11–12. 17. David Begelson, ‘Zol di velt zayn an eydes’, Eynikayt, 25 July 1942, p. 2. 18. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 193. 19. David Bergelson, ‘Gedenkt’, Eynikayt, 5 September 1942, p. 2. 20. Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust ( Jerusalem: Center for Research on East European Jewry, 1998), p. 222. 21. For more on the history of the Holocaust in Vitebsk, see Mikhail Ryvkin and Arkadii Shulman, Khronika strastnykh dnei (Vitebsk: UPP, 2004). Thanks to Arkadii Zeltser for this reference. 22. The copy of Eynikayt used was cut off at its edge. Thus, the Yiddish text here has gaps where the copy of Eynikayt was cut off. 23. Bergelson, ‘Gedenkt’. 24. David Bergelson, ‘Der yunger sovetisher yid’, Eynikayt, 7 November 1942, p. 2. 25. David Bergelson, ‘Dos iz er!’, Eynikayt, 18 January 1943. 26. David Bergelson, ‘Kiev’, Eynikayt, 1 May 1943, p. 2. 27. David Bergelson, ‘Undzer Kiev’, Eynikayt, 11 November 1943, p. 2. 28. Thank you to Harriet Murav for the reference to Baym Dnyepr. 29. David Shneer, ‘When a Picture is Worth More than a Thousand Words: Holocaust Photography in the Russian and Yiddish Soviet Press’, lecture at the Skirball Cultural Museum, Los Angeles, December 2004. 30. David Bergelson, ‘Dos hobn geton daytshn!’, Eynikayt, 14 August 1944, p. 2. 31. According to Yisroel Gutman, extant lists of prisoner transports, which name 250,000 of the nearly 500,000 people who passed through Majdanek, reveal that 100,000 were Poles, 80,000 Jews, 50,000 Soviets, and 20,000 of other national origin, making Majdanek by far the ‘least Jewish’ of any extermination camp. Yisroel Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, III (New York: Macmillan Library, 1990), pp. 938–39. Note that statistics about the number of deaths at Majdanek vary widely, with some more recent scholarship suggesting that the total number of deaths may have been about 170,000. But all research concurs that the camp held a nearly equal number of non-Jewish Poles as Jews.

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32. David Shneer, ‘When a Picture is Worth More Than a Thousand Words’, presentation for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, July 2004. 33. Joseph Sherman, ‘A Note on Bergelson’s “Obsolescence” ’, Midstream, 38.5 ( July/August 2002), 37–42. 34. Naomi Seidman, ‘Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage’, Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society, 3.1 (Fall 1996), 1–19. 35. I would like to thank Harriet Murav and Joseph Sherman for incisive readings of an earlier version of this essay.

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CH A P T E R 13

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‘Du lebst, mayn folk’: Bergelson’s Play Prints Ruveni in Historical Context (1944–1947) Jeffrey Veidlinger On the night of 12–13 January 1948, Shloyme Mikhoels (1890–1948), director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (GOSET) and chairman of the Soviet Jewish AntiFascist Committee ( JAFC), was murdered in Minsk on Stalin’s direct order.1 This event signified the start of a new purge, this time directed against the intellectual and cultural leadership of Soviet Jewry. Among its victims was David Bergelson, who was arrested exactly one year later and shot on his sixty-eighth birthday, 12 August 1952. The fate of these two Jewish cultural leaders was intertwined in other ways as well. Throughout the autumn of 1947, Mikhoels and his theatre had been rehearsing Bergelson’s play, Prints Ruveni (Prince Reuveni), which Mikhoels is said to have worked on longer and with greater resolve than any other during his twenty-year tenure as GOSET’s director. Mikhoels had hoped to turn the play into the theatre’s greatest accomplishment and a final testament to the world he and Bergelson shared.2 A copy of the script was found on his desk after his murder, along with a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince, which he had been reading for background on the production.3 In the days before Mikhoels’s fateful departure for Minsk, witnesses recount that he seemed apprehensive. The actor Benjamin Zuskin (1899–1952), who replaced him as director of the theatre, testified that Mikhoels sat him down at the director’s desk a few days before he left for Minsk and said, ‘Here, you will be sitting in this chair, very soon’.4 Others recall receiving farewell telephone calls from him.5 Indeed, the foreboding signs were not difficult to read. In the months before Mikhoels’s murder, the United Nations — with Soviet support — had approved the partition plan for Palestine, thereby preparing the ground for the establishment of a Jewish nation state and thus a new focus of loyalty for world Jewry. In the euphoric weeks following the UN vote, Mikhoels had expressed support for the future Jewish state, only to discover that his remarks were being erased from the public record. He was also acutely aware of new accusations of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ being directed against Jewish writers. Over the summer and autumn of 1947, for instance, Itsik Kipnis (1896–1974) was castigated in the Soviet press after voicing the

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desire, in a story, one day to see the Star of David alongside the Soviet Red Star.6 Fully a decade after the height of the Great Terror, informed Soviet citizens should have been in little doubt about the degree of violence the Soviet state was prepared to inf lict upon those it regarded as pariahs. Thus there is good reason to believe that Mikhoels suspected his days were numbered when he set out on his trip to Minsk, leaving Prints Ruveni, a play whose final scene begins with the unfurling of a Jewish f lag, on his desk for all to see. This play, which can be read as Bergelson’s final testament, forces us to reevaluate Bergelson’s legacy, particularly in regard to his relationship with Soviet communism. Bergelson’s Soviet period has largely been regarded as an era of decline, in which a once-great writer of infinite promise succumbed instead to the dictates of Soviet socialist realism. The Western consensus is best summarized by his entry in the Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur. After comparing Bergelson during his ‘first period’ to Sholem Aleichem and Mendele, the entry’s author, Borukh Chubinsky, defers to Shmuel Niger’s judgement on his Soviet phase. Quoting Niger, he writes of Bergelson: He began to move in harness with what was then called ‘socialist realism’ and ceased writing according to his own free will. In his Soviet period he sinned terribly against artistic truth. His style was no longer cultivated and refined.7

According to this narrative, the turning point in Bergelson’s career came with the publication in 1926 of his essay ‘Dray tsentren’ (Three centres), written while he was still based in Berlin, which famously depicted the situation of Jewish writers in the Soviet Union in idealized terms. Given that Bergelson was travelling widely throughout Europe and North America at the time, his decision ultimately to settle in the Soviet Union was more one of choice than of necessity. There is every reason to believe that in 1926 he was sincerely convinced that a Yiddish writer could best achieve self-fulfilment and reach a popular audience in the Soviet Union, the only state then giving lavish financial support to the promotion of Yiddish culture. The publication of this pro-Soviet essay is widely assumed to have helped facilitate Bergelson’s return to Russia in advance of the Nazification of his adopted Berlin home. The Soviet government, however, was apparently unwilling to accept his immediate residence in Moscow. Bergelson’s eventual relocation to the Soviet capital was preceded by a trip to Birobidzhan, from which he wrote dispatches praising the creation of an autonomous new Jewish homeland in the Soviet Far East. His 1934 novella Birebidzhaner (Migrants to Birobidzhan) clearly articulated his loyalty to the Soviet state and its Jewish policies; while the 1939 propaganda piece, Birebidzhan, which he co-authored with Emanuel Kazakevitsh, was translated into English and widely distributed to American audiences via the Foreign Language Publishing House; he returned to the theme of Birobidzhan in his final, uncompleted novella Tsvey veltn (Two worlds). Although these texts should not be blithely dismissed as political propaganda, as many Western critics have been wont to do, the greater part of Bergelson’s artistic oeuvre during his Soviet period can fairly be described as expressions of ‘socialist realism’. Certainly, Bergelson, like all Soviet writers, made artistic and moral accommodations with the regime under which he lived. His Birobidzhan sketches

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and his autobiographical novel Baym Dnyepr (At the Dnieper) both conform to ideological dictates of style and content that distinguish them significantly from his earlier work; they lack much of the poignancy, sensitivity, and metaphorical allusiveness for which he had once been admired. Yet during World War II, when the Soviet censors relaxed the strict dictates of socialist realism to encourage writers to rouse popular nationalist fervour, Bergelson seized the spirit of the time, penning some works that can hardly be characterized as either denationalized or socialist-realist. Indeed, Bergelson proved himself equally capable of composing bombastic nationalist works. Chief among these was his play Prints Ruveni. This is Bergelson’s only major historical work and the only piece he conceived ab initio exclusively for stage performance. Set during the Renaissance, employing blank verse and a heightened diction in somewhat archaic language, it relies on stock plot devices of disguise and hidden identity, varies the presentation of its serious theme through bantering interplay between the princely hero and his jester, and exploits a significant number of other characteristics of the high tragic style of both Shakespeare and Schiller. Aesthetically, therefore, the play bears little resemblance to Bergelson’s earlier work.8 Prints Ruveni represents not only a stark change in artistic direction for Bergelson, but can also be read as an implicit repudiation of the ideologies he had earlier espoused, and of the entire Soviet system for which he had served as a spokesperson. From 1938, after nearly a decade of being obliged to portray only the achievements of contemporary socialist construction in the Soviet Union, Soviet writers had been permitted to depict selected historical heroes as well. For most observers, this change in orientation is most evident in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film, Alexander Nevsky. After a series of films depicting great moments in the progress of the Russian revolutionary movement, this represented the director’s first venture into the distant Russian past for inspiration. For audiences of Yiddish theatre, the new direction first became evident also in 1938 with the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre’s production of Shmuel Halkin’s play Bar Kokhba. This performance was permitted, however, only on condition that it reinforced the official Party slogan of ‘the Friendship of Nations’ and conformed to the Stalinist principle of ‘socialist in content; national in form’. Bar Kokhba’s rebellion was required — at least on the surface — to epitomize a multinational rebellion of the working class against imperialism, rather than a Jewish revolt against foreign (Roman) domination. The story could be told in Yiddish and characters could be drawn from Jewish historical traditions, but the whole was always obliged to reinforce the master narrative of class warfare and socialist reconstruction. In short, Soviet cultural dictates continued to constrain the portrayal of historical and national heroes until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union radically altered the storyline and made for a new master narrative. In his first Revolution Day speech following Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Stalin famously called upon the population to defend ‘Holy Russia’ and ‘the great Russian nation — the nation of Plekhanov and Lenin, of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Gorky and Chekhov, of Glinka and Tchaikovsky, of Sechenov and Pavlov, of Suvorov and Kutuzov’.9 This ‘Holy

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Russia’ speech sent a signal to writers throughout the country that the function of historical role models in the country’s national imagination was about to change. Stalin had chosen to unleash the full potential of nationalist fervour as a weapon against the fascist aggressors, and in the immediate aftermath of the war, the same nationalist orientation in cultural production was permitted to continue. Once again the illustration is provided by Eisenstein, whose 1944 film Ivan Groznyi (Ivan the Terrible) epitomized this new approach to historical heroes. In this context, in September 1944 the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre commissioned Bergelson to compose a play on the theme of wartime heroism,10 and he gave them Prints Ruveni, a play he had been working on since at least 1942. Although it was set in the sixteenth century, both its author and its stage director always understood it to be about the twentieth century in general and the recent war in particular. In its February 1944 instructions to GOSET, the Committee of Artistic Affairs urged the theatre management to dramatize themes relating to the ‘Great Patriotic War’.11 Literary themes that had dominated during wartime were to continue into the post-war era: ‘The war continues on the ideological front,’ declared Mikhoels.12 Bergelson’s play was already in production in early 1945, and its performance was approved by the Committee of Artistic Affairs in February of that year.13 It was not staged that year, however, but was given official approval again for the following year. Yet even though the play remained part of the company’s production plan until the theatre was liquidated during the campaign against Jewish institutions in 1949, it was never performed. Set in Italy and Spain during the first quarter of the sixteenth century, its plot is drawn from the well-known historical events surrounding the life of David Reuveni (1490–?1541), who appeared in Venice in 1524 claiming to be a messenger sent from the eastern kingdom of Khaybar where, he alleged, his brother, Joseph, ruled over a Jewish state comprising the Lost Tribes of Israel. Reuveni obtained an audience with Pope Clement VII, to whom he offered an alliance against the common Turkish foe, and requested papal bulls providing him with safe passage to Portugal so that he could seek the support of the Portuguese king as well. In Italy, Reuveni gained the support of Benvenida Abravanel, the wife of the eminent scholar and financier Don Samuel Abravanel (1473–1551), who supplied him with funds and ships. Arriving in Portugal, Reuveni was sympathetically received by King John III, and he attracted broad support among the crypto-Jews, who were being persecuted by the Inquisition following the expulsion of the Jews from Lisbon. One highly placed crypto-Jew, Diego Pires, who had served as a secretary in the king’s court, became convinced that Reuveni was the long-awaited messiah of Jewish tradition, sent to save Portuguese Jewry from their oppressors and to usher in a new messianic age that would reunite the tribes of Israel. Despite being initially rejected by Reuveni, Pires studied Kabbalah, had himself circumcised, adopted the name of Shlomo Molkho, and began publicly hailing Reuveni as the messiah. The two eventually teamed up, and under a f lag bearing the Hebrew inscription ‘MKBI [MaKaBI]’ — an acronym of the liturgical Hebrew phrase mi kamokha be’eylim hashem, ‘Who among the mighty is like unto God?’ — went together to the Emperor Charles V, whose support they sought. However, the growing messianic fervour that

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accompanied them attracted the hostile attention of the Christian authorities who came to doubt Reuveni’s authenticity. The two were arrested by the Emperor’s troops; Molkho was sentenced to death and Reuveni was handed over to the Inquisition. Bergelson’s Prints Ruveni was never performed on the stage of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, nor have there been any major productions of the play elsewhere, while the text was not even published in the Soviet Union. Since the archive of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre contains nine different variants of the play in Russian translation, and two variants in Yiddish,14 it is difficult to determine exactly which version was to have been staged. The text most widely available to readers today, and used for this essay, is the one first serialized in the New York periodical Yidishe kultur in 1945 and published as a complete ‘drama in four acts — six scenes’ by YKUF the following year.15 The few critical evaluations of Prints Ruveni that followed its publication have been in disagreement. Shmuel Niger seized upon Bergelson’s unusual emphasis on Reuveni rather than on the Kabbalist and mystic Shlomo Molkho — which was more typical of many literary retellings of the story — as a highly meaningful and symbolic choice, noting that this focus allowed Bergelson to emphasize the political elements of the messianic fervour over its theological underpinnings. In Niger’s words, Bergelson’s Reuveni fights ‘not with the Name of the One on his lips, but with a sword in his hands’.16 Niger is correct that, in making this choice, Bergelson emphasizes the political and national consequences of the Reuveni episode while downplaying its religious significance. However, others have argued that this emphasis does not de-Judaize the play, as Niger contended. On the contrary, Bergelson’s Reuveni, though having little regard for religion or theology, is nevertheless a secular Jew who is proud of his national heritage and willing to take up arms to defend his people. To this type of national identity Niger’s ideological counterpoint Nakhmen Mayzel was referring when he cited Prints Ruveni as among the most ‘nationalist’ works of Soviet Yiddish writing,17 a conception of the drama as a whole that led Shmuel Rozhansky to praise it for evoking ‘a stirring lyricism of a national vision’.18 This difference of critical opinion not only touches upon the crux of the play’s meaning, but also upon one of the central problems of Jewish life in the postwar world: the conf lict between messianism and political action. Whereas many survivors responded to the Holocaust with a theocentric world-view and a revival of redemptive expectation, others rejected all visionary projects in favour of direct political action. The Holocaust convinced many Jews of the futility and suffering that can result from passive messianism, and induced them instead to value force.19 For them, this meant not only repudiating the messiah of Jewish tradition, but also rejecting the secular utopianism of communism that had attracted so many followers, including Bergelson himself, from among the Jewish intelligentsia. Consequently the envisaged goal of Jewish political action, more often than not, was the establishment of a Jewish nation state. Only within this context can Prints Ruveni be understood. As one of the first literary responses to the Holocaust, the play was ultimately repressed in response to the establishment of a Jewish nation state in Palestine. The fate of both the play and its author was intricately connected to these two central events in Jewish history.

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The conf lict between religious faith and political or military action informed Bergelson’s interpretation of the historical episode he chose to dramatize. Throughout the play, Bergelson plays with concepts of messianic expectation. Both explicitly and implicitly, Reuveni is repeatedly referred to in messianic terms: in the play’s second scene Shabsai introduces him as a saviour and he is presented as a direct descendant of King David, emerging during a time of intense hardship and devastation to lead his people to freedom with the help of an army drawn from the Lost Tribes. The characters in the play begin to believe that they are on the cusp of a messianic era, and Bergelson introduces a variety of messianic motifs to remind the audience of this as well. After the appearance of the martyr Rabbi Amnon, for instance, Reuveni recites in Hebrew one of the Bible’s most famous messianic passages: ‘In days to come [...] nation shall not lift up sword against nation’ (Isaiah 2:118–19). Other messianic traditions, notably the Muscovite, are utilized as well: Molkho curses Rome with the prophecy that keyn Roym keyn driter vet nit zayn! [...] farshvundn vet er nit blaybn mer, vi s’iz amol farshvundn | di royb-shtot Ninve, un vi s’iz farshvundn | di alte royb-shtot fun Mitsraim, ‘a third Rome there shall not be! [...] it will disappear and remain no longer, | just as the robber-city of Nineveh once disappeared | and just as the ancient robber-state of Egypt disappeared’ (98). In the context of the Russian tradition, the ‘Third Rome’ is commonly understood to refer to Russia itself, which succeeded Rome and Byzantium as the protector of the true Christian faith. According to the sixteenth-century monk Filofei of Pskov’s well-known prophecy about the eternal strength of Russia, ‘two Romes have fallen, a third still stands, and a fourth there shall not be’. This doctrine of the Third Rome had been sustained in Russia by the Old Believers, and had been revived during the revolutionary era, when the Soviet Union, and sometimes the Third International, was seen as the new ‘Third Rome’.20 For the purposes of his play, Bergelson adopts this prophecy, equating Filofei’s First Rome with a Third Rome that, in Jewish historical reckoning, followed Egypt and Nineveh. Yet to anyone familiar with Filofei’s prophecy and Russian messianic traditions, the conception of ‘Third Rome’ inevitably referred to Russia, with the result that this prophecy, uttered in the context of Bergelson’s play, could potentially be interpreted as an indictment of the Soviet Union as much as it is an indictment of the Inquisition. Could Bergelson have been implying, perhaps wishfully, that the recent destruction of the modern fascist Rome and Nazi Germany might be followed by a third destruction of Soviet Russia? Ultimately, however, Reuveni rejects passive messianic yearnings for the future in favour of direct political or military action in the here and now. The long-awaited redemption, he contends, will take place in this world, not in the World to Come, and will be brought about not by divine intervention but by the force and vitality of human deeds. The second act concludes with Molkho’s declaration, in the name of Reuveni: Meshiekh?! ... nit meshiekh bin ikh do | far aykh. Ikh bin a kraft an erdishe! | A kraft an erdishe! ‘Messiah?! I am no Messiah for you here. I am an earthly power! |An earthly power!’ (91). Reuveni, who ignites messianic expectations and invites apocalyptic prophecies, is in reality not the miraculous redeemer his supporters have faith in, but a human leader willing to defend his people with force of arms.

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His claim to have an army of 300,000 souls ready to fight turns out to be true, but it is composed not of warriors from the mysterious Khaybar in the East but rather of 300,000 Jewish refugees in the port of Lisbon. Molkho’s rapturous messianic visions are shown to be absurd; the fighter Reuveni will liberate the people not with a heavenly host but with earthly troops. Because Jews embody the quality of mercy, which will always be defeated by brute force, they have suffered at the hands of the powerful; now they can redeem themselves only if they too are willing to use the physical power available to them. As Molkho explains in a song chanted to a Kabbalistic melody: di velt iz a vog-shol. a vog-shol. oyf eyn ek — kraft, oyfn tsveytn ek — khesed. — khesed! kraft iz Amolek! kraft iz Edoym! kraft iz Homen! kraft iz Roym! kraft iz di Inkvizitsye, khesed — zaynen yidn. (90–91) [The world is a weighing-scale, a weighing-scale with power on one side and loving-kindness on the other. Amalek is power! Edom is power! Haman is power! Rome is power! The Inquisition is power! Loving-kindness — that is the Jews.]

The idea of disempowered refugees uniting in the face of annihilation in order to combat the most powerful army on earth had an obvious relevance to Soviet Jewish audiences returning home from evacuation, from hiding, and from military service at the end of World War II. Many of these refugees had themselves recently fought as soldiers and officers in the Red Army, the unf lagging efforts of which had defeated Nazi Germany. Even as Bergelson’s rousing words complimented their courage, a new enemy was emerging as Soviet anti-Semitism intensified in the war’s aftershock. Despite the fact that the play downplays the religious and messianic significance of the Reuveni story, its text is rich in biblical imagery and motifs drawn from the traditional Jewish liturgy. References to the High Holy Days in particular permeate both the text and the drama’s setting. The play opens on board ship during a raging storm at sea. The captain and a Dominican on board cry out, blaming the Jewish passengers for having brought the wrath of God upon their vessel, and they begin throwing the Jews overboard. Although the primary purpose of this opening scene is to introduce the crypto-Jew Diego Pires, who intervenes on behalf of the Jews

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and is recognized by the captain as a high-ranking official of the Lisbon court, its depiction of seamen casting aliens overboard to appease God in the midst of a storm recalls the opening chapter of the Book of Jonah, traditionally read on Yom Kippur.21 Throughout the text, Bergelson retains such echoes of the liturgy of the Day of Atonement. When Pires decides to join Reuveni, for instance, he proclaims his new loyalty with a clear reference to vidui ashamnu, Yom Kippur’s liturgical confession of sins:22 ikh hob gegrayzt ... ashamti, bogadti, ‘I have erred ... I have sinned, I have betrayed’ (43). The apocalyptic prayer beginning unsane-toykef (Let us relate the mighty holiness of this day), one of the most instantly recognizable parts of the High Holy Day liturgy, also recurs in several different forms. Reuveni’s last words as the final curtain falls, mi yikhye u-mi yomus, ‘who shall live and who shall die’, for instance, are derived from it, while in a more complete form, the prayer is recited by a crowd of Jewish refugees in the Lisbon port who carry the bier bearing the corpse of Rabbi Amnon immediately before the cannons are fired that open the play’s final battle scene. In the Hebrew words of the liturgy, they sing: You open the Book of Remembrance and it speaks for itself, for every man has signed it with his deeds ... The angels are alarmed, seized with fear and trembling as they declare: The Day of Judgement is here! For even the hosts of heaven are judged. This day all who walk the earth pass before You as a f lock of sheep. And like a shepherd who gathers his f lock, bringing them under his staff, You bring everything that lives before You for review. You determine the destiny of every creature and you record their fate. (117)

The words of the unsane-toykef prayer are powerful language in any context; it is one of the most consequential and evocative prayers in the Jewish liturgy. The impact these words would have had on Soviet Jewish audiences in 1945 is even more profound. Indeed, any Hebrew-language utterance would have made a powerful impression on that audience, given that the Hebrew language in all its forms had been wholly purged from Soviet discourse some twenty years earlier. The Soviet authorities regarded Hebrew as doubly dangerous, both as the clerical language of the Jewish religion and as the national language of the Zionist movement. It was so distrusted that many words of Hebrew origin were expunged from Soviet Yiddish, while those that remained were given a new orthography to distance them from their Hebrew origins.23 Public performance of religious ritual had also been proscribed, and the public recitation of prayer would have been unthinkable before the war, unless it were done for the sake of ridicule. While the younger generation of post-war survivors had only faint recollections, if any, of traditional Jewish prayer and ritual — even though religious persecution and mockery had been relaxed during the war — those who had been reared in the pre-Soviet shtetlekh of the Pale of Settlement could vividly recall childhoods, and often adulthoods as well, steeped in a world of traditional Jewish observance. Bergelson himself was among them, having grown

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up in a strictly devout Hasidic home. To hear the unsane-toykef prayer recited in public on stage, in a climate in which even the most mundane of Hebrew language expressions was taboo, would have been an unimaginably evocative experience, since by suppressing Hebrew and equating its use with the ideological positions of either religious piety or of Zionist aspiration, the Soviet government ensured that any public use of Hebrew would automatically be interpreted to refer to both. Given that many Soviet Jews found themselves the victims of a resurgent and widespread anti-Semitism at the end of the war, Bergelson’s insertion of Hebrew-language prayers and aphorisms in the diction of his newest play was clearly intended to evoke traditional and national Jewish associations in his audience. The unsane-toykef prayer, moreover, is not merely an expression of profound atonement and the determination to make a new beginning. It is also an articulation of repentance for apostasy, a central theme of the play as a whole. As Mikhoels is said to have explained to its actors, The Jews of the Middle Ages were required to disavow their faith. But if they did disavow, then at night, in secret they prayed to God to forgive their weakness. And at the beginning of the Day of Atonement — this is the main Jewish holy day — they atoned for their sins by reciting the prayer Kol nidre.24

According to a traditional legend, the unsane-toykef was composed by Rabbi Amnon during the time of the Crusades in eleventh-century Mainz. Amnon, an aff luent and respected leader of the Jewish community, was promised a ministerial post by the prince-bishop of Mainz on condition that he convert. Granted his request for three days in which to consider this option, Amnon immediately regretted making it, since it implied that he had, even for a moment, doubted the truth of the Torah. Having spent the time in fasting and prayer, Amnon refused to appear when sent for on the third day, and had to be brought by force. In the presence of the bishop, having announced his rejection of the choice put to him, Amnon demanded that his tongue be cut out for having spoken falsely. Instead, as punishment for his insolence, his arms and legs were cut off for not conveying him to the meeting, and his mutilated body was sent home. On Rosh ha-Shanah, before succumbing to his wounds, Amnon was taken to the synagogue where he asked to be placed on the bimah, together with his severed limbs, just prior to the recitation of the kedushah or Sanctification of God’s name, that part of the liturgy, especially the doxologies based on Isaiah 6. 3 and Ezekiel 3. 12, which echo the praise of the angels for God’s awesome holiness, manifested in the moral purity that issues divine judgment and shows divine mercy. The musaf or supplementary service of Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur features an extra long version of the kedushah. At this point, with his dying breath Amnon recited the words that became the unsane-toykef prayer, and in so doing, transformed the meaning of the kedushah. It now became not only a declaration of God’s sublimity, but also a supreme statement of personal resignation to the vicissitudes of inscrutable divine justice and a meditation on the human sanctification of God’s holy name. In case his intended audiences were unfamiliar with this legend, Bergelson took care to recount the story for them in the voice of Shabsai (79). The martyred Amnon himself even makes a ghostly cameo appearance in the last scene of the play, speaking only in Hebrew. He is brought on stage,

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though, only to die, as a martyr should, with the request that his grave be placed near that of the hero. As he dies, he is covered with a tales, a ritual prayer shawl (125). It is thus possible to speculate that in creating this play, Bergelson invoked Amnon and the unsane-toykef prayer as a personal statement. Like Amnon and the crypto-Jews of Spain, Bergelson had disavowed the faith of his parents and his people for the promise of a communist utopia or at least for the material gains which loyalty to the Soviet state would bestow upon him. He had praised Birobidzhan and deprecated the traditional Jewish homeland. Like many survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, Bergelson emerged from his wartime experience with a profound sense of guilt and a desire to enact change. The theme of atonement, ref lection, and new beginnings was a timely one as much for Bergelson’s Soviet Jewish audiences as for Bergelson personally. In 1944, Soviet Jewry had just begun the long process of rebuilding what remained of its community. Artists, writers, public figures, and the official Party line itself urged people to celebrate the victory of the Soviet army over the fascist aggressors and look towards the future. Devastation and reckoning would be followed by rebirth. One Jewish response to this call came from Zalmen Shneer-Okun, who composed a play entitled Freylekhs ( Joy), drawing on Jewish folk motifs to portray a mourning ceremony that is transformed into a wedding celebration, which won the Stalin Prize for 1945. By association, the birth of a new Jewish community was thus likened to Rosh ha-Shanah, the celebration of the new year and new beginnings. However, in the Jewish tradition, the coming of the new year is not a time only of celebration, but also of trepidation at the coming Days of Awe. During this time of Jewish penitence, God sits in judgment, deciding who shall live and who shall die during the coming year. The liturgy of Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur is consequently suffused with references to this sealing of the Book of Life. Bergelson’s repeated allusions to this liturgy continually keep the audience aware of this theme. There was probably no time and place in Jewish history in which the question of how God decides who shall live and who shall die was more vexing than in the Eastern Europe of 1944. The survivor guilt felt by those returning from evacuation in Central Asia, or emerging from their hiding places to find their families annihilated, could never have been more intense. The devastation that the Jewish community of the Soviet Union had suffered, and the death and destruction the survivors had witnessed, was compounded by the fact that their own expressions of Jewish identity had been suppressed before and during the war. Indeed, the theme of emerging from hiding also permeates the play. The cryptoJews of Iberia, suffering persecution and facing possible annihilation, are only able to defeat their enemy by openly uniting in a shared purpose. Joy and strength can only be achieved by tearing off the masks that hide one’s true identity and faith. This idea is demonstrated most clearly on stage in the character of Reuveni’s servant and jester, Shabsai, who, we are told, came to Reuveni from Portugal where he was a crypto-Jew playing a clown in the Lisbon circus. Among the roles allotted to him was that of playing a Jew in mockery; ironically, this was the only time that he was able publicly to affirm his true identity. As he puts it, a sho in tog | bin ikh in tsirk mir fray a yid, zol zayn | afile in di kleyder fun a lets, ‘for one hour a day | in the circus,

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I could freely be a Jew, | albeit in the costume of a clown’ (68). Diego Pires is also a crypto-Jew who reveals himself in the first scene of the play. As he watches the Jews being cast overboard from the pitching ship into the stormy sea, he declares Im eynmol bloyz hot men gekreytst, un mikh | der lign hert nit oyf tsu kreytsn tog | nokh tog ... mer ken ikh nit! ‘They only crucified Him once, | but the lie keeps on crucifying me | day after day ... I cannot any longer!’ (13). Both of these crypto-Jews achieve self-awareness and self-satisfaction only when they are able to act openly as Jews. Reuveni, too, masks his true identity. While purporting to be an emissary from Khaybar with an army of 300,000 ready to come to the aid of Christian Europe, he is in reality a charismatic pretender with a following at best of 300,000 refugees. His moment of glory comes only when he casts off his princely clothing, stands in the rags of his people, and declares: Nit keyn prints! ... Ikh bin | tsuglaykh mit aykh a yid a posheter | in shmates ... nu? — In shlakht! | Du kemfst mayn folk — dos heyst: du lebst mayn folk! ‘Not a prince! ... I am | equal to all of you, a simple Jew in rags ... So? To battle! | You fight, my people — that means you live, my people!’ (121). If Portugal during the time of the Inquisition is read as a metaphor for the Soviet Union, where expressions of Jewish identity were similarly suppressed, then the repudiation and recantation of those who abandoned the public expression of their faith can be read as Bergelson’s personal statement as well. Had Prints Ruveni ever been performed on the Soviet stage, it is likely that many in the audience would have identified with the crypto-Jews who longed for public recognition as Jews. The theme of being able to express one’s identity after years of hiding was both poignant and timely. Witnessing the annihilation of their brethren in the former Pale of Settlement, many Soviet Jews who had discarded the faith of their parents and adopted the new ideals of Soviet communism declared, like Pires in Bergelson’s play, ‘I cannot any more!’ Some sought solace in religious revival; others in the potential of the Zionist cause. During the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet Jews had been urged to dispose of their real and metaphorical caftans and the world to which these belonged in order to join with the entire Soviet people in the construction of socialism. But when Hitler’s Wehrmacht crossed into Soviet territory and reserved a special fate for the Jews alone, they realized that their dream of integration and assimilation had been a tragic farce. The Red Army failed to repel the Nazis in time, and the Soviet utopia they had believed they were building became little more than a mass grave for their shattered communities. Many Jews sought a return to the traditions of their murdered parents, just as many Russian Orthodox believers took Stalin’s cynical references to ‘Holy Russia’ to heart and returned to their spiritual devotions. For the Jews of the Soviet Union, World War II was a massive coming out, in which they were, for the first time in a generation, permitted to express themselves as Jews. For writers like Bergelson, the war provided an opportunity to articulate in a personal manner the role they felt they could play as representatives of their people. To many intellectuals this movement was symbolized by the Yiddish poet Itsik Fefer’s declaration, Ikh bin a yid, ‘I am a Jew’. In their own way, many Jewish writers and intellectuals who had led their people away from Judaism to communism re-evaluated their positions in the face of the war, and like Rabbi Amnon repented for their often more

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than momentary turning away from the traditions and needs of their people. It is impossible to determine whether they regarded themselves either as crypto-Jews, secretly believing at night but disavowing their faith during the day, as Mikhoels characterized them, or as apostates who genuinely abandoned their faith for other promises. Either way, however, the pressures of living a lie — whether or not they believed in it — proved to be too much for many to bear. The ‘Brother Jews’ meeting of August 1941 and the subsequent creation of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were the most visible signs of this change. Two months after the Nazi invasion, Mikhoels and Bergelson were among the leaders of a mass meeting in Moscow, the purpose of which was to rouse support among world Jewry for the Soviet war effort and to urge America to open a second front. Two years later, under the auspices of the JAFC, Mikhoels and Fefer travelled to North America and the United Kingdom to reinforce this message to the West. In his address at the August 1941 meeting, which was broadcast around the world, Mikhoels warned, Yidn, brider mayne! Gedenkt, az do, oyf undzere shlakht-felder, vert bashlosn oykh ayer goyrl, oykh der goyrl fun ayere lender, ‘Jews, my brothers, remember that here on our battlefields, your fate and the fate of your countries is also being decided’.25 The next day Pravda, the official mouthpiece of the Soviet state, devoted a full-page spread to the rally with a banner headline reading ‘Brother Jews of the entire world’. For the first time since the revolution, Soviet Jewish activists openly hailed what they saw as a united Jewish nation whose people were scattered throughout the world. Soviet Jews had never before been permitted openly to assert their solidarity with Jews beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. This public expression of Jewish identity signified to the Jewish community at large that they could now remove their masks and once again be free to express themselves as Jews. Clearly, the potential audience that Bergelson’s play and Mikhoels’s production of it intended to address could easily have seen themselves mirrored in the figures of the crypto-Jews of Prints Ruveni. Indeed, in the same way as Mikhoels and Bergelson appealed to the unity of world Jewry, Reuveni speaks of Jewish unity, declaring of the Spanish refugees, zey ale tsu mayn shtam gehern — | fun Avrom fun Yitskhok un fun Yankev, ‘they all belong to my tribe — | they stem from Abraham, from Isaac, and from Jacob’ (56). Ultimately the message of the play is that only by coming out of hiding and uniting together can the Jews be free. The Jewish–Christian alliance Reuveni promises was strongly reminiscent of Mikhoels’s mission abroad: he too had suddenly appeared in the West as an emissary from a forgotten Jewish community in the East. Seeking Western support against a common enemy, both Mikhoels and Reuveni pledged that their own people would fight in single-minded unity. Only through Jewish unity and Jewish–Christian cooperation, they contended, could the evil foe threatening Europe be defeated. Many of Reuveni’s impassioned speeches closely resemble the appeals that Mikhoels made as chairman of the JAFC and that Bergelson made in his radio address. Reuveni calls on the West to take up arms along with the Jews of Khayber: tsulib mayn khayl in land Khavur in tsol | fun dray mol hundert toyznt kh’ob bashtelt | gever. — Gever vet klekn oykh far aykh, ‘I have ordered arms for my army of three hundred thousand in the land of Khayber. | The arms will suffice for you as well’ (39).

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Elsewhere he urges the Christian powers to arm the Jewish refugees: [...] bavofenen oykh zey, di kinder fun Yisroel, vos men hot faryogt fun Shpanye. A khayl makht fun zey a shtarks, un shlogn veln zey mit aykh in eynem zeyer faynt dem Terk, vos iz der soyne oykh fun ayer land — ir makht fun zey a khayl! (58) [arm them as well, the children of Israel, who have been driven out of Spain. A powerful army make of them, and they will fight in fury side by side with you against the Turks, who are the enemy of your land too — make of them an army!]

These words echo Bergelson’s own when he declared during his radio address, dos ort fun yedn yidn iz in di armeyen fun der koalitsye, ‘the place of every Jew is in the army of the coalition’.26 Similarly Mikhoels, speaking at New York’s polo grounds, urged America to take up arms: The Red Army avenges the bestial atrocities of the Nazi enemy on the other side of the world. Shoulder to shoulder with all the peoples of the Soviet Union, the Jews of our country wage battle against the enemy. We are witnessing now the most righteous, yea, the holiest but also the bloodiest and most gruesome war. The unity and brotherhood of the united nations will decide the struggle.27

Bergelson even ends Prints Ruveni with much of the same rhetoric and themes that concluded his own radio address, notably the Hebrew declaration: lo omus, ki ekhye, ‘I will not die, because I will live,’ which is echoed in the play by Reuveni’s Hebrew mi yikhye u-mi yomus, ‘Who shall live and who shall die’. In his real-life address, Bergelson continued: Ikh vel nit shtarbn, ikh vel lebn! In farloyf fun undzer geshikhte zaynen mir baygeshtanen on a shir umglik un tsores. Mir veln bayshteyn oykh dem itstikn grestn un letstn umglik! Nor farzamen tor men nit — di frage geyt vegn dem etsem kiyem funem gantsn yidishn folk! [I will not die, I will live! In the course of our history we have withstood incalculable misfortune and suffering. We will also withstand this current greatest and final misfortune. Only it is not permissible to tarry — the question goes to the very essence of the continuity of the entire Jewish people.]28

These words could very well have been spoken by Reuveni. His assertion, for which he sacrifices his life, is that the Jewish people will never be free of persecution and will never be able to emerge from hiding unless they assert themselves through the force of arms. Only an army under a Jewish f lag can break the cycle of suffering and misfortune. It was in part for making this same assertion that Bergelson and Mikhoels sacrificed their own lives. In the play, the associations between the recent war and the sixteenth-century

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Inquisition are strengthened through Bergelson’s rendering of the concept of time itself. Throughout the play, he juxtaposes time, linking the experiences of the Jewish refugees from the Inquisition to the sufferings of other generations of Jews throughout history. For Bergelson, Jewish time is cyclical and circular; Jewish life is always situated in a moment between impending disaster and redemption. The historical details are interchangeable, but the patterns and underlying meaning are consistent and eternal. Just as Nineveh, Egypt, and Rome are different manifestations of the same phenomenon, so Nazi Germany is only its latest and most vile incarnation. In the post-war period, the Soviet Union was also beginning to manifest itself as yet another persecutor of the Jews. It was probably in reference, at least in part, to this play that the issue of cyclical time was raised during Bergelson’s interrogation after his 1949 arrest. Bergelson testified that Mikhoels gave the impression of time as an eternal cycle in which Jewish suffering is perpetually repeated.29 The play’s ending, in which Reuveni, with Amnon by his side, sacrifices himself al kidesh hashem, ‘for the Sanctification of God’s name’, the Jewish definition of martyrdom, illustrates this pattern most poignantly. The notion of kidesh hashem situates Reuveni within the tradition of Jewish self-sacrifice dating back to the martyrs of the Second Temple period. Bergelson, following in the tradition of rabbinic literature as noted by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ‘seems to play with time as though with an accordion, expanding and collapsing it at will’.30 This juxtaposition is at its most jarring with the cameo appearance of Rabbi Amnon, the martyr of the Crusades, in the Lisbon harbour, but is also manifested in the equation between the Inquisition and Amalek, Edom, Haman, and Rome. Had Prints Ruveni ever been performed, those Soviet Jews who might have sat in its audience would very likely have added Hitler to this list, and some Stalin as well. Historical figures came and went, but for the Bergelson of Prints Ruveni and the rabbis of the Talmud, as long as the Jewish people were trapped within the cycle of suffering between the biblical era and the coming of the Messiah, historical time was of little concern. As Reuveni declares in his dying moments, ikh bafel | dos dir — dos folk vil vayter lebn ... gey! | [...] Fun undz, | fun undzer umkumen ot do mit shtolts | far ayer vayterdikn lebn, ‘I command you — the people will continue to live ... Go! | [...] From us, from our perishing here with pride, | to your continued life’ (125–26). The cycle will continue perpetually. Through destruction and kidesh hashem will come regeneration and redemption. As an astrologer foretells through the mouth of the character Montino, netzokh Yisroel lo yishoker, ‘The Glory of Israel will not deny itself ’ (71), a phrase from Samuel 15. 29 commonly used to signify the long-term persistence and survival of world Jewry. Both the official Soviet cultural line and the strivings of Soviet Jewry in the aftermath of the war called for works of art that celebrated self-sacrifice in the face of destruction, and for continuity in the face of death. Prints Ruveni fitted the climate of the times perfectly. It is probably this tension between the play’s overt conformity with post-war Soviet ideology and its potentially anti-Soviet subtext that led the censors consistently to approve it for production year after year, but ultimately to prevent its performance. While set in a distant time and place, Prints Ruveni portrays the very real hopes and dreams of post-war Soviet Jewry. Of all Bergelson’s Soviet works, Prints Ruveni

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is set in the most distant time and place, but is perhaps the one that best captured the zeitgeist of its period. Its inherent ambivalence makes it impossible to know exactly how audiences would have received it, or what message Bergelson truly intended by it. The theme of crypto-Jews responding to persecution by force of arms certainly had the potential to be read as a commentary on the contemporary disillusionment of Soviet Jewry. Bergelson’s extensive use of the Hebrew language, as well as motifs drawn from traditional Jewish prayer, indicate a bold reaction on his part against the secularist and internationalist policies he himself had championed during the inter-war period. The theme of atonement, particularly for the sin of apostasy, points to Bergelson’s desire to seek forgiveness for having publicly disavowed his faith and his people’s national strivings. Bergelson himself may have wanted to be remembered as a crypto-Jew who, while publicly disavowing his faith, secretly held true to it. Or perhaps he sought atonement for the prominent part he had played in leading young Soviet Jews away from their faith, and for believing in this mission himself. The play urges us to look anew at Bergelson’s Soviet works for a possible answer to all these questions. In any case, in the aftermath of the war, Bergelson arguably became convinced that the Soviet Union could not provide eternal shelter for him or his people. As the play asserts, the defeat of one oppressor simply means that another will arise to take its place. This is the nature of Jewish history. Egypt, Nineveh, Haman, the Roman Empire, the Crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition are all conf lated in the play as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Audiences recovering from the recent defeat of the Germans could easily have been led to believe that Nazis too would be replaced. By the end of the war, when Prints Ruveni was written, it was becoming increasingly clear that, under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet Union was preparing to fulfil this role. Reuveni’s solution, to discard passive messianic dreams and sacrifice oneself instead in the tradition of kidesh hashem by taking up arms under a Jewish f lag, suggests that Bergelson may have been advocating a Zionist solution. Although the campaign against ‘bourgeois nationalism’ had not yet begun in earnest at the time of the play’s composition, it was in ample evidence during the play’s final rehearsals, when Mikhoels insisted on continuing his work on its presentation despite the increasingly obvious dangers. Bergelson very likely understood the risks he was taking in writing such a play. By implying that he was recanting and seeking atonement for his earlier support of the Soviet regime, he may very well have understood that he, like Reuveni, was sacrificing himself in order to express the national strivings of his people. Notes to Chapter 13 1. For more on Mikhoels and the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre see Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 2. Natalia Vovsi-Mikhoels, Mon père Salomon Mikhoels: souvenirs sur sa vie et sur sa mort, trans. Erwin Spatz (Monticher, Switzerland: Les Editions Noir sur Blanc, 1990), p. 212. 3. Vovsi-Mikhoels, Mon père, p. 225. 4. V. P. Naumov (ed.), Nepravdenyi sud. Poslednii stalinskii rasstrel (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), p. 308. 5. See, for instance, P. L. Kapitsa, Vosponiniia, pisma, dokumenty (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), p. 86. 6. For more on the Kipnis affair, see Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–

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1967: A Documented Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 149, 171–72; and Yehoshua A. Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, 1939–1953 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), pp. 143–45. 7. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur (New York, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 382–83. 8. Bergelson’s earlier work for the stage had been strictly realistic adaptations of his own prose works that had contemporary relevance. He made his stage debut in 1929 with an adaptation of his civil war short story ‘Baym telefon’ (At the telephone) for performance during his tour of America; his adaptation of ‘Der toyber’ (The deaf man), originally performed in Gomel, was restaged with immense success by GOSET in 1930, as was his stage version of his novel Mideshadin (The full severity of the law) in 1933. In each case, the subtleties of the original prose texts were elided in favour of crude propagation of the Party line; it was left to the acting and direction of Mikhoels to suggest ambivalences subtextually, through gesture and other stage devices. See Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater, pp. 121–25; 133–34. 9. Cited in Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (London: Pan Books, 1965), p. 242. 10. See Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater, pp. 243–45. 11. Rossiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), f. 2307, op. 1, d. 4, l. 10. 12. ‘Vystuplenie v komitete po delam iskusstv 1946 g.’, uncatalogued manuscript in Israel Goor Theater Archive and Museum, Jerusalem, Israel. 13. RGALI. f. 2307, op. 1, d. 4, l. 16. 14. RGALI F. 2307, op. 2, d. 101–11. 15. David Bergelson, Prints Ruveni (New York: YKUF, 1946). All quotations from the play in this essay are taken from this edition, to which page numbers in parentheses refer. 16. Shmuel Niger, Yidishe shrayber in Sovet-Rusland (New York: S. Niger Book Committee, 1958), p. 329. See also Avrom Novershtern, Kesem ha-dimdumim: apokalipsah u-meshihiyut be-sifrut Yidish ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003), pp. 310–20. 17. Nakhmen Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn un der yidisher shrayber in Sovetnfarband (New York: YKUF, 1959), p. 199. 18. Shmuel Rozhansky, Yidishe literatur — yidish lebn (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1973), II, 466; Nakhmen Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn, p. 199. 19. For a discussion of the conf lict between messianism and politics in post-war Jewish thinking see Michael L. Morgan, Interim Judaism: Jewish Thought in a Century of Crisis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 83–118. 20. For more on the concept of the Third Rome see Daniel B. Rowland, ‘Moscow — The Third Rome or the New Israel?’, Russian Review, 55 (October 1996), 591–614; and Peter J. S. Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Communism and After (London: Routledge, 2000). 21. The Book of Jonah is the Haftarah or portion of the prophets read during the minkhe or afternoon service of the Day of Atonement. It is chosen chief ly because of the way it celebrates God’s acceptance of the fasting and repentance of the Ninevites. 22. This is a collective confession of sins, arranged in the order of the Hebrew alphabet, which the worshippers in a congregation recite in conjunction with the longer confession Al kheyt during each of the five services of Yom Kippur. Since these confessions form part of the Amidah prayer, which is recited first in silence by the congregation and then repeated by the cantor, the number of its recitals during the course of the day is doubled to ten. 23. For more on the suppression of Hebrew in the Soviet Union see Yehoshua A. Gilboa, A Language Silenced: The Suppression of Hebrew Literature and Culture in the Soviet Union (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982). 24. Cited in Matvei Geizer, Solomon Mikhoels (Moscow: Prometei, 1990), p. 186. 25. Brider yidn fun der gantser velt! (Moscow: Der emes, 1941), p. 9. 26. Brider yidn, p. 20. 27. ‘Soviet Delegates Urge Unity Here’, New York Times, 9 July 1943, p. 5. 28. Brider yidn, p. 20. 29. V. P. Naumov (ed.), Nepravdenyi sud. Poslednii stalinskii rasstrel, p. 83. 30. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 17.

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C H A P T E R 14

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‘Jewish Nationalism’ in Bergelson’s Last Book (1947) Joseph Sherman I After 1945, under the slogan ‘Do not divide the dead’, Soviet policy downplayed the calculated German persecution of Jews. Fascism, it was maintained, had menaced all ‘peaceful Soviet citizens’ equally, so Jewish suffering was not acknowledged as qualitatively and quantitatively different from the suffering of other ethnic groups. Even while the war still raged, an official Soviet commission investigating German atrocities was instructed to avoid mentioning Jews as the selected victims of deliberate large-scale massacres, and to suppress the extent to which Ukrainians, acting as special Politzei, had collaborated with the SS in mass shootings of Jews. Soviet vocabulary had no equivalent term for ‘Holocaust’ and never evoked the concept.1 Limited information about German atrocities against Jews in the occupied territories was for the most part available only in the limited-edition Yiddish newspaper Eynikayt. Members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee ( JAFC), Bergelson among them, who had privileged access to information, knew well that a central aim of the German attack on the Soviet Union had been the annihilation of Eastern Europe’s Jews. In seeking to highlight this tragedy, however, informed Yiddish writers were obliged to follow the Party’s ideological line and to keep within the mandatory confines of ‘socialist realism’. Often the most they could do was to publish accounts of atrocities as though they were news reports from the front, as Der Nister did in writing up a number of what he called faln, ‘cases’, gained at first hand from refugees during the German occupation.2 Conscious of these considerations, in 1947 the censorship gave permission for Emes, the official (and only) Yiddish publishing house in the Soviet Union, to publish what was to be Bergelson’s last complete book. Entitled Naye dersteylungen (New stories), it offered its readers nine short stories, seven of which dealt with the German invasion and its aftermath. The embryonic concept of ‘proletarian realism’ was first articulated by Stalin in 1925, during a speech to students of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East.3 In 1932, after the regime promulgated the decree ‘On the reconstruction of literary and art organizations’, the Union of Soviet Writers was established which, in controlling output, ensured that the term ‘socialist realism’ came into general

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use. An essay published in the May 1932 issue of Literaturnaya gazeta called for ‘a revolutionary, socialist realism in the representation of the proletarian revolution’, a demand echoed by Maksim Gorky in his 1933 essay, ‘On socialist realism’.4 Approved by Stalin, this doctrine was adopted at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Enforced in all spheres of artistic endeavour, it required the creative artist to serve the proletariat by optimistically representing ‘real’ life. It was, of course, always clear that ‘socialist content’ was to take precedence over ‘national form’, a postulate that defined both the language that could be used and the national allusions that could be drawn on, although the extent of both was controlled by Party ideologists. Aware of all this, and without directly creating a hidden subtext in his new work, Bergelson deployed such narrative tropes as metonymy and synecdoche to function on both literal and figurative levels. During the war years, while it promoted ‘the love of all Soviet peoples for their socialist fatherland’, the regime adopted a more tolerant attitude towards the national and religious traditions of its ethnic minorities.5 As a result, Yiddish fiction and poetry increasingly celebrated Jewish national identity, Jewish heroism on the battlefield, and Jewish suffering by reviving religious and national motifs.6 To counter the Nazi extermination of the Jews of Europe, it reasserted its roots in Jewish national consciousness. Encouraged by wartime’s comparative liberalism, after the war the leaders of Soviet Jewry actively tried to strengthen their position within the Soviet establishment. They rashly believed that wartime expediency would extend to permanent sanction for the continued celebration of national selfawareness.7 But when peace came, suppression of the memory of the Holocaust intensified.8 By 1946, those collecting documentary material were forced to cease their activities, assertions of Jewish particularism were condemned as manifestations of ‘Jewish nationalism’, and mention of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union was stigmatized as disloyalty to the state. Stalin was particularly concerned about the extent to which the war had aroused national self-consciousness among the Soviet Union’s ethnic minorities. He saw incipient nationalism as a threat to the unity of the communist empire and the potential cause of its future dissolution.9 A campaign aimed particularly at historians, writers, philosophers, and artists was accordingly launched in a speech delivered in August 1946 by Andrei Zhdanov, the Party’s chief ideologist, in which he denounced all ‘worshippers of bourgeois culture’. These included writers who displayed any sense of national consciousness, all ‘alien’ inf luences on Russian culture and scientific life, all those who, in ‘bowing down’ before Western culture denigrated the great Russian tradition, and all tendencies in art or literature that supposedly undermined Soviet patriotism.10 Following Party directives, on 24 September 1946 Eynikayt published corresponding attacks against Yiddish writing that was ‘apolitical, devoid of ideas, and nationalist in character’, and by April 1947, various Jewish artists were specifically accused of an unhealthy preoccupation with Jewish history, a romantic attachment to the old Jewish way of life, and harmful attitudes to the progress of modern Soviet society.11 This was the disturbing background against which Bergelson’s new volume of stories appeared. As one of the best-known Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union, he

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would have been acutely aware both of the unstable ideological climate and of the extent to which anything he published would come under the closest scrutiny, so he clearly had to find ways in which to balance the considerations of the moment against any Jewish self-awareness, particularly in respect of the Holocaust. As a result, most of the stories in this collection depicting resistance to the Germans present characters who, although nominally Jews, are indistinguishable from other Soviet citizens. This is so with Godashvili, the young Jewish-Georgian student taken hostage by three Germans in ‘Tsvishn barg’ (In the mountains), with Meyer Shlayen, the railway signalman in ‘In shayn fun shayters’ (By the light of bonfires), and with Mikhl Kaplan, the truck driver in ‘A shvere kharakter’ (A difficult character). In addition, the tales in which these figures feature are embellished with stock praise for the omniscient benevolence of the Leader and the Party. On one occasion, the mere presence of Stalin’s portrait converts a desolate hovel into a haven of comfort: Un fun ot dem portret, vos hot, bashitsndik un tsuzogndik, aropgekukt fun der vant, iz in shtibl gevorn mit amol fil heymlekher, vi glaykh me volt okorsht itst tsum ershtn mol hobn oysgeheytst dem oyvn un tsum ershtn mol derfilt, vi varemkayt baruikt. (‘In shayn fun shayters’, p. 142) [And from this portrait, which protectively and reassuringly gazed down from the wall, the little dwelling suddenly grew much cosier, as though the stove had only just been heated for the first time, and the way in which warmth could soothe was only now being felt.]

Elsewhere, in the heat of battle on the western front, the powerfully built Mikhl is severely wounded, but finds new strength — and richer meaning in a hitherto unsatisfying existence — as soon as he recognizes, in the heroic conduct of a much weaker comrade, the inspiring power of the Communist Party. This comrade, Babayev, visits him in hospital in company with a lieutenant in the politotdel — the political department charged with ensuring the steadfastness of Red Army troops from their rear — who brings with him healing powers of a unique kind:12 — Iz vos? — hot geshmeykhlt tsu Mikhlen der leytenant, — iz, aponem, an ankete un in der partey, vi? ... — A? — hot meyoyshevdik ibergefregt Mikhl. Dos hot er a trakht geton vegn dem derbay-shteyendikn Babayevn un vegn dem simen, vos er, Mikhl, hot zikh in im gemakht: ‘Komsomolyets iz ... s’iz koykhes!’ Ersht tsurik mit etlekhe sho hot men fun Mikhls akslen gehat aroysgenumen di shpliters. Er iz geven zeyer opgeshvakht, un in koykhes hot er zikh azoy shtark geneytikt. — Nu yo, aponem azoy iz es, — hot er geentfert dem leytenant funem politopteyl un derbay a kuk gegebn af im, vi af epes azoyns, vos zi, di milkhome, hot es untergeshikt tsu im, Mikhlen, un take, mashmoes, fun zayn, Mikhls, toyve vegn (‘A shvere kharakter’, p. 169) [— Is this significant? — the lieutenant smiled at Mikhl. — This is apparently an application to join the Party, or what? ... — Eh? — enquired Mikhl passively. As he did so, he thought about Babayev, who was standing nearby, and about the affirmation he had found in him:

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JOSEPH SHERMAN ‘To be a member of the Komsomol is ... it’s strength!’ The shrapnel had been removed from Mikl’s back only a few hours earlier. He had been greatly weakened, and had great need of strength. — Well, yes, apparently so it is, — he answered the lieutenant of the political division, at the same time glancing at him as at something which the war had sent him with particular care and, indeed, presumably only for his benefit.]

Within constraints of this kind, Bergelson found ways to speak, allusively and dexterously, to particularistic Jewish concerns and to address the nature of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. These themes are most fully developed in two stories — respectively entitled ‘An eydes’ (A witness) and ‘Der skulptor’ (The sculptor), and placed one after the other in the volume’s arrangement — which are set in unnamed but clearly identifiable Jewish towns in Ukraine and depict the aftershock of the Holocaust expressly from the point of view of its Jewish survivors. II ‘An eydes’, set in der nit lang bafrayter republikanisher hoyptshtot, ‘in the recently liberated republican capital’ (Y 45/E 55),13 offers the rubble of bombed-out buildings as the physical correlative of irreparable emotional fragmentation. The living are indistinguishable from the dead: individuality of appearance and action are erased, and corporeality manifests itself as readily in two as in three dimensions. Hence the old Jew who is the tale’s eponymous witness appears bloyz oysgemolt in der tunkeler pustkayt fun der felndiker tir, ‘something painted on in the dark aperture where the door had been’. His emblematic function is stressed by the background — as in a portrait, designed to highlight and define its subject — against which he is presented: an obliterated signboard bearing the unintelligible fragment of a word complements his face from which s’felt epes, ‘there was something missing’, and his garments, that bet zikh, me zol es vos gikher farbaytn af epes anders, ‘simply begged to be changed to something else’ (Y 45/E 55). Both background and foreground are sundered from any context that might supply meaning. Truncated physical fragments are thus made to emblematize the tale’s two chief characters, the old Jew himself, and Dora, the woman who unwillingly becomes his amanuensis. The bald graffito, Khane hot men avekgefirt fun geto dem 27-tn gants fri, ‘Hannah was taken out of the ghetto very early on the 27th’, appears ‘meaningless’ to passers-by, because Hannah has been decontextualized, a condition she shares with both the old Jew and Dora; only the fact that she is dead and they are alive distinguishes them. Yet this depersonalization makes the anonymous Hannah a synecdoche for those millions of others to whose murders the equally unknown old Jew intends to bear witness. This alone is what he understands as the sole purpose of his continued existence; unlike those around him who are desperate to resume interrupted lives, he has no connection except with the dead. This solipsistic self-awareness invests his first exchange with Dora with profound irony: — Mikh? — fregt zi baym yidn. — Mikh darft ir? Ir dakht zikh az der yid hot zi nor vos a ruf geton. Un take do bald, baym

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ershtn kuk oyf im, falt ir ayn, az er iz a blinder — tsi darf er nit, me zol im ariberfirn afn andern trotvar? — Vos? — fregt kaltlekh der yid. Nit geaylt firt er op zayn farshtartn blik fun der vant mitn oyfshrift, vos in antkegndikn hayzer-gevalger, un farhalt im bloyz eyn rege afn meydl. — Meglekh, az aykh darf ikh. (Y 46) [‘Me?’ she asked the Jew. ‘You want me?’ She had thought he had called her. And now, looking at him it occurred to her that he must be blind, and wanted her to take him across the street. ‘What?’ he asked dully. Unhurriedly he removed his numbed gaze from the wall and the inscription there, and rested it for a moment on the young woman. ‘Perhaps I do need you.’ (E 55)]

On the level of daily intercourse, the old Jew is unseeing of the life being rebuilt all round him, blind to the fact of his own survival, blind to the day-to-day provision of necessities in which Dora, for example, is engaged. So he has no comprehension of what Dora means when she offers him clothes, nor any use for the job he has been given other than as a means to fulfil his sole function as der eyntsiker geblibener eydes, ‘the only remaining witness’ (Y 47/E 56). By distinguishing between different kinds of survivors, the narrative suggests different values to be attached to their testimonies. Dora, the narrative voice relates, rekhnt, az zi farshteyt shoyn beerekh vegn vos geyen do di reyd, ‘thought [my emphasis] that now she knew what the old man was talking about’ because, as she adds, ver iz den haynt nit keyn eydes? ... Un ver iz den haynt nit keyn geblibener?, ‘Who isn’t a witness nowadays? And who isn’t nowadays a survivor?’ (Y 47/E 56). In these terms, of course, Dora is correct; all who are still alive are survivors. But the old Jew, with his angry demand, Hert, vos me zogt aykh!, ‘Listen to what I’m telling you!’, insists on a different degree of survival and therefore on a different intensity of witness. As the only survivor of ‘a death camp somewhere outside Lvov’ — in reality Belzec — where, as the narrative records, iber a milyon, ‘over a million’, Jews were slaughtered, he demands that Dora devote her youth and strength to writing down his testimony.14 Never stated directly, Dora’s consent derives from the arbitrary nature of the life she is living, which is presented in two contrasting images. The first is of her community support job at the town hall where at her office door vart tsu yeder tsayt fil mer oylem vi lebn andere skheynishe tirn, ‘there were always more people waiting than at the other adjoining doors’. The second is what she takes to be dem umnutslekhn oyfshrift, ‘the useless inscription’ that insistently recalls the unknown Hannah (Y 48/E 57). Accordingly when we are told, one sentence later, that the old Jew ‘spoke’, and she ‘wrote’, the act of writing becomes an attempt not simply to record but also to impose meaning on what is related, since it gradually becomes clear to her az dos alts hot a shaykhes [...] tsum umkumen [...] fun ir gantser mishpokhe un fun ale ire noente do in shtot, ‘that it was all connected with [...] the destruction of her whole family and all her near ones in this town’ (Y 51/E 59). This connection, clearly the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’, would have been obvious to a Soviet reader of Yiddish in 1947, even though a note recording the desperate attempt of the Jews in Lvov to break through to the

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partisans had been among the many censorship cuts made to the Russian text of The Black Book.15 The fragmentary nature of Dora’s attempt to restore her family home is a correlative of her inability to achieve any emotional reinstatement, and points to the impossibility of either properly recording or imposing meaning on the devastation. The only survivor of a family of eight, with all her friends and neighbours either scattered or dead, all she has salvaged are the shell of her family’s apartment in halb-khorevn hoyz, ‘in the half-ruined building’, and its former dining table, shoyn gor keyn keyle nit, ‘hardly an article of furniture any more’. These inanimate, barely functional objects are partially revived by the physical labour of Dora’s scrubbing and polishing, a manifest attempt to purify which achieves more the illusion than the reality that vider iz [...] gevorn heymlekh bay di Aronskis in voynung, ‘the Aronskis’ apartment looked like home again’ (Y 49/E 57). In the gloom of dark, ill-lit winter evenings, the solitary, gaudy cloth on the table and the silk scarf draped over the karkas, ‘skeleton’, of the chandelier are parodies of homeliness, emphasizing what is missing rather than what is present, as the narrative eye, passing like a camera over the opgelupete vent, ‘battered peeling walls’, insists: vos reyner in tsimer, alts nogndiker iz dos vartenish (Y 49), ‘the cleaner the room, the greater the nagging sense of waiting’. The futility of hoping for an unattainable restoration rooted in deficient externals is pointed up by the newly supplied but non-functioning telephone, a memento mori, the occasional umklorn tsiterikn klang, ‘reluctant unclear trembling sound’ of which merely articulates the f lickering of futile hope that at least her two youngest brothers, serving together at the front, might yet be alive. The unexpected caller who does arrive one night is not a relative but Kiril Biryukov, the officer son of a neighbour hanged with Dora’s father on the same day on the same gallows. United in this desolate room are thus three survivors, each with a different experience but an equal inability either to communicate their own or to absorb that of others. They expose the complexity both of bearing and of comprehending witness. The primary experience is that of the old Jew who has passed through a death camp; the secondary experience is Dora’s attempt to transcribe his narrative; and the third-hand experience is Kiril’s reading of what has been written. Each of these stages transforms the experience: the old man testifies in Yiddish, Dora translates into Russian, and Kiril reads the f lat prose of reportage. Even as this linguistic interchange crudely fulfils the Soviet ideological demand for ‘internationalism’, the essential incommunicability of the experience more subtly highlights the inadequacy of writing, and thus by extension, of literature itself. The room in which these disparate experiences are exchanged is their correlative: the dim electric light zipt zikh koym-koym, ‘hardly manages to seep’ into its kalte pustkayt, ‘cold emptiness’; here there can be neither literal nor figurative illumination of a narrative vos iz a sakh erger fun umkum, fil shreklekher vi toyt, ‘that is much worse than destruction, more terrible than death’ (Y 51/E 58). Though Dora, trained in sedulous work habits from childhood, takes pains to ensure that her Russian translation is grammatically and stylistically perfect, in tokh genumen, ‘fundamentally’, she remains uncertain ver darf ot di mi ire, ‘who needed all this care of hers’ (Y 51/E 59). This crucial question regarding the ‘usefulness’ of bearing

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witness is heightened by a doubt that language in and of itself is at all adequate to articulate it. If testimony given in the mother tongue of an eye-witness has questionable value, how much less has a translation of that testimony? Dora’s need to verify the linguistic accuracy of her translation by reading it back to the old man immediately brings her to this crux: — Yo, — tut umetik zikh a shokl der yid un trakht a vayle, — azoy, aponem, iz es. Er hot ir eyn mol in aza fal shoyn geentfert: — Mikh fregt ir do meyvines? ... Vos ken ikh aykh deruf zogn? ... Di tsores zaynen geven af yidish ... (Y 52) [‘Yes’, he shook himself sadly, and after considering for a while, said: ‘That’s how it seems to have been.’ But once he had answered her: ‘You ask me to judge? What can I tell you? Our sufferings were in Yiddish.’ (E 59)]

Read back to him in Russian, what the old Jew has so painfully related in Yiddish now lies at one remove from what he endured; now what he hears only ‘seems’ — aponem, apparently — to relate to it. Transferred from one language to another, clarity and certainty fade, as he makes clear by using the Hebrew word meyvines, with its connotations of critical judgement based on expert knowledge, to query what Dora is asking of him. On one level, this makes a telling comment on the duplicity of translation. On another, it asserts that language — the medium — indissolubly becomes the message, however incomplete or inadequate. The declaration that di tsores zaynen geven af yidish unites speech and speaker to emphasize — contrary to Stalinist policy — that Hitler’s war was, in one of its chief dimensions, specifically a war against Jews. First-hand experience of it consequently remains untranslatable, even as the act of recording it renders it unrecognizable. Furthermore, transforming an act of recording into a literary exercise trivializes the experience, and completes the process of debasing it. This recognition alters Dora’s approach to her transcription; she abandons precision in favour of speed. Since a written record is ipso facto already f lawed, there is no further place for the contrivances of artistic creation. Inevitably, then, when out of curiosity Kiril reads the old Jew’s testimony, he finds it f lat. Having expected to be shocked by its power, he is instead astonished to find appalling barbarism related in words that are trukn, kimat vi in a protokol, ‘as dry as the minutes of a meeting’ (Y 59/E 63). This is the answer to Dora’s question, vos vet derfun aroyskumen, ‘what would come out of it [all her transcribing and translating]?’ (Y 51/ E59). Nothing will come out of it. The experience is alive only to him who endured it. Once written down, it is rendered lifeless, and becomes incommunicable. Hence the old Jew rouses himself from exhaustion to denounce mortality: Vi ken ikh shtarbn? ... Ikh bin dokh an eydes! ‘How can I die? I am a witness!’ (Y 60/E 64). This is a disturbing acknowledgement that when death silences eye-witnesses, the records of their testimony will be at best unpersuasive and at worst untrue. Two further narrative devices assume symbolic resonance within the confines of ‘socialist realism’. The old Jew no longer has any individual identity: he is never given a personal name; instead, he is a charred ember, literally ‘a brand plucked from the burning’ from whom es filt zikh [...] a reyekh fun gesmoliete beyner, ‘a smell of

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smouldering bones seemed to come’ (Y 52/E 59). He can only focus obsessively on a yunge froy, zeyer a groyse sheynhayt ... a krasevitse — gornit oystsumoln — oysforn veltn, ‘a young woman, outstandingly beautiful, out of this world, impossible to describe’, and on the Nazi cynicism that first orders a young Jewish painter to record this beauty in its naked vulnerability, and then malevolently destroys model and artist alike (Y 52). The incomparable beauty of one individual is as gratuitously destroyed as the artist who has sought to preserve it, highlighting only the uselessness of both. While no art can be worth the cost of a human life, confronted with the nugatory power of motiveless malignity, all art is also a travesty. This shattering recognition — certainly on the part of an artist about his life’s work — is underpinned by the extremes of khliperay [...] hikhtsn un krekhtsn, ‘sobbing [...] sighing, moaning’ to which this particular act of destruction moves its frail witness. These anguished cries are reductively likened to a zhumeray fun a flig, vos volt keseyder zikh klapn un klapn in fentster un volt umetum zikh onshtoysn af gloz (Y 53), ‘the buzzing of a f ly continually banging against the window yet everywhere beating itself against the glass’, in a simile that simultaneously captures the uselessness of grief, and the hopelessness of evading the mockery of both life and art that grief ultimately represents. By raising the question of Professor Biryukov’s ethnicity, Bergelson contrives to highlight the particularism of the Nazi genocide. The old Jew’s testimony reminds Kiril that when, as a boy, he mocked a Jewish playmate, his father dealt with this by confiding that zayn familye iz in der emesn nor Abramson — nor a yid, heyst es (Y 60), ‘his true family name was actually Abramson — [he was] a Jew, in other words’. This archetypal surname transforms a modern Soviet father into a son of Abraham, the destroyer of idols, the progenitor of the Jewish people, and the receiver of God’s promise that his seed would be as numerous as the sands of the sea shore (Genesis 12. 1–3). Although the narrative pays lip-service to the professed Soviet ideal of subordinating ethnicity to internationalism by suggesting that the father is lying for the sake of his son’s moral instruction — a shtikl tsayt hot der foter nokhdem im, Kiriln, gelozt meynen az er iz a yid (Y 60), ‘for a long time afterwards his father allowed Kiril to think [my emphasis] that he was a Jew’ — the ambiguity is deepened by the etymology of the father’s assumed Russian name, which derives from the word biryuk, meaning a lone wolf or an unsociable person,16 strengthening the inference that Kiril’s father, detached from a Jewish community, is another of the Soviet Union’s anusim, forced converts or crypto-Jews. Here it would seem that Bergelson uses this ambivalent literary contrivance subtly to urge Jewish pride in national identity while paying lip-service to the propaganda that under Soviet rule, anti-Semitism is not tolerated. This assertion was a lie, of course: between 1947 and 1953 the regime explicitly set about ‘exposing’ Soviet Jews who concealed their ‘true’ identities by adopting ‘Russian’ surnames.17 By contrast, however, the name and patronymic of Dora’s father — Mordkhe Benzionovich — openly stress his symbolic function as an archetypal representative of the Jewish people: he is called Mordkhe (Mordechai), after the nation-saving uncle of the Jewish queen Esther, and is the son of ‘a son of Zion’, one who hopes for Jewish national restoration. Nevertheless, whether concealed or openly identifying, Jews qua Jews are impotent to fight the Germans — or any other enemy — if all

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they are armed with is a superior sense of ethics. As Dora discovers about the fate of her parents, the devotion of a wife who helps her husband degradingly drag a water cart through the streets is useless in a world where might rules; those like her mother, who fought the Germans mit sheynkayt, mit geveynlekher mentshlekher sheynkayt, ‘with [moral] beauty, with ordinary human beauty’ (Y 54/E 61), are destroyed as easily as the physical beauty burnt to ashes in the death camp. A metaphorical dimension is given also to Biryukov’s chemical research. Concerned with ‘converting something nasty smelling into something sweet smelling’, it is an endeavour his colleague Mordkhe Benzionovich rightly believes to be futile, since all it does is generate an overpowering stench (Y 55/E 61). It is not difficult to see here a censor-proof metonym that would resonate with an alert reader by suggesting policies that have poisoned the fragrance of the promised Soviet utopia. Another literary allusion ironically undermines the Party line still further. Kiril’s girlfriend Valia, a passionate Communist Youth activist, enlists the aid of their elderly fathers in manufacturing and distributing hand grenades to guerrilla partisans. This, Kiril explains to Dora, is how both their fathers became ‘Young Communists’ at the age of seventy: — Vi du vilst dir, — zogt [Kiril] tsu Dore. — Af tsu makhn tsurik yung dem altn Faustn hobn daytshn gemuzt aropbrengen aza fintstern tsinishn gayst vi Mefistofeln, un bay undz hot es durkhgemakht der loykhtik-gleybndiker gayst fun der Komyugistin Valie. Tsi ligt nit oykh in dem der untersheyd tsvishn undzer mentshn un zeyern? Dore entfert deroyf gornit. Zi hot nit geendikt, vi Kiril, keyn shum filologishe fakultetn un muz nokh do gut a trakht ton, vos er meynt. Zi kukt af Kiriln ongeshtrengt, mit aza oysdruk, vi glaykh ir volt fun rege tsu rege alts mer geshtokhn in di shleyfn. (Y 57) [‘There you have it’, [Kiril] said to Dora. ‘When they wanted to rejuvenate old Faust, the Germans were obliged to bring down so sinister and cynical a spirit as Mephistopheles. With us, however, this was achieved by the luminously believing spirit of the Communist Youth member, Valia. Doesn’t this illustrate the difference between their people and ours?’ Dora didn’t answer. Unlike Kiril, she hadn’t graduated from any kind of philology faculty, and she was obliged to give a great deal of thought to what he meant. She concentrated her gaze on Kiril, and from the strained look in her eyes it seemed as if the throbbing in her temples increased from minute to minute.] (E 62, adapted)

The use of Goethe’s Faust as a moral exemplum is deliberately ambiguous. Whether ‘dark’ and ‘cynical’ or ‘bright’ and ‘believing’, Mephistopheles is the agent of the Devil, and it is with the Devil that Faust strikes his bargain. The bleak narrative wit that employs the chief model of German Hochkultur to undermine German claims to superiority also subtly challenges Soviet boasts about ‘the difference between their people and ours’, certainly in regard to the treatment meted out to Jews. Lest this point be overlooked, the narrative emphasizes the extent to which this glib contrast troubles Dora: untrained in the kind of sophistry with which Marxist dialectic reconciles blatant contradictions, she — like the attentive reader — remains unconvinced.

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III The second story, fully twice the length of the first, is more complex in developing its allusions. Although the deserted town in which it is set is never named, a number of clues establish it as Berdichev. It is, we are told, eyne fun di shtile mitele shtet af der grenets tsvishn Podolya un Volin (Y 61),18 ‘one of the quiet middle-sized towns on the border between Podolia and Volhynia’, and was a gants alte yidish shtot, ‘a very old Jewish town’, descriptions that recall the traditional designation of Berdichev as the ‘Jerusalem of three gubernias’ because it was situated between the tsarist provinces of Kiev, Volhynia, and Podolia.19 This town, the narrative goes on, hot opgeshpilt ir rol in fil yidishe folks-mayses vegn erdishe lodenishn mit himlshn got (Y 62), ‘had played its role in a great many Jewish folk-tales about earthly lawsuits against a heavenly God’, a plain reference to the early Hasidic leader, Levi Yitskhok (1740–1809), known as derbarmdiker, the compassionate, who served as rabbi of Berdichev from 1785 until his death in 1809. One of his best-known teachings was, ‘Whether someone really loves God can be determined by the love he bears toward human beings’,20 a principle he practised himself, most famously one Yom Kippur when, in praying before the congregation, he insisted that since requests for pardon had to be reciprocal, the Almighty must also seek forgiveness for the aff lictions He had visited on the People of Israel. Although statistically there were more Jews in other towns, Berdichev, where Jews comprised a majority of the population, was regarded as the most Jewish town in Ukraine; even before the 1917 revolution, both anti-Semites and Jews called it ‘the Jewish capital’. It had been an important centre of Hasidism in the eighteenth century and a promoter of the Haskalah in the nineteenth century; both Mendele and Sholem Aleichem had lived and worked there, and its Jews had dwelt in harmony with their Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish neighbours; until the pogroms and anti-Jewish riots of the civil war period, Berdichev had never suffered any anti-Jewish violence.21 In accordance with the nationalities policy adopted throughout the Soviet Union in 1923, the first Yiddish-language law court was established in Berdichev in July 1924.22 Berdichev was a strategic military target because, as the junction of several railway lines leading from Poland to the east as well as the terminus of a highway from Zhitomir, it offered a logistically well-supplied base from which to attack Kiev. Moreover, since it was home to approximately 30,000 Jews — half its total population — the town offered the SS its first major opportunity for a wholesale massacre and thus infamously became the first testing ground of the Nazis’ ability to commit mass murder. While Berdichev’s buildings were barely damaged during the occupation, virtually all its Jews were exterminated. The Germans entered Berdichev on 7 July 1941, two weeks after their invasion began, but they encountered such fierce resistance that they only secured the town after ten days of heavy fighting and the dispatch of reinforcements. The compulsory creation of ghettos was decreed throughout the Ukraine on 13 August 1941, and Berdichev’s Jewish residents, declared illegal, were confined in the Yatki Bazaar, the town’s poorest district, while their homes were looted by Ukrainian locals

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with whom the Germans established a relationship of ‘peace and friendship’. On 5 September, 10,000 people, including most of the town’s Jewish young men, were transported to an area five miles south of Berdichev, shot, and buried in huge pits dug earlier. Left behind in the ghetto were those incapable of organizing any resistance, mainly women, children, and the elderly. Ten days later, at four in the morning of 15 September, German troops force-marched them to a field near Berdichev’s airstrip where they were shot down in groups of forty. Nearly 20,000 people were massacred in less than two days. The German army selected some 400 Jews — among them doctors, tailors, shoemakers, barbers, and their families — whose special skills could be useful to them; housed in the cellar of the town’s Carmelite convent, the majority were shot on 28 October 1941, although the last survivors were murdered only hours before the Red Army recaptured the town on 7 January 1944.23 These appalling facts were known to Bergelson, as to all other members of the JAFC.24 When he came to write this story, he knew, however, that he could only indicate that Jews had been singled out for planned destruction by using culture-specific allusions not readily accessible to the uninformed. As the tale opens, the view that greets the sculptor as he returns to his birthplace after its liberation unmistakably evokes the Berdichev massacre. He finds the town gants, kimat nit gerirt, ‘whole, virtually untouched’, yet dos iz fil shreklekher fun yene shoyder vos er hot zikh forgeshtelt (Y62), this ‘was more shocking to him than the horror he had imagined’: Keyn roykh iz nit gegangen fun keyn eyn koymen, un dokh hot zikh gedakht, az alts arum-un-arum reykhert zikh un tliet. Keyn toyte kerper hobn in ergets zikh nit gevalgert, nor in der luft hot der heyser vint fun umetum dertrogn tsu der noz a reyekh fun morg — fun der gantser shtot hot zikh gefilt vi fun a nit-bagrobenem mes. (Y 62) [No smoke rose from a single chimney. Yet it seemed that everything all around was smouldering and smoking. No corpses lay scattered about anywhere, yet in the air the hot wind carried to every nose the smell of a morgue — the whole town reeked as though from an unburied corpse.]

The reactions that follow, though depicted in approved socialist-realist terms, can be read as a dramatization of the distinction Levi Yitskhok made between sorrow and joy: When he was asked which was the right way, that of sorrow or that of joy, [he] said: There are two kinds of sorrow and two kinds of joy. When a person broods over the misfortunes that have come upon him, when he cowers in a corner and despairs of help — that is a bad kind of sorrow, concerning which it is said, ‘The Divine Presence does not dwell in a place of dejection.’ The other kind is the honest grief of a person who knows what he lacks. The same is true of joy. He who is devoid of inner substance and, in the midst of his empty pleasures, does not feel it, nor tries to fill his lack, is a fool. But he who is truly joyful is like a person whose house has burned down, who feels his need deep in his soul and begins to build anew. Over every stone that is laid, his heart rejoices.25

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It is not surprising that Bergelson should draw on Hasidism’s long tradition of instruction through parable; after all, he had grown up in a devout Hasidic home. But his use of such material made it censor-proof, since only readers familiar with Hasidic teachings would pick up this allusion. Moreover, he carefully follows the rules of socialist realism by making his chief character a type rather than an individual: predominantly identified only by his public persona as ‘the sculptor’, only in one brief encounter with a former schoolmate is he recognized more personally as Leybl dem parikmakhers, ‘Leybl the barber’s son’ (Y 72). Bergelson’s choice of a sculptor as the chief bearer of this tale’s import is equivocal. Under Stalin, sculptors were important creators of representational monuments blazoning forth the triumph of the Soviet enterprise. In Jewish terms, however, since the second commandment clearly prohibits the making of ‘graven images’, sculpture was the least ‘Jewish’ form of art.26 In traditional Jewish life, a ‘sculptor’ — working in two rather than three dimensions — is primarily the creator of tombstones commemorating the dead. While the sculptor of this story seems, in the work he produces, to be commemorating the indomitable spirit of those who survive to rebuild the glowing communist future, he is in reality memorializing what has been irrecoverably lost. Recognizing that he himself has no future in this Judenrein old town, he can only craft images of a dead world. The story develops more deeply traditional Jewish motifs as well. The father’s goat, for example, references an ancient and multivalent Jewish symbol. Clean according to Jewish dietary laws, the animal provided both meat and milk; its hide was used to make parchment and wineskins, while woven goat hair provided the first curtain over the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25. 4–5). In Eastern Europe, goats were an important staple of Jewish life: reared in countless homes, they were believed to be endowed with mystical qualities, and Jewish folklore is rich in tales of loss and longing embodied in the image of a goat, a ram, or a kid. The best-known of these is the quasi-folksong ‘Rozhinkes mit mandlen’ (Raisins and almonds), which personifies Israel as the widow Bas-tsiyen (Daughter of Zion) rocking to sleep her only son Yidele (little Jew), under whose cradle lies a shney-vays tsigle, a snow white kid.27 In traditional Ashkenazi life, this image came nostalgically to connote the warmth and shelter of family and the parental home. A midrash recounts that God chose Moses to lead Israel out of bondage because when he was still a humble shepherd, one of the young goats under his care strayed from the herd; finding it weak and unable to return when he went in search of it, Moses carried it back to safety in his arms. Goats as symbols of both collective and individual longings are central to several of Judaism’s ritual observances. A kid is the creature at the centre of Khad gadya (Only one kid), the best-known of all Passover zmires, the table songs sung at the conclusion of the seder, the ritual meal commemorating the redemption of the Jewish people from slavery.28 Khad gadya is traditionally interpreted as allegorically recounting the persecutions of the Jewish people who will be redeemed only when God slays the Angel of Death, a reading that makes it especially pertinent to any attempt to make sense of the Holocaust. The story of the akedah or the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22. 1–19), the central section of the Torah portion read on Rosh

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ha-Shanah, concludes with the substitution of a sacrificial ram; this links it to the sacrificial scapegoat which Aaron, the High Priest, is commanded to burden with the collective sins of the Jewish people and drive ‘by the hand of an appointed man (ish iti)’ into an inaccessible region in the wilderness (Leviticus 16. 21–22). This command is delivered in the parsha or Torah reading known, by its first two words, as Akharey mot, ‘after the death [of the two sons of Aaron]’, read annually on the third Sabbath after Passover, and repeated during the morning service of the Day of Atonement. There is deliberate irony in recalling a parsha entitled ‘After the death’ in narrating the annihilation of an entire Jewish town, as in the pointed reversal by which the death of sons is replaced with the death of a father. The death of Aaron’s two sons (Leviticus 10. 1–3) occurred on the most auspicious of occasions, when the work of building the Tabernacle was completed and God’s Holy Presence descended to validate its construction. By contrast with exegetes who maintain that their deaths were in punishment for some sin against holiness, a midrash teaches that their deaths are mentioned in connection with Yom Kippur to assert that the death of the righteous effects atonement for Israel.29 The deaths of the innocent, however painful, sanctify God’s name. Such traditional resonances in the metonymic use of the dead father’s goat place the murdered Jews of Berdichev in the role of arbitrarily selected sacrifices; they are the innocent ‘righteous’ who have been offered up. Biblical allusions are rife in the story. The sculptor sees himself and the Ukrainian peasant girl Teklie, the only two returnees to the town, as a new primordial pair, a fremder Odom mit a fremder Khave (Y 66), ‘an unfamiliar Adam with an unfamiliar Eve’, called upon to rebuild an entire world. His father’s quite ordinary goat, a tsig vi ale tsign (Y 66), has found its own way to a small herd of farm animals, almost all associated with Temple sacrifice — three young heifers, a young bull, and two goats — located in a gants vayter lonke tif in vald (Y 68), ‘in a very distant pasture deep in the woods’. The metaphorical scapegoat has made its way ‘to Azazel’, as it were, and its return brings hope for restoration. In pursuing these allusions, it can be argued that the role of the scriptural ish iti or ‘appointed man’ is filled by the sculptor’s deaf-mute father whose disabilities — deprived of speech and hearing — metonymically bespeak the plight of all twentieth-century Jewry. However, escaping the fate of his fellow Jews, he dies assisting the partisan resistance. In approved Party terms, he functions as a symbol of shared patriotism, a hero shot on the bridge linking the Jewish to the Ukrainian town while carrying weapons to his Soviet brethren. But the sculptor also recognises az zayn toyb-shtumen foters sof keytlt zikh nor mit epes a min onheyb (Y 75), ‘that his deaf-mute father’s end was bound up with some kind of beginning’. His valiant death transforms Jews from passive victims to active agents. In the person of this handicapped old barber, they reject their theologically defined role as ‘God’s suffering servants’ in favour of fighting for their freedom.30 But one man’s resistance cannot counterbalance the German massacres, the scale of which is stressed by the absence of anyone to share the abundance brought forth by the highly fertile soil of Podolia. Before the invasion, the collective farmer Teklie used bring the region’s produce to the town’s market; in a gesture of defiant

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reconstruction, she brings even more after the Germans have been driven out. Now, however, her action simply highlights a moral indecency: the season’s lush harvest rots for want of people to eat it: Unter di dine heytlekh zaynen ire pomidorn — tsugeklibn-royte un groyse, vi tsunoyfgevaksn dray un mer af a mol — geven ful ongegosn mit zoyerlekhvayniker zaft. Nor in shtot zaynen nit geven keyn tseyn, vos zoln vern fun ot der zaft ayngenemen-haylik. Di pshenitshkes in zeyer grinem, kimat nokh faykhtn onton hobn aroysgeshtekt fun koshekl mit zeyere frishe f laksene grives. Nor in shtot zaynen nit geven keyn kinder, vos zoln mit groys umgeduld vartn, biz di mame vet di pshenitshkes koyfn un opkokhn, un biz zey veln mitn varemen katshan in di hentlekh zikh kenen aroyslozn durkh der hintertir in gas, un girik-freserish zikh aynbaysn in di zetik-batamte kerner. Arumgeleygt fun ale zaytn mit farhoykhket-blove patlazshanes, iz in koshikl gelegn a lenglekhe dinye — di ershte fartik gevorene dinye. Zikh tsevaremt do in mark af der heyser zun, hot zi genumen aroysgebn dem sharfn reyekh fun der tsuker-ziser yoykh un fun di kerner, vos boyten zikh in ir. Nor in shtot iz nit geven keyn noz, vos zol durkh ot dem reyekh derfiln, az der zumer halt shoyn baym sof [...] (Y 75–76) [Under their thin skins — gathered together in a rush of red and very large, as though three or more had grown together at the same time — her tomatoes were filled with luscious, sharp juice. But in town there were no teeth that might be pleasurably set on edge by it. The corn cobs in their green, near-damp casings poked out of the basket with their fresh, f laxen manes. But in town there were no children waiting in great impatience for their mothers to buy these corn cobs and cook them, until they could rush out of the back doors into the street with the hot cobs in their little hands and with eager greediness bite into the tasty, nourishing kernels. In the basket, surrounded on all sides by dull blue aubergines, lay an oblong melon — the first fully ripened melon. Warmed here in the market-place by the hot sun, it began to exude the sharp scent of its sugar-sweet syrup, and of the seeds rattling within it. But in town there was no nose that might infer from this scent that the summer was drawing to a close [...] ]

This sensuality teases only the phantoms of eye, touch, and smell. The act of evoking the plenitude of nature merely calls attention to the dearth of human beings to savour it. In this newly desolate ghost town, only the vagabond sculptor remains to witness nature’s recurrent pattern. The early falling autumn leaves become metonyms for the deracinated Jews: they too are driven from the town, their corpses scattered, their identity effaced: Geveynlekh blaybn bletlekh lign hart lebn di beymer-shtamen unter di tsvaygn, fun velkhe zey zaynen opgefaln. Dort zaynen zey geshitst un bamistikn zeyere beymers vortslen. Nor vu zoln vern geshitst di beryozhe-bletlekh? — zeyere beymer zaynen oysgehakt. (Y 77) [Normally, leaves remain lying close by the tree trunks, under the branches from which they have fallen. There they are protected and compost the roots of the trees. But where are the birch leaves to be protected? — Their trees have been cut down.]

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As a boy, watching these falling leaves cling to the roots of the trees that bore them, made comforting sense to him; as an adult, this cycle now seems arbitrary. His paralysed immobility is twice likened to a groyse un shvere shive (Y 71, 80), ‘a huge and heavy Seven Days of Mourning’, the period mandated by Jewish law for grieving before the obligations of life must be resumed. Yet even as the sculptor cowers in ‘bad sorrow’ on the steps of his dead father’s abandoned house, Teklie sells her produce to the youngest daughter of the murdered Dr Fayerman. Now a doctor herself, she has returned to take her father’s place. The effort required to turn ‘bad sorrow’ into ‘good joy’ triggers psychosomatic symptoms in the sculptor: — Zi vet do arbetn? Der skulptor hot es ibergefregt mit aza mine afn ponem, vi glaykh fun yeder mindster onshtrengung tsu banemen, vos zogt Teklie, heybt im on zeyer shtark tsu shisn in di shleyfn, mamesh der kop shpalt zikh im af tsveyen — mit aza shvern inyen hot er do tsu ton. (Y 78) [— She’ll work here? The sculptor repeated the question with such an expression on his face as though with every slightest effort to grasp what Teklie was saying, a severe pain started shooting through his temples, literally as though his head were splitting in two — with such difficult matters was he dealing here.]

In her determination to rebuild, Lina Fayerman forces the sculptor unwillingly to recognize that he has responsibilities, nor poshet, vayl dos lebn keytlt zikh (Y 79), ‘simply because life moves on [link after link]’. With Bergelson, as with Turgenev, it is always women who have the strength to lead the way when men falter. Together with Lina and Manya, Teklie is one of three women in this story who seemingly recall the sculptor to his obligations. To a large extent, they do so in approved Party terms by representing idealized communist virtues. Taking him for a kranker, an invalid (Y 79), Teklie assists the sculptor to rise from his blackout, and returns his father’s goat, in this way binding dead father to living son. He thus finds the best pose in which to sculpt her is nisht andersh, vi inem moment, ven zi beygt zikh on oyftsuheybn an umgefalenem mentshn (Y 92), ‘no other way than in the moment when she bends down to assist a fallen person to rise’. In this representation of feminine compassion on the part of one peasant girl, former Ukrainian collaboration with the Germans is evaded. Similarly Manya, the daughter of a Jewish furrier named Froym (Ephraim) (Y 75) who reports the manner of the deaf-mute barber’s death, continues the ‘beginning’ which the old man’s courage marked. She too is one of a new breed of Jews: Geklekt hot ir koykhes af alts ibertsutrogn un seykhl af aroystsudreyen zikh fun daytshishe hent, antloyfn tsu partizaner, zikh shlogn in eynem mit zey far ir ort af der erd. (Y 82) [She had sufficient strength to endure everything and intelligence enough to escape the clutch of the Germans, to f lee to the partisans, and to fight side by side with them for her place on the earth.]

Ostensibly without irony, Manya is made to embody the indomitable spirit of victorious communism, and hence becomes the ideal subject for the Soviet sculptor’s art. She is a sturdy young woman mit shvere fis fun a denkmol (Y 70) ‘with

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the heavy tread of a monument’; her unfaltering stride, unsentimentally kicking aside broken shards of glass as she retakes possession of her father’s ruined house, hot zi virklekh dermont on an arumshpanendikn denkmol (Y 81), ‘literally reminded one of a walking monument’. Destined to be a nayer shtam-muter (Y 82), the progenitrix of a new tribe, she is also capable of mourning what has been destroyed: zi veynt mit ale zaftn fun ir veytik (Y 84), ‘she wept with all the dammed-up f low of her pain’, demonstrating the truth of Levi Yitskhok’s teaching that recognition of what has been lost must be the spur to rebuilding. If her youthful grief marks the beginning of renewal, for the older sculptor her tear-stained face emblematizes the martyrdom of the whole town, recalling a folkbelief that martirer-trern tor men nisht opvishn (Y 85), ‘one is forbidden from wiping away a martyr’s tears’.31 Like the figures the sculptor fashions to memorialize the murdered, the entire narrative also circumvents the official de-Judaization of the Shoah by refusing to wipe away the martyrs’ tears. Though it carefully avoids overt mention of things Jewish, their existence is pointed through their absence, not only in allusions, but also in contrasts. Those missing from ot der shreklekh-puster shtot (Y 71), ‘this shockingly empty town’, stand out by contrast with those left alive, like dem polylishn dokters klenern yingl (Y 72), ‘the Polish doctor’s youngest son’, and the peasants inem ukrainishn dorf, vos af yener zayt shmoln taykhl (Y 74), ‘in the Ukrainian village on the other side of the narrow stream’. The former Jewish town has ceased to exist, its name is baleydik-monendik [...] geblibn fartseykhnt af di shar-bleter fun fil yidishe sforim vos m’hot amol in ir gedrukt (Y 62), ‘insultingly recalled [...] by remaining inscribed on the jackets of many Jewish holy books that had once been published there’. A few such books had been printed there in modern times as well: during the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921–28) with its temporary liberalization of revolutionary doctrine, Berdichev was one of the few towns in which there had been an upsurge of religious book publishing.32 Now such traces of Jewish life as remain are mere bits of débris: a f leeting reminder of the prohibition against eating blood33 in the form of a hiltsern zalts-bretl af kosher makhn fleysh, ‘a wooden salting-board for koshering meat’, rattles down the deserted streets with the windswept ashes of halb-opgebrente mezuzes tsi kameyes, ‘half-burnt up mezuzes or amulets’ and fargelte yidishe vekslen oysgeshtelt epes nokh gor af hebreish (Y 64), ‘yellowed Jewish promissory notes astonishingly somehow still set out in Hebrew’, a specific reference to the commerce and financial services which had been the chief source of income for Berdichev Jews in former times. All signs of vibrant Jewish communal life, effaced by the Germans, come to seem impossible of regeneration. As a result, the artist at the centre of this tale, like the writer whose surrogate he is, feels burdened with the responsibility of memorializing all that has been lost. His starting point is his discovery that his father hid his tryumo — the cheval-mirror central to his trade — for safekeeping with one of the peasants on the further side of the river. This heavy mirror becomes both a legacy and a memorial (Y 85). The son’s need personally to retrieve it and carry it home on his back like a corpse, motivated in part by his guilt at having rarely kept in touch after he left home, physically expresses his recognition that henceforth any return to creative life he may want to make will require him to recognize his roots as a Jew:

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Unter ale naye hoytn, vos zaynen af im ongevaksn in di groyse shtet in di krayzn, vu er hot gelebt, gearbet un gehat derfolg, iz ergets tif in im, vi an ayzerner fond, geblibn oysbahaltn der posheter art denken funem tsvelf-yorikn ‘Leybl dem parikmakhers’. Un keyn mol hot er azoy shtark nit gefilt, az er iz nit mer vi ‘Leybl dem parikmakhers’, vi er hot es gefilt itst, zitsndik do af di treplekh fun zayn foters puster shtub. (Y 69) [Under all the new hides he had grown in the circles of the great cities in which he had lived, worked, and achieved success, somewhere deep inside him, like an iron base, remained hidden the simple mode of thinking of the twelve-year-old ‘Leybl the barber’s son’. And never had he felt so strongly that he was nothing more than ‘Leybl the barber’s son’ than he felt it now, sitting here on the steps of his father’s empty house.]

Facing irreparable loss, the sculptor attempts to memorialize his father by repairing the old man’s mirror and barber’s chair. Impossibly, he seeks his father’s presence in the deaf-mute’s sole means of communication, di golmesers un di sherlekh [...] laykht bashmirt mit fets, ‘the lightly greased razors and scissors’ (Y 87), and tries to recapture him through forshndik-shtrenge blikn, ‘rigorously searching glances’ at the mirror (Y 88), fully aware that this activity represents little more than the erection of gravestones (Y 88). The tools of his father’s trade become metonyms for art, as this narrative defines it: an activity that can merely ref lect reality, not resurrect it. Once the living are no longer present, even their ref lections vanish. The professions of both barber father and sculptor son have been debased by German arrogance. The father was kept alive solely so that he could barber the German murderers (Y 68); the son, exposed in a German prisoner-of-war camp as both a Jew and a sculptor, had been spared only so that he could model his captors’ busts (Y 69). This perversion turned the son from his vocation in disgust, but led the father, fully aware that zey veln mikh koyln, ‘they will slaughter me’, to turn even his disabilities into weapons. The son’s creative urge f lows back into him as soon as he recognizes his father’s life-affirming determination to fight: Shtarker fun ale farlangen in lebn hot in im genumen shturemen di baderfenish oystsuklepn dem foter, vi er shpant avek fun der puster shtot in yenem zunikn frimorgn. (Y 87–88) [Stronger than all the longings in his life there began to stream through him the need to model his father as he hurried away from the deserted town on that sunny morning.]

His determination to create memorials to the lost is counterbalanced by the return of the found, the Jewish partisans who, in another Biblical reference, emerge from hiding to rebuild their destroyed homes vi in di tsaytn ven Noyekh mit zayne kinder zaynen aroys fun der teyve (Y 88) ‘as in the days when Noah and his children emerged from the Ark’. The different demands of mourning and rejoicing, of the dead on one side and the living on the other, are pointed first by two professional mourners who move in ritual lamentation from one deserted house to another, glat azoy fun mitsve vegn tsi efsher loyt epes a min alter yidisher traditsye (Y 89), ‘simply for the sake of performing a good deed or perhaps according to some ancient Jewish tradition’, and then by the return to the town of its first pregnant woman, whose

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condition hot gehaltn in eyn tsunisht makhn yeder gedank, az dos lebn ken men opshteln (Y 90), ‘continually negated every thought that life could be postponed’. The sculptor, however, is wholly committed neither to the present nor to the future; his allegiance is to the past, which is why Lina Fayerman’s complaints about the damage done to her father’s house amazes him: s’iz oysgekumen, vi eyner, vemen me hot opgehakt di fis, volt zikh geklogt, alemay me hot im kaliye gemakht a por hoyzn (Y 91) ‘it seemed to resemble the attitude of someone who, having lost both his legs, complains that a pair of his trousers has been ruined’. This image explicitly defines the Jewish artist’s role in the post-Holocaust Soviet Union. The work of rebuilding must go forward, but what has been lost can neither be forgotten nor replaced. Hence the story’s most thematically telling metaphor emerges in the resemblance of the salvaged picture of old Dr Fayerman to the face of Y.-L. Peretz (Y 91), the inspiration of modern secular Yiddishism.34 The picture itself appears to be undamaged — the image, in other words, remains whole — but the frame around it is broken. Stalinist persecution of Yiddish had begun before the war, and was resumed with full force just as Bergelson was starting to publish this collection of ‘new stories’. Peretz’s ‘big picture’ may be undamaged, but the frame within which his vision was supposed to be realized — Soviet promises to foster Yiddish culture — is broken, probably beyond repair. Whether or not there is either the possibility or the will to restore it, is an unspoken question overshadowing the entire narrative. The imprint page of the 1947 edition of Naye dertsteylungen records its print run as 15,000 copies. Even if all of these were distributed, this figure hardly represents the ‘mass readership’ about which Bergelson, and those of his colleagues who committed themselves to building Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union, dreamed. The idealistic vision has been shattered by the harsh facts of a reality that left only books — like the sculptures of this fiction — as lifeless memorials to a destroyed world. For the artist Bergelson, as for his eponymous sculptor, the world he once lived in is impossible to resurrect, while the artist who memorializes it is homeless and dispossessed: — Vu vet zayn der adres? Im iz geven shver deroyf tsu entfern. Keyn genoyem adres hot er dervayl nokh nit gehat, nor er hot gehat skulpturn, vos hot banays gekent dertseyln vegn zayn foter, vegn zayn shtot, un vegn ire mentshn. (Y 93) [— What will my address be? He found this difficult to answer. He had as yet no exact address, but he had sculptures, which could tell all over again about his father, about his town, and about its people.]

His home — physical and spiritual, national and cultural — has been irrevocably effaced. This is why he cannot provide any forwarding address, either literally or figuratively. The only signifying markers of his identity are not monuments celebrating a glorious present and a utopian future, but the unmarked graves of the destroyed world of Eastern European Jewry. By the time this final volume of his work appeared, Bergelson was facing the shattered Soviet myth of ‘the brotherhood of nations’, and the covert implementation

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of institutionalized anti-Semitism. Amid such wreckage of his hopes for Yiddish in the revolutionary world he had welcomed, all he had left was his identity as a Jew, and what little pride he could redeem from that. Notes to Chapter 14 1. Zvi Gitelman, ‘Politics and the Historiography of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union’, in Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, ed. by Zvi Gitelman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 15–21. 2. Der Nister’s first such collection, entitled Korbones (Sacrifices), appeared in Moscow in 1943. An expanded edition, including some stories written before 1946, was published posthumously in New York in 1957 under the title Dertseylungen un eseyen (Narratives and Essays). In his introduction to this volume, Nakhmen Mayzel calls them ‘a dramatic testament to the destruction of Eastern European Jewry’. 3. Entitled ‘The Political Tasks of the University of the Peoples of the East’, this speech was published in Pravda, 115, 22 May 1925. Stalin’s formulation was as follows: We are building proletarian culture. That is absolutely true. But it is also true that proletarian culture, which is socialist in content, assumes different forms and modes of expression among the different peoples who are drawn into the building of socialism, depending upon differences in language, manner of life, and so forth. Proletarian in content, national in form — such is the universal culture towards which socialism is proceeding. Proletarian culture does not abolish national culture, it gives it content. On the other hand, national culture does not abolish proletarian culture, it gives it form. See J. V. Stalin, Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), VII, 135–54. 4. Cited in Matthew Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin (Oxford: Phaidon, 1991), p. 16. 5. Gennadi Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 27. 6. Ironically, this new development coincided with the earliest post-revolution theories of the Kiev Group, notably defined by Dobrushin, who aspired to create a secular Yiddish culture that drew on traditional Jewish elements. See Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 28–29, p. 183 n. 108. 7. Khone Shmeruk, ‘Araynfir’ in A shpigl oyf a shteyn: antologie poesie un proze fun tsvelf farshnitene yidishe shraybers in Ratn-farband, ed. by Kh. Shmeruk and others (Tel Aviv: Farlag Goldene keyt/ Y.L. Peretz, 1964), pp. xx–xxi. 8. See Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 187; Arno Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), p. 160. 9. Kostyrchenko, Red Shadows, p. 28. Subsequent history has proved these fears well founded. 10. Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and his Era (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973; repr. 1989), pp. 643– 48. 11. Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union, p. 147. 12. This incident centres on the importance of the ankete, a questionnaire about personal background that all Soviet citizens had to complete. Their eligibility for restricted jobs depended on their answers. In this case, the ankete is an application form: the lieutenant is offering the heroic Mikhl a short-cut into membership of the Party. 13. All quotations in Yiddish (Y) are from David Bergelson, Naye dertseylungen (Moscow: Emes, 1947), pp. 45–60; English translations (E) are from ‘The Witness’, in An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. by J. Leftwich (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), pp. 55–64. Where no page reference to a published English text is given, the translation is mine. 14. On 30 June 1941, eight days after their invasion of the Soviet Union, German forces entered the city of Lvov, in pre-1939 Poland home to the third largest Jewish community (over 100,000) after Warsaw and Łodz. From the first hours of the German occupation, mobs of Ukrainian thugs, incited by the Germans, roamed the streets, murdering Jews wherever they found them. On 30

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January 1942, after Hitler had announced in Berlin ‘the complete annihilation of the Jews’, the labour camp at Belzec, a remote village on the former German–Polish border west of the River Bug, was converted into a death camp. A railway line linked Belzec with the whole of Galicia, from Cracow in the west to Lvov in the east, and with the entire Lublin district. During August 1942, Jews from more than twenty communities in eastern Galicia, one of the heartlands of Eastern European Jewry, were deported to Belzec, from which there were only two survivors. See Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London: Fontana/Collins, 1987), pp. 163, 285–87, 410. 15. Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews, p. 166. 16. Thanks to Gennady Estraikh for pointing this out. 17. Officially adopted was the practice of publishing in the press the Russianized surnames or pseudonyms of prominent public figures, particularly those in the arts and sciences, alongside their original, obviously Jewish, family names in parentheses. When the surname sounded nonJewish, individual first names and patronymics were also published in full, the express intention being to ‘unmask cosmopolitans’. This practice reached its peak during the first quarter of 1949 as Stalin’s ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign, directed specifically against Jews, intensified. For specific details see Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union, pp. 159, 196–208; Kostyrchenko, Red Shadows, pp. 153–78. 18. All Yiddish quotations are taken from Bergelson, Naye dertseylungen, pp. 61–93, to which all page references after the letter Y refer. All translations into English are mine. 19. For a discussion of Berdichev’s significance in Yiddish fiction, see Mikhail Krutikov, ‘Berdichev in Russian Literary Imagination: From Israel Aksenfeld to Friedrich Gorenshtein’, in The Shtetl: Image and Reality, ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 91–114. 20. Born in Galicia, Levi-Yitskhok was a Talmudic prodigy who studied with Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezritch (Miedzyrzec Podlaski), who had in turn studied with the founder of the Hasidic movement, Israel Baal Shem Tov himself. Levi-Yitskhok, whose ecstasies during prayer found expression in wild gestures, was a man of the people who revered simplicity. He was greatly loved for defending his community before God even when its members were doing wrong, as several anecdotes attest. In one instance, when he saw a man greasing the wheels of his wagon wearing a prayer shawl and phylacteries, the adornments of weekday morning prayers, he praised God for the piety of Jews who remained mindful of God even in the midst of the most lowly activities; on another occasion, when a man he reproached for smoking a cigarette on the Sabbath refused to deny or excuse the fact despite being given every opportunity to do so, Levi Yitskhok praised the scrupulous honesty of Jews in general. Levi-Yitskhok communed with God as with an intimate, taking Him to task for injustice. Once he remained standing at his pulpit all day without uttering a sound, because he had warned God, ‘If You refuse to answer our prayers, I shall refuse to go on saying them’. See Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters, trans. by Olga Marx (New York: Schocken, 1947; repr. 1975), pp. 203–34; Nathan Ausubel (ed.), A Treasury of Jewish Folklore (New York: Crown, 1954), pp. 118–19. 21. An attempted pogrom against the town’s Jews during the riots following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 had been repelled by armed and organized Jewish groups. See John and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vassily Grossman (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 39. 22. See Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union, p. 68. 23. These details come from the account given in Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev, pp. 1–30, 336. 24. Particularly so to Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) and Vasily Grossman (1905–64), the co-editors of The Black Book, a collection of eye-witness testimonies and documents recording German atrocities, compiled as evidence for the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945. Grossman’s own mother perished in the Berdichev massacres. 25. Quoted in Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, p. 231. 26. This may be why Bergelson often embodies the move towards assimilation in the figure of a sculptor, as for instance in Yoysef Shor. 27. This song, composed by Avrom Goldfaden (1840–1906) for his melodrama Shulames (1880),

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proved so enduringly popular that it is commonly taken for an ancient folksong. It exists in several variants, two of which can be found in Nathan Ausubel (ed.), A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, pp. 679, 684. 28. This song, built on an accretion of calamities repeated in turn until an impassable terminal point, relates, through the eyes of a child, the history of a kid goat bought by his father for two zuzim, farthings. The kid is eaten by a cat, which is in turn bitten by a dog, which is in turn beaten by a stick. Then comes a fire that burns the stick; the fire is quenched by water which is drunk by an ox, which is slain by a butcher. The butcher is in turn slain by the Angel of Death, who is finally destroyed by ‘the Holy One, blessed be He’. Unlike the main body of the Haggadah, this song is composed in Aramaic and is generally supposed to have been written by a fifteenth-century Kabbalist. 29. High Holyday Prayer Book, trans. and ed. by P. Birnbaum (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 2002), p. 711. Hasidic commentators from Baal Shem Tov onwards follow Rashi in arguing that these sons were so overcome by ecstatic desire to cleave to holiness that God claimed them for His own, adducing in support of this reading God’s message to Aaron: ‘Through them that are nearest to me I will be sanctified, and before all the people I will be glorified’ (Leviticus 10. 3). 30. Bergelson developed this theme in his 1945 play Prints Ruveni. Ironically, this was the motive of the Haganah, the Jewish underground movement that fought the British for an independent Jewish state in Palestine, and was a ground principle of modern Zionist nationalism, the ‘crime’ Bergelson and his co-defendants were accused of abetting. 31. The origins of this folk belief may derive from a midrash that when Isaac lay bound on the altar waiting to be sacrificed (Genesis 22. 9) the angels wept over him; their tears dropped into his eyes and dimmed them, reducing him steadily to blindness. See Midrash Rabbah: Genesis 65:10, trans. by H. Freedman (London: Soncino, 1961), II, 585–86. Another explanation suggests that when the corpses of martyrs are ritually cleansed before burial, the tears on their faces must not be wiped away, as would normally be the case. Thanks to Nicham Ross and Nathan Snyder for these suggestions. 32. The chief producers of these books had been a publisher named Ginsburg, and the Lubavicher Hasidic movement Chabad. See Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union, p. 105 33. This prohibition is also issued in the parsha Akharey mot (Leviticus 17. 13–14) 34. The veneration in which Peretz was held by aspiring young Yiddish writers who sought his approval is evident, for example, in a description of their meeting written in 1940 by Bergelson’s long-time associate Der Nister. See ‘Peretz hot geredt un ikh hob gehert’, in Der Nister, Dertseylungen un eseyen (New York: YKUF, 1957), pp. 279–89.

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C H A P T E R 15

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A Bibliography of David Bergelson’s Works in Yiddish and English Roberta Saltzman Introduction In this bibliography I have attempted to list all of David Bergelson’s published works in Yiddish and English, in book form and in periodicals. Finding all of Bergelson’s contributions to periodicals, in particular, is a daunting and probably impossible task, as he contributed to more than four dozen periodicals — some of which exist only in partial runs scattered among a number of libraries, and, even taken together, these may be incomplete. For his work in European periodicals, I relied heavily on the invaluable Index to Yiddish Periodicals, created by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in cooperation with the Jewish National and University Library, now available on the web. I also made use of unpublished bibliographic work by David Shneer (University of Denver) and the PhD thesis of Susan Ann Slotnick. For Bergelson’s work in American periodicals, I surveyed, among others, Forverts from 1922 to 1926, and Frayhayt from 1926 to 1948. (Frayhayt changed its name to Morgn-frayhayt on 17 June 1929, but I have referred to it throughout as Frayhayt for the sake of brevity.) This bibliography is divided into three sections. Sections A and B list Bergelson’s work in book form and periodicals, respectively; these sections are arranged chronologically to allow the reader to trace the course of Bergelson’s writing career. The reader will notice that many of Bergelson’s novels and stories were reprinted over and over again. In the 1920s, especially, it was very common for a story to appear first in a European periodical and shortly thereafter in an American one, or vice versa. I do not claim to have unearthed any literary treasures in Section B — although there are quite a few pieces that were not published elsewhere — but I hope that this section will add biographical details to our knowledge of Bergelson. See, for example, the essay on the Kielce pogrom that Bergelson contributed to Frayhayt shortly after the event (item B350), demonstrating that as late as 1946 he was still allowed to have contact with publishers in the West. Section C is an alphabetical list of English translations. A total of twenty-nine of Bergelson’s works have been translated, in whole or in part, into English. Several have been translated more than once: the short stories ‘Altvarg’, ‘Droyb’, ‘An eydes’,

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and ‘In pansyon fun di dray shvester’; and the novels/novellas Nokh alemen, Opgang, and Yoysef Shor. A need for more translations of Bergelson has been felt for a long time; as early as 1947, Morris U. Schappes wrote: In the Soviet Union [...] there is the highly celebrated Yiddish novelist David Bergelson, whose work spans the pre-revolutionary, revolutionary and modern periods of the life of Russian Jewry. It would be instructive for English readers and English writers to have available at least several volumes that would reveal his development and his achievement, and show the impact of socialism upon a formerly nationalistic and pessimistic Yiddish novelist. (‘Translate and unite’, Frayhayt [English page], 15 Nov. 1947, p. 8)

In romanizing Yiddish titles, I have used the standard YIVO system of transliteration — but I also aimed to transcribe titles exactly as they originally appeared, so the reader will see a number of instances of Soviet orthography (‘bam’ instead of ‘baym’), or dialectic variations (‘ertsehlung’ instead of ‘dertseylung’). I have also included an alphabetical index of titles, a list of periodicals to which Bergelson contributed, and a selective list of secondary sources. Section A: Yiddish Works by David Bergelson in Book Form A1. Arum vokzal (Warsaw: Farlag Progres, 1909), 93 p. A2. Arum vokzal (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1913), 93 pp. A3. Nokh alemen: roman in 4 teyln (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1913), 344 pp. A4. Der toyber: ertsehlung (Kiev: Kunst-ferlag, 1914), 44 pp. A5. Dos goldene kaykele (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1917), 7 pp. A6. Arum vokzal (Kiev: Yidisher folksfarlag, 1919), 93 pp. A7. Droyb (Kiev: Yidisher folksfarlag, 1919), 76 pp. A8. In a fargrebter shtot (Kiev: Yidisher folksfarlag, 1919), 60 pp. A9. Tsvey vegn farnakht (Kiev: Yidisher folksfarlag, 1919),12 pp. A10. Mayse-bikhl (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1920), 39 pp. A11. Opgang (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1921), 227 pp. A12. ‘Revolutsyonerer gayst’, in Y. L. Perets: zamlung tsu zayn 7tn yortsayt (Minsk: Kulturlige, 1922), pp. 5–12 A13. Verk (Berlin: Wostok, 1922–1923), 6 vols. Contents: Vol. 1. Opgang Vol. 2. Arum vokzal. Der toyber. Yordim Vol. 3. In a fargrebter shtot. Yoysef Shur Vol. 4. Droyb. Der letster Rosheshone. In eynem a zumer. Di meshumedes. Ohn a nomen. Tsvey vegn. Baynakht Vols. 5–6. Nokh alemen A14. Mayse-bikhl (Berlin: Wostok, 1923), 48 p. With lithographs and woodcuts by Lazar Segal. This edition was reprinted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1983 A15. Shturemteg: dertseylungen (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1927), 291 pp. Contents: Birgerkrig. In a farpeysekhdikn aker shteyen midlekh tsu di ferd. Me benkt keyn dorem un me geyt keyn tsofn. Shturem oysbahaltener un f lisiker. Aleksandrovke. Eynems a veg. Hinter a brenendikn shtetl. Af hundert mit eynter viorst. Tsvishn tsvelf punktn. Altvarg. Tsvishn emigrantn. A zeltener sof. Khoyves. Hershl Toker

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A16. Geklibene verk (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1928–1930), 8 vols. Contents: Vol. 1. Arum vokzal. Der toyber. Yordim. Droyb. Der letster Rosheshone Vol. 2. Nokh alemen Vol. 3. In a fargrebter shtot. Yoysef Shur. In eynem a zumer. Di meshumedes. On a nomen. Tsvey vegn. Baynakht Vol. 4. Opgang Vol. 5. Shturemteg: Birgerkrig. Eynems a veg. Hinter a brenendikn shtetl. Oyf der hundert un eynster viorst. Tsvishn tsvelf punktn. Altvarg. Tsvishn emigrantn. A zeltener sof. Khoyves. A tsenrubldiker Vol. 6. Velt-oys velt-ayn (dertseylungen): Sheyvet Gedalye. Note. Serls kheylek. Blindkeyt. Shvester. In pansyon fun di dray shvester. Di dinamishe rege. Der bariton. Der kabren. Stantsye Kotlyet. A roman. Mit eyn nakht veyniker. Tsvey rotskhim. Sonim. Iber eyn trit. An eybiker knekht. Skhar-tirkhe. Birger Voli Brener Vol. 7. Mides-hadin Vol. 8. Tsugvintn (dertseylungen): Tsugvintn. A mayse mit gvirim. Der lokh, durkh velkhn eyner hot farloyrn. Geburt. Hershl Toker. In a roytn vinkl. A yubilar. In step. In a Sovetishn shabes [1st chapter of ‘Birger Voli Brener’]. In a tog a vokhedikn. DzshiroDzshiro. Fayvls mayses A17. Der tsenrubldiker (Moscow: Emes, 1928) A18. Mides-hadin (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1929), 265 pp. A19. Di broyt-mil (Der toyber): drame in dray aktn (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1930), 114 pp. A20. Bam Dnyepr (Moscow: Emes, 1932), 2 vols. A21. Dovid Bergelson in shul (Minsk: Melukhe-farlag fun Vaysrusland, 1933), 248 pp. Includes excerpts from: Der toyber. Nokh alemen. Eynems a veg. Mides-hadin. Bam Dnyepr A22. Birebidzshaner: dertseylung (Moscow: Emes, 1934), 275 pp. A23. Arum vokzal: un andere dertseylungen (Moscow: Emes, 1935), 335 p. Contents: Arum vokzal. Der toyber. Der letster Rosheshone. Sheyvet Gedalye. Der kabren. A roman. Note. Droyb. Yordim. On a nomen. In a fargrebter shtot. In eynem a zumer. Der bariton A24. Nokh alemen: roman in fir teyln (Moscow : Emes, 1935), 339 pp. A25. Bam Dnyepr (Moscow: Emes, 1936–40), 2 vols. A26. Droyb (Moscow: Emes, 1936), 24 pp. A27. Der letster Rosheshone (Moscow: Emes, 1936), 22 pp. A28. Note (Moscow: Emes, 1936), 15 pp. A29. Sheyvet Gedalye (Moscow: Emes, 1936), 31 pp. A30. Der toyber (Moscow: Emes, 1936), 47 pp. A31. Tsvishn lebedike mentshn: fartseykhenungen un bilder (Minsk: Melukhe-farlag fun Vaysrusland, 1936), 125 pp. Contents: Khaverte Bronye. In der komune. Zelik Broder. A kranker doler un a khoylevater galekh. Mir, vos lebn A32. Yordim (Moscow: Emes, 1936), 19 pp. A33. Penek: roman (Warsaw: Literarishe bleter, 1937) A34. A shtetl in tol: dertseylungen (Warsaw: Kinderfraynd, 1937), 52 pp. Contents: Der toyber. Sheyvet Gedalye. Stantsye Kotlet A35. Trot nokh trot: dertseylungen (Moscow: Emes, 1938), 319 pp. Contents: Tsvey partizaner. Bam voyenkom in der heym. Eynems a veg. Kontributsye. Ibergeburt. Lebn pantser-tsug. Bam telefon. Yona Grigoryevitsh. Hershl Toker. A zeltener sof A36. Tsugast (Moscow: Emes, 1938), 19 pp.

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A37. Bam telefon (Moscow: Emes, 1939), 46 pp. A38. Birobidzshan: an algemayne iberzikht fun der idisher avtonomer gegnt (Moscow: Emes, 1939), 39 pp. A39. Eynems a veg (Moscow: Emes, 1939), 44 pp. A40. Lebn pantser-tsug (Moscow: Emes, 1939), 52 pp. A41. Sholem-Aleykhem (Moscow: Emes, 1939), 30 pp. A42. Tsugast (Riga: Kamf, 1940), 14 pp. A43. ‘A zun-bashaynter riz’, in Arn Kushnirov (ed.) Osher Shvartsman: zamlung gevidmet dem XX yortog fun zayn heldishn toyt (Moscow: Emes, 1940), pp. 10–14 A44. Dertseylungen (Moscow: Emes, 1941), 318 pp. Contents: Dzhiro-Dzhiro. Onheyb. In step. Altvarg. Opklayb. Birobidzshaner fragmentn. In a roytn vinkl. Der mentsh mit der krumer bak. Serls kheylek. Tsvey rotskhim. A gzeyre af yidn. In pansyon fun di dray shvester. Sonim. Nepmanishe inyonim. An eybiker knekht. Prostak. Birger Voli Brener. In a tog a vokhedikn. Ash. An eydes. A kranker doler un a khoylevater galekh. Khaverte Bronye. Nakht. Zorg. Tsvey shkheynim. Tsugast. Friling A45. Idn un di milkhome mit Hitlern (New York: YKOR, 1941), 16 pp. [cf. item A46] A46. Yidn un di foterlendishe milkhome (Moscow: Emes, 1941), 24 pp. [cf. item A45] A47. Geven iz nakht un gevorn iz tog: dertseylung (Moscow: Emes, 1943), 31 pp. A48. Un geven iz nakht un gevorn iz tog (Buenos Aires: YKUF, 1944), 46 pp. A49. Prints Ruveni: drame in fir aktn (New York: YKUF, 1946), 126 pp. A50. Naye dertseylungen (Moscow: Emes, 1947), 176 pp. Contents: Tsvishn berg. Frayntshaft. An eydes. Der skulptor. Yortsayt-likht. Grod zi. Kartapukh. In shayn fun shayters. A shverer kharakter A51. A shverer kharakter (Bucharest: Federatsye funem farband fun di yidishe kehiles in der Rumenisher folks-republik, 1948), 30 pp. A52. Naye dertseylungen (Buenos Aires: YKUF, 1949), 222 pp. Contents: Tsvishn berg. Frayntshaft. An eydes. Der skulptor. Yortsayt-likht. Grod zi. In shayn fun shayters. A shverer kharakter. In a vinterdikn shturem. Hershl Toker. Tsvey rotshkim. Tsvishn shkheynim A53. Tsvey veltn: kapitlen fun a greserer dertseylung (New York: YKUF, 1953), 176 pp. A54. Opgang (New York: YKUF, 1955), 227 pp. A55. ‘Tsvey veltn’, in Zamlung fun shafungen fun yidishe shrayber un dikhter in Ratn-farband (Rio de Janeiro: YKUF, 1956), pp. 135–235 A56. Noveln (Warsaw: Yidish bukh, 1959), 117 pp. Contents: Tsvishn berg. Der skulptor. Yortsayt-likht A57. Oysgevaylte verk (Moscow: Melukhe-farlag fun kinstlerishe literatur, 1961), 763 pp. Contents: Der toyber. Nokh alemen. Yordim. Droyb. A roman. Eynems a veg. Bam telefon. Hershl Toker. Tsvey rotskhim. Ibergeburt. Frayntshaft. In shayn fun shayters. An eydes. Yortsayt-likht. Der skulptor A58. Ale verk (Buenos Aires: YKUF, 1961–64), 4 vols. Contents: Vol. 1. Arum vokzal. Nokh alemen Vol. 2. Der toyber. In a fargrebter shtot. Yosef Shur. Droyb. Der letster Rosheshone. Yordim. Opgang Vol. 3. In eynem a zumer. Di meshumedes. On a nomen. Tsvey vegn. Banakht. Sheyvet Gedalye. Birgerkrig. Eynems a veg. Hinter a brenendikn shtetl. Af dem hundert eynstn viorst. Tsvishn tsvelf punktn. Altvarg. Tsvishn emigrantn. A zeltener sof. Khoyves. A tsenrubldiker Vol. 4. Mides-hadin. Velt ayn velt oys: Note. Serls kheylek. Blindkeyt. Shvester. In pansyon fun di dray shvester. Di dinamishe rege. Der bariton. Der kabren

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A59. ‘Yoysef Shur’; ‘Fresh’; ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’; ‘A tsenrubldiker’; ‘Grod zi’; ‘An eydes’, in B. Hrushovski, A. Sutzkever and Kh. Shmeruk (eds.) A shpigl oyf a shteyn: antologye: poezye un proze fun tsvelf farshnitene yidishe shraybers in Ratn-farband (Tel Aviv: Di goldene keyt, 1964), pp. 3–120 A60. Oysgekliblene shriftn (Buenos Aires: Yoysef Lifshits-fond fun der literatur-gezelshaft baym YIVO, 1971), 317 p. Contents: Der toyber. Opgang. Fun ‘Birobidzshaner’. Grod zi. Prints Reuveni. Di milkhome un di yidish-sovetishe literatur. [Also includes critical and biographical essays by S. Rozshanski, A. Vayter, N. Mayzel, S. Niger, B. J. Bialostotsky, I. B. Singer, Y. Gil, and H. Shoshkes] A61. In der sho fun oyspruv: publitsistik fun di milkhome-yorn (Moscow: Sovetski pisatel, 1985), 63 pp. Contents: Dos derhoybene vet zign! Der goyrl vert bashlosn. Der yunger sovetisher yid. Akh, du liber Oygustin. Shtark, vi dos lebn. Kiev. Undzerer a mentsh. In eyn heldn-rey. Tsvey yor foterlendishe milkhome un di yidishe-sovetishe literatur. A folk, a giber. Bafrayt Sholem-Aleykhems shtot. Undzer Kiev. Unter der zun fun der sovetisher konstitutsye. Frayntshaft. Dos hobn geton fashistn! Der yontev fun felker. FSSR, di festung fun der velt-demokratye A62. ‘Lebn pantsertsug’, in In shturemdike teg (Moscow: Sovetski pisatel, 1987), pp. 36–63 A63. Opgang, edited and introduced by Joseph Sherman (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1999), 235 pp.

Section B: Yiddish Works by David Bergelson in Periodicals B1. ‘Oyfn besoylem’, Kiever vort, 1910 Jan. 4, pp. 2–3 B2. ‘Der toyber’, Idisher almanakh, 1910, pp. 15–36 B3. ‘Tsvey vegn’, Idisher almanakh, 1910, pp. 49–51 B4. ‘A kapitl fun a dertseylung’, Di naye velt, 1910 Oct. 15, p. 2; Oct. 17, p. 3 B5. ‘Vove Burnes’, Fun tsayt tsu tsayt (1) 1911, pp. 31–54 B6. ‘Der letster Rosheshone’, Vuhin, 1911 Dec., pp. 3–22 B7. ‘Ahin tsu vegs’, Vuhin, 1912 June–July, pp. 3–15 B8. ‘On a zayt’, Der Bobruisker vokhnblat, 1912 Aug. 10, pp. 7–10 B9. ‘Der onheyb funem sof ’, Di idishe velt, 1912 July, pp. 31–58 B10. ‘Di basmalke “Emes” ’, Fun tsayt tsu tsayt (2) 1912, pp. 99–106 B11. ‘Der get’, Di yudishe velt, 1913 Feb., pp. 31–48 B12. ‘In a fargrebter shtot’, Di yudishe velt, 1914 Feb., pp. 163–80; March, pp. 323–46; April, pp. 23–34 B13. ‘Dos goldene kaykele’, Grininke beymelekh, 1914 Feb., pp. 11–16 B14. ‘Vos hot Got gepoyelt? — Monolog’, Di vokh, 1915 Feb. 12, pp. 41–44 B15. ‘Yankev-Nosn Viderpolier’, Di yudishe velt, 1915 March, pp. 261–70 B16. ‘A mayse mit zibn feygelekh’, Grininke beymelekh, 1915 March, pp. 135–42 B17. ‘Briv tsu der yunger yidisher inteligents’, Di yudishe velt, 1915 April-May, pp. 43–48 B18. ‘Bay nakht: a halb-oysgetrakhte mayse’, Dos yudishe vort, 1916 Jan., pp. 59–62 B18a. ‘Oyf der bafrayte gas’, Naye tsayt, 1917 Oct. 23, pp. 2–3 B19. ‘In fartunklte tsaytn’, Eygns (1) 1918, pp. 3–58 B20. ‘In eynem a zumer’, Oyfgang (1) 1919, pp. 5–23 B21. ‘In fartunklte tsaytn’, Ilustrirte velt, 1919: July 8, pp. 5–6; July 16, pp. 21–22; July 24, pp. 40–41; July 31, pp. 54–56; Aug. 7, pp. 69–70; Aug. 14, pp. 86–87; Aug. 21, pp. 99–100; Aug. 28, pp. 117–20; Sept. 4, pp. 138–40; Sept. 18, pp. 168–70; Sept. 24, pp. 182–85 B22. ‘Dikhtung un gezelshaftlekhkayt’, Bikher-velt, 1919 Aug., pp. 5–16 B23. ‘Opgang’, Eygns (2) 1920, pp. 3–115

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B24. ‘In der heym’, Ringen, 1921 Sept., pp. 173–85 B25. ‘Yordim’; ‘Droyb’, Almanakh, tsum 10-yehrigen yubileum fun Moment 1921, pp. 1–18 B26. ‘Fresh’, Almanakh, tsum 10-yehrigen yubileum fun Moment 1921, pp. 47–48 B27. ‘Fayvls mayses’, Der khaver, 1921 April, pp. 199–209, 250–60 B28. ‘Fresh: poeme’, Tsukunft 1921 May pp. 257–58 B29. ‘Onheyb Kislev 5679 [November 1918]’, Milgroym (1) 1922, pp. 25–26 B30. ‘Der geshehner oyf brokh’, Milgroym (1) 1922, pp. 41–43 B31. ‘Botshko’, Shtrom (3) 1922, pp. 8–30 B32. ‘Briv in redaktsye’, Shtrom (3) 1922, p. 83 B33. ‘Dos kabtsanishe bekherel’, Forverts, 1922: March 19, p. 3; March 20, p. 3. A note at the end of the 20 March instalment reads ‘fortzetsung morgn’, but no further instalments were found B34. ‘Y. L. Perets: shtrikhen: geshriben tsu Peretses yohrtsayt’, Forverts, 1922 May 7, p. 6 B35. ‘Botoshko [sic], der fihrer fun vilder folk: roman fun di blutige teg in Ukraine’, Forverts, 1922: May 9, p. 3; May 10, p. 3; May 11, p. 3; May 13, p. 9; May 14, p. 3; May 15, p. 3; May 16, p. 3; June 12, p. 3; June 13, p. 3; June 14, p. 3; Aug. 1, p. 3; Aug. 2, p. 3; Aug. 3, p. 3. This title was published earlier as ‘Botshko’; see B31 B36. ‘In a farlozenem hoyf in miten nakht: a bild fun der revolutsye in Ukraine’, Forverts, 1922: Oct. 15, p. 3; Oct. 16, p. 3; Oct. 17, p. 3; Oct. 18, p. 3; Oct. 19, p. 3; Oct. 20, p. 5 B37. ‘Operatsyes, khasenes un revolutsyes (amol un haynt): humoreske’, Forverts, 1922 Dec. 2, pp. 8, 9 B38. ‘Di yidishe shriftshteler letoyves di yidishe folksshuln’, Di yudishe tribune, 1923 Jan. 4, pp. 2–3 B39. ‘Erev der shlakht: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1923: Jan. 29, p. 3; Jan. 30, p. 3; Jan. 31, p. 3; Feb. 5, p. 3; Feb. 6, p. 3 B40. ‘Di lage fun di yidishe shuln’, Haynt, 1923 Jan. 31, p. 5 B41. ‘Vegn der yidisher folksshul in Poyln’, Shul un lebn, 1923 Feb. 9, pp. 19–21 B42. ‘Der royter armeyer: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1923 May 6, Section 2, p. 2 B43. ‘Tsu ale fraynt fun der yidisher literatur, un yidisher kultur,’, Haynt, 1923 June 25, p. 3 B44. ‘Tsvishen verter zaynen oykh faran “gvirim” un “kabtsonim” ’, Forverts, 1923 July 29, Section 2, p. 1 B45. ‘Kristen velkhe hoben ayngeshtelt zeyer leben tsu reten iden’, Forverts, 1923 Aug. 12, Section 2, p. 1 B46. ‘Di tsores vos idishe komunisten hoben nebekh oystsushtehn fun zeyer frume tates’, Forverts, 1923 Oct. 28, p. 12 B47. ‘Idishe komunisten fun Rusland makhen vieder pogromen oyfn idishen got’, Forverts, 1923 Dec. 15, p. 4 B48. ‘Bay a brenendigen shtedtel: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1923 Dec. 30, pp. 12, 13 B49. ‘Bal-makhshoves: Bal-makhshoves der gertner’, Bikher-velt, 1924 Jan.-April, pp. 1–3 B50. ‘Tsu der yidisher efntlekhkayt’, Bikher-velt, 1924 Jan.–April, p. 5 B51. ‘Amerike: tsvey bilder’, Forverts, 1924 Feb. 19, p. 4 B52. ‘Idishe literatur, un idisher leben in Amerike’, Forverts, 1924 April 20, Section 2, p. 1 B53. ‘Der kabren: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1924 April 27, pp. 12, 13 B54. ‘Gedalye der groyser: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1924 June 1, p. 12; June 2, p. 3 B55. ‘A kranker mentsh: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1924 June 29, p. 12; July 6, pp. 12, 15 B56. ‘In a raykher familye: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1924 Aug. 17, Section 2, p. 2 B57. ‘Vi azoy men derkent a guten literarishen bukh’, Forverts, 1924 Aug. 24, Section 2, p. 5 B58. ‘Note mit zayne vayber: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1924 Oct. 4, p. 9 B59. ‘Di tsveyte Ester hamalke: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1924 Nov. 2, Section 2, p. 2

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B60. ‘Dovid Bergelson makht a rayze in Keshenev un in di arumige shtedtlakh’, Forverts, 1924 Dec. 28, p. 14 B60a. ‘A tsveyter vikhtiger brif fun Besarabye’, Forverts, 1925 Jan. 18, p. 14 B61. ‘Vi heymishe iden reden fun Dr Hertsl’s zuhn velkher hot zikh geshmadt’, Forverts, 1925 March 1, p. 13 B62. ‘Tsvey kristen iden-fraynd, tsvey merkvirdige tipen in Kishinev’, Forverts, 1925 March 8, Section 2, p. 1 B63. ‘Y.L. Perets un di khsidishe ideologye’, Literarishe bleter, 1925 April 10, p. 3 B64. ‘Khoyves: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1925 April 26, p. 12; May 3, p. 12 B65. ‘Vos a teater-direktor hot mir dertsehlt’, Forverts, 1925 June 6, p. 9 B66. ‘Lenins a vinkel: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1925 June 28, p. 13 B67. ‘A roman: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1925 July 18, pp. 9, 5 B68. ‘Bilder, stsenes, bagegenishen oyf dem tsienistishen kongres in Vien’, Forverts, 1925 Sept. 8, p. 4 B69. ‘Der held: fun di shreklekhe teg in Ukraine’, Moment 1925 Sept. 11 pp. 6–7; Sept. 13, p. 3; Sept. 16, p. 2; Sept. 17, p. 2 B70. ‘Gantse derfer idishe farmers in Rumenyen shtarben oys fun hunger’, Forverts, 1925 Oct. 17, pp. 9, 4 B71. ‘Oyfn breg: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1925 Nov. 1, Section 2, p. 5; Nov. 2, p. 3; Nov. 3, p. 3; Nov. 4, p. 3; Nov. 5, p. 5 B72. ‘A komunistishe shtetele in miten Besarabye: humoreske’, Forverts, 1925 Nov. 10, p. 3 B73. ‘Gelekhter un trehren: zeltene pasirungen, vos zaynen farlofen in di groyzame yohren fun der Rusisher revolutsye’, Forverts, 1925 Nov. 15, Section 2, p. 3 B74. ‘Stantsye Kotlyet: an emese mayse’, Forverts, 1925 Nov. 21, p. 9 B75. ‘Shpasige un rihrende stsenes: vos zaynen farlofen in di shvere, groyzame yohren fun der Rusisher revolutsye’, Forverts, 1925 Nov. 29, p. 13 B76. ‘Yeremenko der groyser un Yeremenko der kleyner: eyner fun di ershte Bolshevistishe palken’, Forverts, 1925 Dec. 6, p. 13 B77. ‘Di idishe tragedye vos shpielt zikh itst op in Lite, Letland un Estland’, Forverts, 1925 Dec. 11, p. 6 B78. ‘Briv in redaktsye’, Literarishe bleter, 1925 Dec. 11, p. 306 B79. ‘Der mentshen-kener: a humoristish bild’, Forverts, 1925 Dec. 12, p. 9 B80. ‘Der nayer sort oyfgekumene idishe gvirim in Rusland’, Forverts, 1925 Dec. 13, p. 15 B81. ‘A meshumed hot oyfgeboyt a kristlikhe melukhe’, Forverts, 1925 Dec. 19, p. 9 B82. ‘A mayse mit a shlukerts: a monolog fun a iden’, Forverts, 1925 Dec. 26, p. 9 B83. ‘Der geshtorbener “Mordekhai” oyfn Dvinsker besalmen, velkher lebt nokhn toyt’, Forverts, 1926 Jan. 9, p. 3 B84. ‘Dovid Bergelson shildert idishe balebatim vos zaynen gevoren betlers un shlepers’, Forverts, 1926 Jan. 12, p. 4 B85. ‘A idishe ayzen-bahn: a bild’, Forverts, 1926 Jan. 23, p. 3 B86. ‘A shtodt fun same idishe Nikolayevske soldaten’, Forverts, 1926 Jan. 30, p. 9 B87. ‘A briv fun Dovid Bergelson’, Emes, 1926 March 3, p. 3 B88. ‘Altvarg: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1926 March 13, p. 11 B89. ‘Far 12 toyzend dolar fast er 40 teg’, Forverts, 1926 March 30, p. 3 B90. ‘Mides-hadin’, In shpan (1) 1926 April, pp. 7–50; May, pp. 5–29 B91. ‘Dray tsentren’, In shpan (1) 1926 April, pp. 84–96 B92. ‘Altvarg’, Folkstsaytung 1926 April 9, p. 5 B93. ‘Tsvey rotskhim: Berliner bilder’, Forverts, 1926 April 14, p. 7 B94. ‘A zeltener sof: ertsehlung’, Forverts, 1926 April 25, p. 21; May 2, Section 2, p. 2; May 3, p. 3

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B95. ‘Shriftn’ (zamlung), ‘Farlag “Amerike” ’, ‘Vinter 1925–1926’, In shpan (2) 1926 May, pp. 162–71 B96. ‘Zayne koshere leftsn’, Frayhayt, 1926 May 22, p. 4 B97. ‘Vi azoy vet oyszen dos idishe lebn in Rusland shpeter mit etlekhe yor’, Frayhayt, 1926 May 29, p. 5 B98. ‘Hershl Toker: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1926 May 30, p. 3; May 31, pp. 5, 2; June 1, pp. 5, 6 B99. ‘Di farshvendung fun kinstlerisher energie’, Frayhayt, 1926 June 20, p. 5 B100. ‘Der tepikh fun “Moral un rekht”: a briv fun Berlin’, Emes, 1926 June 20, p. 2 B101. ‘Shvester: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1926 June 27, pp. 3, 5 B102. ‘Mides-hadin’, Shtern, 1926 July, pp. 1–15 B103. ‘Fuftsn milyon! A briv fun Berlin’, Frayhayt, 1926 July 4, p. 5 B104. ‘Blindkeyt: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1926 July 25, pp. 6, 3 B105. ‘An entfer Sh. Nigern’, Frayhayt, 1926 Aug. 22, p. 5 B106. ‘Sholem-Aleykhem un di folks-shprakh’, Frayhayt, 1926 Aug. 29, p. 5 B107. ‘Moskve’, Frayhayt, 1926 Sept. 5, p. 5 B108. ‘Oyf dem shvel fun “der velt,” un “yener velt,” ’, Frayhayt, 1926 Sept. 19, p. 5 B109. ‘A mayse vegn kvaln un leym/fun Boris Pilnyak; Idish fun Dovid Bergelson’, Frayhayt, 1926: Sept. 26, p. 7; Sept. 27, p. 5; Sept. 28, p. 5; Sept. 29, p. 5; Sept. 30, p. 5 B110. ‘Pretendentn afn “veg” keyn Krim’, Frayhayt, 1926 Oct. 2, p. 7 B111. ‘Eynems a veg’, Shtern, 1926 Nov., pp. 27–36 B112. ‘In polish af der keyt: ershter spektakl fun idishn melukhe-teater in Vaysrusland’, Frayhayt, 1926 Nov. 22, p. 3 B113. ‘Eynems a veg’, Frayhayt, 1927: Jan. 2, p. 7; Jan. 3, p. 5; Jan. 4, p. 5; Jan. 5, p. 5 B114. ‘Der bester fargenign iz a rayze iber der Volga’, Frayhayt, 1927 Jan. 16, p. 7 B115. ‘Dos lebn, in a shtetl in Sovet-rusland’, Frayhayt, 1927 Jan. 23, p. 5; Jan. 31, p. 5 B116. ‘Mit eyn nakht veyniger: Berliner bilder’, Frayhayt, 1927 Feb. 5, p. 7 B117. ‘Der yubilyar’, Frayhayt, 1927 Feb. 13, p. 5 B118. ‘Varyas kamf mit der Sovetn-makht: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1927 Feb. 22, p. 5 B119. ‘Untern trayb fun vintn: rayze bilder’, Frayhayt, 1927 March 13, p. 7 B120. ‘Naye groyse idishe talantn in Sovet-rusland’, Frayhayt, 1927 March 20, pp. 7, 10 B121. ‘A nayer talantfuler proze-shrayber in Sovetn-farband: “Khadoshim un teg” fun Y. Kipnis’, Frayhayt, 1927 March 27, p. 3 B122. ‘Nomberg, der kholesh’, Frayhayt, 1927 April 3, p. 7 B123. ‘In pansyon fun di dray shvester: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1927 April 10, p. 7 B124. ‘A dinamishe rege: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1927 April 17, p. 7 B125. ‘Der toyber: a pyese’, Frayhayt, 1927 May 8, p. 5; July 31, p. 3; Aug. 7, p. 3 B126. ‘Der bariton: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1927 June 3, p. 5 B127. ‘Sambatye: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1927 June 12, p. 3; June 19, p. 5 B128. ‘A tsenrubldiker’, Yungvald 1927 July, pp. 4–7; Aug., pp. 2–4 B129. ‘A raykher bruder: a bild’, Frayhayt, 1927 July 3, p. 5 B130. ‘A tsenrubldiker’, Frayhayt, 1927 July 17, p. 8 B131. ‘Khoyves: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1927 Sept. 25, p. 3; Sept. 26, p. 7; Sept. 28, p. 5 B132. ‘Mides-hadin’, Di royte velt, 1928 Jan., pp. 1–19; Feb.–March, pp. 35–45 B133. ‘Khoyves’, Literarishe bleter, 1928 Jan. 27, pp. 73–77; Feb. 3, pp. 93–95; Feb. 10, pp. 113–16 B134. ‘Di shabesdige khale’, Frayhayt, 1928 Jan. 28, pp. 7, 3 B135. ‘Golikhovke’, Frayhayt, 1928: March 25 (?); March 26, p. 3. Issue of 25 March 1928 was not available; note at beginning of 26 March instalment reads ‘Shlus’ (Conclusion) B136. ‘Dovid Bergelson vegn dem Granovski-teater’, Literarishe bleter, 1928 April 27, p. 321 B137. ‘Di shabesdike khale’, Literarishe bleter, 1928 Aug. 24, pp. 665–69

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B138. ‘Iber eyn trit! A bild’, Frayhayt, 1928 Sept. 2, p. 4 B139. ‘Der moderner davner: tsu Herts Grosbards kontsert fun yidishn vort’, Literarishe bleter, 1928 Sept. 7, p. 713 B140. ‘Sonim: a bild’, Frayhayt, 1928 Sept. 9, p. 3 B141. ‘Birger Voli Brener’, Frayhayt, 1928 Sept. 16, pp. 3, 5; 1929 July 7, pp. 7, 8 B142. ‘Skhar-tirkhe: a bild’, Frayhayt, 1928 Sept. 23, p. 3 B143. ‘Velt-oys, velt-ayn’; ‘Birger Voli Brener’; ‘Skhar-tirkhe’, Di yidishe velt, 1928 Oct., pp. 21–41 B144. ‘An eybiger knekht: a bild’, Frayhayt, 1928 Oct. 7, p. 5 B145. ‘Geburt: a khronik’, Frayhayt, 1928 Oct. 21, p. 3; Oct. 22, pp. 5, 3 B146. ‘Beshas oyfshtand’, Frayhayt, 1928 Oct. 28, p. 5 B147. ‘Geburt: a khronik’, Di yidishe velt, 1928 Nov., pp. 193–211 B148. ‘Iber eyn trit! A bild’, Literarishe bleter, 1928 Nov. 16, pp. 905–07 B149. ‘Di amolige broydes’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1928 Dec. 9, pp. 3, 5 B150. ‘Yuzi Spivak’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1928 Dec. 16, p. 3 B151. ‘Pinke Veyl’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1928 Dec. 23, p. 3 B152. ‘Tsvey rotskhim’, Literarishe bleter, 1928 Dec. 28, pp. 1026–28 B153. ‘Filipov’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1928 Dec. 30, p. 7 B154. ‘Spivak afn farher’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1929 Jan. 6, p. 7 B155. ‘Shmuel Voltsis’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1929 Jan. 13, p. 3 B156. ‘A geshikhte vegn Lenin, vos iz nokh nit dertseylt gevorn’, Frayhayt, 1929 Jan. 19, p. 7 B157. ‘Nekhe’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1929 Jan. 20, pp. 3, 10 B158. ‘An eserevke’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1929 Jan. 27, p. 5 B159. ‘Royte f lekn’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1929 Feb. 3, p. 8 B160. ‘In klem’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1929 Feb. 10, p. 3 B161. ‘Der oyfgerufener’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1929 Feb. 17, p. 3 B162. ‘Tsvey arestantkes’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1929 Feb. 24, pp. 7, 8 B163. ‘Kapitlen fun “Mides-hadin” ’, Literarishe bleter, 1929 March 1, pp. 173–76 B164. ‘Filipovs kerper’ (fun Mides-hadin), Frayhayt, 1929 March 3, p. 5 B165. ‘Di amolike broydes’, Literarishe bleter, 1929 March 22, pp. 235–36; March 29, pp. 254–56 B166. ‘Baym telefon’, Frayhayt, 1929 April 6, p. 7; April 14, p. 7; April 21, p. 7 B167. ‘Buryan: a bild’, Frayhayt, 1929 May 5, p. 7 B168. ‘A zay-gezunt mayne Amerikaner khaveyrim-arbeter’, Frayhayt, 1929 May 17, p. 3 B169. ‘Y. Kipneses “Khadoshim un teg” ’, Literarishe bleter, 1929 July 19, pp. 558–60 B170. ‘In a tog a vokhedign: a bild’, Frayhayt, 1929 July 21, p. 7 B171. ‘Z. Vaynper’, Literarishe bleter, 1929 Aug. 25, pp. 655–56 B172. ‘Penek’, Frayhayt, 1929: Sept. 1, p. 7; Sept. 15, p. 5; Sept. 29, p. 5; Oct. 6, pp. 7, 3; Nov. 3, pp. 6, 3; Nov. 10, pp. 5, 3; Dec. 8, p. 5; Dec. 15, pp. 7, 8; Dec. 22, p. 5; Dec. 29, pp. 5, 3; Frayhayt, 1930: Jan. 5, pp. 5, 3; Jan. 12, pp. 5, 3; Jan. 26, pp. 5, 6; Feb. 2, pp. 5, 6; Feb. 9, p. 5; March 16, pp. 5, 3; March 17, p. 5; March 23, pp. 5, 6; March 30, pp. 5, 6; April 6, p. 5; April 7, p. 5; April 13, p. 9; April 20, pp. 5, 6; April 21, p. 5; April 27, pp. 5, 6; April 28, p. 5; May 4, p. 5; May 5, p. 5; May 11, p. 5; May 18, p. 5; May 19, p. 5; June 1, pp. 5, 6; June 2, p. 5; June 29, pp. 5, 6; July 6, p. 5; July 7, p. 5; July 13, p. 5; July 14, p. 5; July 27, pp. 5, 6; July 28, pp. 5, 6; Nov. 30, pp. 5, 6; Dec. 7, pp. 5, 6; Dec. 8, pp. 5, 2; Dec. 14, pp. 5, 8; Dec. 21, p. 5; Dec. 28, pp. 5, 6; Frayhayt, 1931: Jan. 18, p. 5; Jan. 19, pp. 5, 6; Jan. 25, pp. 5, 8; Feb. 1, pp. 5, 8; Feb. 8, pp. 5, 6; Feb. 15, p. 5; Feb. 22, pp. 5, 6; March 1, pp. 5, 6; March 8, pp. 5, 6; March 22, pp. 5, 6; March 23, p. 5; April 19, p. 5; April 26, p. 5; May 3, pp. 5, 6; May 10, p. 5; May 17, p. 5; May 24, p. 5; May 25, p. 5; May 31, p. 5; June 1, p. 5; June 7, pp. 5, 2; June 14, pp. 5, 8; June 21, pp. 5, 3; June 28, p. 5; July 5, p. 5; July 12, p. 5; July 19, p. 5; Sept. 27, p. 5; Sept. 28, pp. 5, 2; Oct. 4, p. 5; Oct. 5, p. 5; Oct. 11, p. 5

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B173. ‘Penek’, Literarishe bleter, 1929 Sept. 13, pp. 712–15; 1931 April 1, pp. 267–68; April 17, pp. 300–01 B174. ‘Birger Voli Brener’, Literarishe bleter, 1929 Sept. 27, pp. 763–65 B175. ‘Dzhiro-Dzhiro: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1929 Oct. 20, p. 5; Oct. 27, p. 5 B176. ‘In a tog a vokhedikn’, Literarishe bleter, 1929 Nov. 22, pp. 920–21 B177. ‘In step’, Literarishe bleter, 1930 Jan. 31, pp. 87–89 B178. ‘Shefe’ Literarishe bleter, 1930 Feb. 7, p. 104 B179. ‘Dzhiro-Dzhiro’, Literarishe bleter, 1930 April 11, pp. 283–85; April 17, pp. 310–13 B180. ‘Problemen fun der yidisher literatur’, Literarishe bleter, 1930 June 13, pp. 437–39 B181. ‘Der lokh durkh velkhn eyner hot farloyrn’, Literarishe bleter, 1930 June 20, pp. 465–69 B182. ‘Dovid Bergelson vegn farsheydene literarishe problemen’, Literarishe tribune, (3) 1930, pp. 2–4 B183. ‘A mayse mit gvirim’, Literarishe bleter, 1930 Aug. 22, pp. 642–44; Aug. 29, pp. 662–65; Sept. 5, pp. 683–84 B184. ‘Abisl ash: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1931 Nov. 15, p. 5; Nov. 22, p. 5; Nov. 29, p. 5; Nov. 30, p. 5 B185. ‘Der proletarisher yontev: a briv fun Moskve’, Frayhayt, 1931 Dec. 6, p. 5 B186. ‘Dos land zol konen zayne heldn! A briv fun Sovetn-farband’, Frayhayt, 1931 Dec. 27, p. 5 B187. ‘Odes: briv fun Sovetn-farband’, Frayhayt, 1932 Jan. 9, p. 5 B188. ‘Satsgevet: gevidemet dem proletarishn yungen leyener’, Frayhayt, 1932 Feb. 28, p. 5 B189. ‘Tsvishn lebedige mentshn’, Frayhayt, 1932: March 6, p. 5; March 7, p. 5; March 13, p. 3; March 20, p. 5; March 28, pp. 5, 2; March 29, p. 5; April 24, p. 5; May 1, p. 5; May 2, p. 5; June 26, p. 5 B190. ‘Fayvl Sito’, Frayhayt, 1932 April 11, p. 5 B191. ‘Zey blaybn on a tsudek’, Frayhayt, 1932 May 8, p. 5; May 9, p. 5; May 15, p. 5; May 22, p. 5; May 23, p. 5 B192. ‘A mayse: der mayse, vos Peneks tate, Mikhl Levin, hot dertseylt dem tsveytn oyfdernakht nokh zayn kumen fun Kiev’, Literarishe bleter, 1932 June 3, p. 359 B193. ‘In a kolvirt: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1932 June 19, pp. 5, 6 B194. ‘On a tsudek’, Literarishe tribune, 1932 July, pp. 5–7 B195. ‘Matushka idish’, Frayhayt, 1932 July 11, p. 5 B196. ‘Arbetloze un arbetloze: fun a rayze’, Frayhayt, 1932 July 24, pp. 5, 2 B197. ‘Proletarishe proze-kunst’, Frayhayt, 1932 Aug. 8, pp. 5, 2; Aug. 15, p. 5 B198. ‘In der guralnye’, Literarishe bleter, 1932 Aug. 19, pp. 537–40 B199. ‘Proletarishe proze-kunst’, Literarishe tribune, 1932 Sept., pp. 9–12; Oct., pp. 7–8 B200. ‘Vider tsvishn lebedige mentshn: fartseykhenungen fun Sovetn-farband’, Frayhayt, 1932 Oct. 2, p. 5 B201. ‘Biro-Bidzshan tsvishn Leningrad un Moskve’, Frayhayt, 1932 Oct. 10, p. 5; Oct. 11, p. 5 B202. ‘Proletarishe kunst’, Frayhayt, 1932 Oct. 31, pp. 5, 2. A note at the end of this article reads ‘fortzetsung morgn’, but no further instalments were found B203. ‘Khaverte Bronye’, Shtern, (2) 1933 Feb., pp. 1–12 B204. ‘Biro-Bidzshaner’, Frayhayt, 1933: April 2, p. 9; April 3, p. 5; April 4, p. 5; April 5, p. 5; April 9, p. 5; April 10, p. 5; April 16, pp. 5, 6; April 23, p. 5; April 30, p. 5; May 7, p. 5; May 14, p. 5; May 21, pp. 5, 6; May 28, p. 5; June 4, pp. 5, 6; June 11, p. 5; June 18, pp. 5, 2; June 25, p. 5; July 2, pp. 5, 2; July 9, p. 5; July 16, p. 5; July 23, p. 5; July 30, p. 5; Aug. 6, p. 5; Aug. 7, p. 5; Aug. 13, pp. 5, 6; Aug. 19, pp. 5, 2; Aug. 26, pp. 5, 6; Sept. 2, p. 5; Sept. 10, p. 5; Sept. 16, p. 5; Sept. 23, pp. 5, 6 B205. ‘Birobidzshan’, Shtern, 1933 (5–6) May–June, pp. 6–25 B206. ‘Birobidzshaner’, Literarishe bleter, 1933 Aug. 18, pp. 528–30

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B207. ‘Penek un di yomim-neroim’, Tshernovitser bleter, 1933 Sept 24, p. 2 B208. ‘Birobidzshaner’, Farmest, 1934 Jan., pp. 6–33 B209. ‘Tog-bukh fun a Sovetishn shrayber’, Frayhayt, 1934 Jan. 1, p. 5 B210. ‘Etyudn tsum tsveytn teyl “Baym Dnyepr” ’, Frayhayt, 1934 Jan. 7, p. 5 B211. ‘Eyner, vos shraybt di “briv”: di letste kapitlen “Biro-Bidzshaner” ’, Frayhayt, 1934 Jan. 14, p. 5 B212. ‘Arum brunim: letste kapitlen “Biro-Bidzshaner” ’, Frayhayt, 1934 Feb. 17, p. 5 B213. ‘Di ershte hayzer: fun di letste kapitlen “Biro-Bidzshaner” ’, Frayhayt, 1934 Feb. 24, p. 5; March 4, p. 5 B214. ‘A gast: letste kapitlen “Biro-Bidzshaner” ’, Frayhayt, 1934 March 11, pp. 5, 3; March 18, p. 5; March 25, p. 7 B215. ‘Erev Oktober yontev: letste kapitlen “Biro-Bidzshaner” ’, Frayhayt, 1934 April 1, pp. 3, 2 B216. ‘Prisker (Biro-Bidzshan)’, Frayhayt, 1934 April 8, p. 5 B217. ‘Bolshevistisher koyekh: sof fun bukh “Biro-Bidzshaner” ’, Frayhayt, 1934 April 15, p. 7; April 22, p. 5 B218. ‘Di ershte hayzer’, Iberboy, 1934 May, pp. 18–20 B219. ‘Zeyer shrek far unzer heldishkeyt’, Frayhayt, 1934 May 6, p. 5 B220. ‘Di idishe oytonome gegnt in Biro-Bidzshan un ir badaytung’, Frayhayt, 1934 June 17, pp. 5, 6 B221. ‘A groys lebn, fodert a groyse kunst’, Frayhayt, 1934 Sept. 13, p. 5 B222. ‘Birobidzshan, di yidishe oytonome gegnt’, Fraynd, 1934 Nov. 27, p. 6 B223. ‘Dovid Bergelson vegn zayn sheferisher arbet’, Aktyaber, 1934 Dec. 5, p. 3 B224. ‘Baym Dnyepr: tsveyter band’, Frayhayt, 1934: Dec. 9, p. 5; Dec. 12, pp. 5, 2; Dec. 16, p. 5; Dec. 23, p. 5; 1935: Jan. 27, pp. 5, 2; Feb. 3, pp. 5, 2; Feb. 10, p. 5; Feb. 17, pp. 5, 6 B225. ‘Taykhn in Birobidzshan’, Fraynd, 1934 Dec. 11, p. 4 B226. ‘In park’, Fraynd, 1935 Jan. 11, p. 4 B227. ‘Bam Dnyepr’, Sovetish (2) 1935, pp. 3–35; no. 3, pp. 13–58; 1938 no. 6, pp. 7–110; no. 7–8, pp. 55–80; 1939 no. 9–10, pp. 16–103 B228. ‘Far vos bin ikh far Birobidzshan’, Fraynd, 1935 Jan. 4, p. 4 B229. ‘Mir trakhtn vegn lebn’, Farmest, 1935 Feb.–March, pp. 5–25 B230. ‘Di proklamatsye: a bild fun dem arbeter-lebn, in Kiev in der tsayt fun Kishenever pogrom’, Frayhayt, 1935 Dec. 1, p. 5 B231. ‘Di rabonim baym gubernator’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1935 Dec. 8, pp. 5, 2 B232. ‘Nokh’n pogrom’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dneypr], Frayhayt, 1935 Dec. 22, p. 5 B233. ‘Di hazkore’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1935 Dec. 29, p. 5 B234. ‘Barg-aroyf ’, Forpost, 1936 no. 1, pp. 37–70 B235. ‘S’geshleg in ganovim-shtibl’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1936 Jan. 5, p. 5 B236. ‘Zekharye, der binen-tsukhter: fun “Biro-Bidzshaner motivn” ’, Frayhayt, 1936 Jan. 26, p. 5 B237. ‘Yosl der shtarker’, Grininke beymelekh, 1936 May, pp. 301–06 B238. ‘Di heylige protsesye’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1936 June 14, pp. 5, 2 B239. ‘Men greyt di zelbst-shuts’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1936 June 21, pp. 5, 2 B240. ‘A bagegenish tsvishn an advokat un a redaktor’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1936 June 28, pp. 5, 2; June 29, p. 5 B241. ‘Der tsaytung-korektor Magidovitsh’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1936 July 5, pp. 5, 2 B242. ‘Magidovitsh bahalt zikh oys fun a shpion’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1936 July 12, pp. 5, 2

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B243. ‘Magidovitsh filt, er hot opgetsolt der velt, ale zayne vekslen’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1936 July 19, pp. 5, 2 B244. ‘Der varshtat shteyt leydig’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1936 July 26, pp. 5, 6 B245. ‘Magidovitsh’n vert epes klor’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1936 Aug. 2, pp. 5, 2 B246. ‘Leksik-problemen in der yidisher literatur’, Forpost, 1937 no. 2, pp. 140–53 B247. ‘Birobidzshan’, Forpost, 1937 no. 3, pp. 72–119 B248. ‘Nakhmen der farber’, Der khaver, 1937 March, pp. 85–92; April–May, pp. 117–24 B249. ‘Der yontev fun di valn’, Emes, 1937 Oct. 20, p. 3 B250. ‘Tsu gast: a dertseylung in zibn bildlekh’, Forpost, 1938 no. 1, pp. 64–72 B251. ‘Yankl der furman’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1938 Jan. 9, p. 5 B252. ‘Tsu gast bay Mendele’n’, Frayhayt, 1938 Jan. 16, p. 5 B253. ‘Baym pantser-tsug: fun a greserer dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1938 March 6, p. 5; 1939 Jan. 28, p. 5 B254. ‘Leksik-problemen in der yidisher literatur’, Foroys, 1938 March 18, pp. 5–6 B255. ‘Vartndig: a bild’, Frayhayt, 1938 April 10, pp. 5, 6 B256. ‘In avangard’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1938 Aug. 29, pp. 5, 2; Aug. 30, p. 5; Aug. 31, p. 5 B257. ‘An eydele zakh’, Frayhayt, 1938 Oct. 1, pp. 5, 6 B258. ‘Penek’s Rosheshone’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1938 Oct. 17, p. 2 B259. ‘A get fun Simkhes-Toyre: dertseylung: fun der serye “Droyb” ’, Frayhayt, 1938 Oct. 22, p. 5 B260. ‘Tsu-gast: a dertseylung in zibn bilder’, Frayhayt, 1938 Nov. 12, p. 5; Nov. 13, p. 5 B261. ‘Tsurik in der “khevre” ’, Sovetishe literatur, 1939 Jan., pp. 20–32 B262. ‘Sholem-Aleykhem, tsum akhtsikstn yor fun zayn geburt’, Sovetishe literatur, 1939 March–April, pp. 65–78 B263. ‘Sholem-Aleykhem, der groyser humanist’, Frayhayt, 1939 May 21, p. 3 B264. ‘Bletlekh’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1939 July 1, p. 5 B265. ‘A vikhtike bagegenish’, Forpost, 1940 nos. 2–3, pp. 17–33 B266. ‘Yunge yorn’, Sovetishe literatur, 1940 May, pp. 54–96 B267. ‘A kapitl fun tsveytn bukh “Bam Dnyepr” ’, Shtern, 1940 March, pp. 10–20; May, pp. 2–17 B268. ‘Sheyndl di groyse’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1940 Nov. 10, p. 5 B269. ‘Penek un Mani’ [from vol. 2 of Baym Dnyepr], Frayhayt, 1940 Nov. 17, p. 5 B270. ‘Dzshiro-Dzshiro’, Shtern, 1941 Jan., pp. 7–25 B271. ‘Kraft fun viln: Sovetishe mames un tates rufn durkh radio zeyere zin oyf ’n front: “Shlogt di Natsis!” ’, Frayhayt, 1941 Aug. 3, p. 3 B272. ‘Idishe heldn: keybl fun Moskve tsu der “Morgn-frayhayt” ’, Frayhayt, 1941 Aug. 10, p. 5 B273. ‘Ilya Ehrenburg, Bergelson, Mikhoels, Shakhne Epshteyn redn oyf der Moskver radio tsu idn fun der velt’ [text of speeches], Frayhayt, 1941 Aug. 28, p. 5 B274. ‘Khaverte Bronye’, Yidishe kultur, 1942 Jan., pp. 12–19 B275. ‘Blut far blut, toyt far toyt! a briv tsu di idn fun Amerike’, Frayhayt, 1942 March 22, p. 5 B276. ‘Kemft far ayere rekht tsu lebn, vi yidn’, Yidishe kultur, 1942 June, pp. 3–4 B277. ‘Kemft far ayer rekht tsu lebn, als idn! rede gehaltn oyf dem idishn anti-fashistishn kongres in Moskve, zuntog, dem 24tn May’, Frayhayt, 1942 June 2, p. 5 B278. ‘Tsveyter miting fun forshteyer funem yidishn folk’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1942 June 7, p. 2 B279. ‘Ver?’ Eynikayt [Moscow], 1942 June 17, pp. 3–4 B280. ‘Eskadrilye “Felker-frayntshaft” ’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1942 July 5, p. 2

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B281. ‘Zol di velt zayn an eydes’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1942 July 25, p. 2 B282. ‘Oyf tsepukenish’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1942 Aug. 15, p. 2 B283. ‘Gedenkt!’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1942 Sept. 5, p. 2 B284. ‘A gut gesheft’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1942 Sept. 15, p. 4 B285. ‘Oyf ale fir’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1942 Oct. 6, p. 4 B286. ‘Idn in Vitebsk: Vu zaynen zey? Vos iz fun zey gevorn?’, Frayhayt, 1942 Oct. 23, p. 5 B287. ‘Der yunger Sovetisher yid’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1942 Nov. 7, p. 6 B288. ‘Sovetishe idn un amerikaner idn hobn eyn oyfgabe’, Frayhayt, 1942 Nov. 29, p. 4 B289. ‘Der goyrl vert bashlosn’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1942 Dec. 5, p. 2 B290. ‘Kh’vel lebn,!’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1942 Dec. 27, p. 3 B291. ‘Zeyer khezhbm mit yidn’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Jan. 7, p. 3 B292. ‘Dos iz er!’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Jan. 18, p. 3 B293. ‘Velt-tribune far yidishe sovetishe shrayber: tsum tsveytn plenum funem yidishn antifashistishn komitet’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Feb. 7, p. 4 B294. ‘Der sovetisher id (tsugeshikt fun Koybishev)’, Frayhayt, 1943 Feb. 14, p. 5. ‘Koybishev’ (Kuibyshev), now known as Samara, is 858 km east of Moscow B295. ‘Akh, du liber Oygustin’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Feb. 27, p. 5 B296. ‘Heysblutike brider’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 March 25, p. 2 B297. ‘Kiev’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 May 1, p. 4 B298. ‘Undzerer a mentsh’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 May 27, p. 3 B299. ‘In eyn heldnrey’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 June 7, p. 2 B300. ‘Tsvey yor foterlendishe milkhome un di yidishe sovetishe literatur,’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 June 25, p. 6 B301. ‘A Natsi troymt vegn Nyu York (tsugeshikt fun Koybishev)’, Frayhayt, 1943 July 3, p. 5 B302. ‘Besarabier idn (tsugeshikt fun Koybishev)’, Frayhayt, 1943 July 12, p. 5 B303. ‘Geven iz nakht un gevorn iz tog’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Aug. 31, pp. 6–7; Sept. 9, p. 3; Sept. 16, p. 3 B304. ‘Undzerer a mentsh’, Yidishe kultur, 1943 Sept., pp. 60–61 B305. ‘A folk a giber’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Sept. 23, p. 3 B306. ‘Kiev’, Frayhayt, 1943 Sept. 29, p. 5 B307. ‘Bafrayt Sholem-Aleykhems shtot’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Sept. 30, p. 2 B308. ‘Un geven iz nakht un geven iz tog’, Yidishe kultur, 1943 Oct., pp. 12–16; Nov., pp. 15–18; Dec., pp. 14–20 B309. ‘Dniepropetrovsk’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Oct. 28, p. 2 B310. ‘Di milkhome un di idishe sovetishe literatur’, Frayhayt, 1943 Nov. 6, p. 25 B311. ‘Undzer Kiev’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Nov. 11, p. 3 B312. ‘Frayntshaft’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Nov. 18, p. 3 B313. ‘Daniel’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Nov. 25, p. 4 B314. ‘Unter der zun fun der Stalinisher konstitutsye’ [cf. item A61], Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Dec. 2, p. 2 B315. ‘Mikhoels tsurik in zayn Tevye-geshtaltn’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1943 Dec. 30, p. 3 B316. ‘Der farkishefter shnayder’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1944 Jan. 13, p. 3 B317. ‘Dray plenums’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1944 March 30, p. 3 B318. ‘Der general Yankev Kreyzer’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1944 July 6, p. 2 B319. ‘Yisroel Shrayer’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1944 July 6, p. 4 B320. ‘Frayntshaft’, Frayhayt, 1944 July 30, p. 5 B321. ‘Dos hobn geton daytshn!’ [cf. item A61], Eynikayt [Moscow], 1944 Aug. 17, p. 2 B322. ‘Volodye’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1944 Oct. 5, p. 3 B323. ‘General Yankev Kreyzer katevet di daytshn far zayn land un far zayn folk’, Frayhayt, 1944 Oct. 23, p. 5

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B324. ‘In land fun sotsyaler gerekhtikeyt’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1944 Nov. 8, p. 6 B325. ‘Prints Ruveni: dramatishe poeme in finf bilder’, Yidishe kultur, 1945 Jan., pp. 18–24; Feb., pp. 23–27; May, pp. 22–31; June, pp. 20–28 B326. ‘Der yontev fun felker’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1945 Feb. 15, p. 2 B327. ‘Sdom brent!’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1945 Feb. 15, p. 3 B328. ‘Oysroten zey!’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1945 March 17, p. 2 B329. ‘Mayne bagegenishn mit Y.L. Perets’, Eynikayt [New York], 1945 April pp. 16–17, 29 B330. ‘Y. L. Perets un “folkstimlekhe geshikhtn” ’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1945 April 10, p. 3 B331. ‘Mit Y. L. Perets in Berditshev’, Eynikayt [New York], 1945 May pp. 22–23 B332. ‘Zig un nekome’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1945 May 10, p. 3 B333. ‘Khaver Shakhne’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1945 July 26, p. 3 B334. ‘Tsu nitsokhn!’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1945 Aug. 11, p. 2 B335. ‘Der eydes — eyner fun a milyon’, Frayhayt, 1946 Aug. 26, p. 5; Aug. 27, p. 5; Aug. 28, p. 5 B336. ‘ “Freylekhs” in Moskver yidishn melukhe-teater’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1945 Aug. 30, p. 4; reprinted in Eynikayt [New York], 1946 Feb., pp. 26, 30 B337. ‘Loyn un shtrof ’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1945 Sept. 22, p. 3 B338. ‘Der protses iber di henker fun Belzener kontslager’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1945 Sept. 25, p. 2 B339. ‘Forshraybndik’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1945 Sept. 29, p. 3 B340. ‘Mit Y.L. Perets in Kiev’, Eynikayt [New York], 1945 Oct. pp. 20–21 B341. ‘Der Sovetn-farband hot gezigt a dank Stalin’s firershaft’, Frayhayt, 1945 Nov. 7, p. 3 B342. ‘Undzer yontev’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1945 Nov. 7, p. 4 B343. ‘Loyn un shtrof ’, Frayhayt, 1945 Dec. 2, p. 5 B344. ‘Aleksandr Barash’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1946 Jan. 1–Jan. 15 B345. ‘Far mayn Sovetish heymland’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1946 Feb. 10, p. 3 B346. ‘Biro-Bidzshan boyt zikh un vet zikh boyen’, Frayhayt, 1946 June 21, p. 5 B347 ‘Der groyser dertsierishe kraft’, Eynikayt [Moskow], 1946 July 6, p. 2 B348. ‘Der khezhbm vos yeder id darf zikh itst opgebn: vegn dem kiem un der tsukunft fun idishn folk’, Frayhayt, 1946 July 10, p. 5 B349. ‘Di fedemer funem Keltser pogrom’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1946 July 18, p. 2 B350. ‘Di shpurn fun dem Keltser pogrom’, Frayhayt, 1946 Aug. 12, p. 5 B351. ‘A zig far idisher kultur: di badaytung fun di Stalin premyes in Sovetn-farband’, Frayhayt, 1946 Aug. 25, p. 5 B352. ‘Likht’, Yidishe kultur, 1946 Sept., pp. 23–29; Oct., pp. 19–25 B353. ‘Grod zi’, Frayhayt, 1946 Sept. 22, p. 3; Sept. 23, p. 5 B354. ‘Fun heym tsu heym’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1946 Oct. 19, p. 3 B355. ‘Nayn un tsvantsik yor vert alt di Sovetishe ordenung’, Eynikayt [New York], 1946 Nov. pp. 4–5 B356. ‘Idishe retung’, Frayhayt, 1946 Nov. 7, Section 3, p. 1 B357. ‘Tsum yontev’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1946 Nov. 14, pp. 2–3 B358. ‘Tsvey veltn’, Heymland 1947 (no. 1), pp. 29–42; (no. 2), pp. 3–14; 1948 Jan.–Feb. (no. 3), pp. 83–97; May–June (no. 5), pp. 11–29 B359. ‘Vos der yunger yidisher dor veyst nit’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1947 Jan. 11, p. 3 B360. ‘A shverer kharakter: dertseylung’, Frayhayt, 1947 May 25, p. 55 [25th anniversary issue of Frayhayt] B361. ‘In a vinterdikn shturem’, Yidishe kultur, 1947 June, pp. 20–23 B361a. ‘Bagrisung dem Kh. Ber Slutski’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1947 June 26, p. 3 B362. ‘Di Sovetishe yugnt: bamerkungen vegn Aleksander Fadeyev’s roman “Di yunge

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gvardye,” in oystsug ibergezetst in idish fun Dovid Bergelson’, Frayhayt, 1947 July 20, p. 5; July 21, p. 5; July 22, p. 3; July 23, p. 2; July 24, p. 3; July 25, p. 3; July 26, p. 2. [Bergelson’s commentary and translation of excerpts from Aleksandr Fadeyev’s Molodaia gvardiia, which was first published in Russian in 1946] B363. ‘Grod zi’, Yidishe kultur, 1947 Sept., pp. 21–25 B363a. ‘Mentshlekhe derhoybnkayt’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1947 Nov. 6, p. 2 B363b. ‘Der Sovetn-farband, der virklekher farteydiker funem yidishn folk’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1947 Dec. 11, p. 2 B363c. ‘Groyser literarisher ovnt in Moskve’, Eynikayt [Moscow], 1947 Dec. 30, p. 3 B364. ‘Tsvey veltn’, Frayhayt, 1948 March 28, p. 5; March 29, p. 5 B365. ‘Ver vagt? Vegn Menakhem Boraysho’s paskvil oyf Mikhoels’n’, Frayhayt, 1948 April 18, p. 8 B366. ‘Der lign in shleyer’, Frayhayt, 1948 May 2, p. 5 B367. ‘Zalmenke iz do!’ [chapter from Tsvey veltn], Frayhayt, 1948 June 13, pp. 5, 3 B368. ‘Dos iz es dokh!’ [chapter from Tsvey veltn], Frayhayt, 1948 June 21, p. 5 B369. ‘Dos gefil fun yugnt’ [chapter from Tsvey veltn], Frayhayt, 1948 July 4, pp. 5, 3 B370. ‘Rive un Elik’ [chapter from Tsvey veltn], Frayhayt, 1948 July 11, pp. 5, 3 B371. ‘Es vet a ruekh in tatn!’ [chapter from Tsvey veltn], Frayhayt, 1948 July 25, p. 5 B372. ‘Profesor Kalmens iz gliklekh’ [chapter from Tsvey veltn], Frayhayt, 1948 Aug. 1, p. 5 B373. ‘Finf mentshn trinken tey’ [chapter from Tsvey veltn], Frayhayt, 1948 Aug. 15, p. 5 B374. ‘Der profesor fun Shikago’ [chapter from Tsvey veltn], Frayhayt, 1948 Sept. 12, p. 5 B375. ‘Tsu gast bay di Rusishe shkheynim’ [chapter from Tsvey veltn], Frayhayt, 1948 Sept. 26, pp. 5, 3; Sept. 27, p. 5 B376. ‘A briv fun Dovid Bergelson’, Di goldene keyt (7) 1951, p. 223. [Facsimile and transcription of a letter sent by Bergelson to Abraham Sutzkever on Sept. 4, 1944] B377. ‘Briv fun Dovid Bergelson’, Zamlbikher (8) 1952, pp. 85–105. [Letters from 1910–13] B378. ‘Fun “Penek” ’, Zamlbikher (8) 1952, pp. 129–38 B379. ‘An umbakanter briv fun Dovid Bergelson’, Parizer tsaytshrift (19) 1957, pp. 3–6 [Facsimile and transcription of a letter sent by Bergelson to A. Bekerman on 27 Jan. 1931] B380. ‘An eydes’, Di goldene keyt (43) 1962, pp. 207–17 B381. ‘Kh’vel lebn! (Lo amut ki ehyeh): drame in 3 aktn’, Sovetish heymland 1968 (no. 11), pp. 25–57 B382. ‘Mikhoels: etyudn’, Sovetish heymland 1970 (no. 3), pp. 126–30 B383. ‘Pionern’, Sovetish heymland 1974 (no. 4), pp. 9–13 B384. ‘In der sho fun goyrldikn oyspruv’, Sovetish heymland 1975 (no. 5), pp. 28–49. [Excerpts from articles originally printed in Eynikayt, 1942–45] B385. ‘Proletarisher proze-kunst’, Sovetish heymland 1976 (no. 1), pp. 56–62

Section C: Translations into English This section is substantially drawn from Joseph Sherman’s bibliography in his 1999 translation of Opgang (Descent), with a few additions. Works are in alphabetical order, with the original Yiddish title at the end of each entry C1. ‘Among Refugees’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe, ed. by David Roskies (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988), pp. 263–74; republished in The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005), pp. 21–43. [Yiddish: ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’] C2. At the Depot, trans. by Ruth Wisse in A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas, ed. by Ruth Wisse (New York: Behrman House, 1973), pp. 79–139. [Yiddish: ‘Arum vokzal’]

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C3. ‘At Night’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in Yenne Velt: Great Works of Jewish Fantasy and Occult, vol. 1, ed. by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Stonehill, 1976; London: Pan, 1978), pp. 243–45; republished in The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories, ed. by Ilan Stavans (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 89–91. [Yiddish: ‘Bay nakht’] C4. ‘Blindness’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005), pp. 85–101. [Yiddish: ‘Blindkeyt’] C5. ‘The Boarding House of the Three Sisters’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005), pp. 45–55. [Yiddish: ‘In pansyon fun di dray shvester’] C6. ‘Citizen Woli Brenner’, trans. by Joseph Leftwich in Yisroel: The First Jewish Omnibus, ed. by Joseph Leftwich (London: John Heritage, 1933), pp. 676–82; repr. New York: Beechhurst Press, 1952, pp. 511–16. [Yiddish: ‘Birger Voli Brener’] C7. ‘Civil War’, trans. by Seth Wolitz in Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet Yiddish Writers, ed. by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Schocken, 1977), pp. 84–123. [Yiddish: ‘Birgerkrig’] C8. ‘The Convert’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, ed. by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979), pp. 269–72. [Yiddish: ‘Di meshumedes’] C9. ‘The Deaf Man’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present, ed. by Joachim Neugroschel (New York/London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002), pp. 424–43. [Yiddish: ‘Der toyber’] C10. ‘The Déclassé’, trans. by Joseph Sherman in The Mendele Review (TMR), Vol. 09.009, http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele/tmrtoc09.htm [Yiddish: ‘Yordim’] C11. ‘Departing’, trans. by Golda Werman in The Stories of David Bergelson: Yiddish Short Fiction from Russia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), pp. 25–154. [Yiddish: ‘Opgang’] C12. Descent, trans., with an introduction and notes, by Joseph Sherman (New York: Modern Language Association, Texts and Translations Series, 1999). [Yiddish: ‘Opgang’] C13. ‘For 12,000 Bucks He Fasts Forty Days’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005), pp. 57–64. [Yiddish: ‘Far 12 toyzent dolar fast er 40 teg’] C14. ‘Hershl Toker’, trans. by Joseph Sherman, Midstream 37:8 (Dec. 2001), pp. 24–29. [Yiddish: ‘Hershl Toker’] C15. ‘The Hole Through Which Life Slips’, trans. by Reuben Bercovich in Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet Yiddish Writers, ed. by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Schocken, 1977), pp. 74–83. [Yiddish: ‘Der lokh durkh velkhn eyner hot farloyrn’] C16. ‘Impoverished’, trans. by Golda Werman in The Stories of David Bergelson: Yiddish Short Fiction from Russia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), pp. 14–24. [Yiddish: ‘Yordim’] C17. ‘In a Backwoods Town’, trans. by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Viking Press, 1954; repr. Schocken, 1973), pp. 471–504. [Yiddish: ‘In a fargrebter shtot’] C18. ‘In the Boarding House’, trans. by Joseph Sherman in Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, ed. by Sandra Bark (New York: Warner Books, 2003), pp. 247–58. [Yiddish: ‘In pansyon fun di dray shvester’] C19. The Jewish Autonomous Region. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939. [Yiddish: ‘Birobidzshan, an algemayne iberzikht’] C20. ‘Joseph Schur’, trans. by Leonard Wolf in Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet Yiddish Writers, ed. by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Schocken, 1977), pp. 29–73. [Yiddish: ‘Yoysef Shur’]

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C21. ‘Joseph Shorr’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, ed. by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979), pp. 399–450. [Yiddish: ‘Yoysef Shur’] C22. ‘Obsolescence’, trans. by Joseph Sherman, Midstream, 38.5 ( July/Aug. 2002), pp. 37–42. [Yiddish: ‘Altvarg’] C23. ‘Old Age’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005), pp. 9–20. [Yiddish: ‘Altvarg’] C24. ‘One Night Less’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005), pp. 103–16. [Yiddish: ‘Mit eyn nakht veyniger’] C25. ‘Remnants’, trans. by Golda Werman in The Stories of David Bergelson: Yiddish Short Fiction from Russia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), pp. 1–13. [Yiddish: ‘Droyb’] C26. ‘The Revolution and the Zussmans’, in Leo W. Schwarz, The Jewish Caravan: Great Stories of Twenty-five Centuries (New York: Farrar and Rinehard, 1935), pp. 663–80. [Yiddish: ‘Khoyves’] C27. ‘Sisters’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005), pp. 65–83. [Yiddish: ‘Shvester’] C28. ‘Spring’, trans. by Joseph Sherman in Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, ed. by Sandra Bark (New York: Warner Books, 2003), pp. 191–210. [Yiddish: ‘Friling’] C29. ‘The Squash’, trans. by Nathan Ausubel in A Treasury of Jewish Humor, ed. by Nathan Ausubel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951), pp. 436–47. [Yiddish: ‘Droyb’] C30. ‘Story’s End’, trans. by Jacob Sloan, Commentary (May 1960), pp. 413–25. [Yiddish: ‘A zeltener sof ’] C31. ‘Two Murderers’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005), pp. 1–8. [Yiddish: ‘Tsvey rotskhim’] C32. ‘Two Roads’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in Joachim Neugroschel (ed.), No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present (New York/London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), pp. 416–18. [Yiddish: ‘Tsvey vegn’] C33. When All is Said and Done, trans. by Bernard Martin (Athens, OH: University of Ohio Press, 1977). [Yiddish: Nokh alemen] C34. ‘When All is Said and Done, Part I’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, ed. by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979), pp. 377–94. [Yiddish: Nokh alemen] C35. ‘When All is Said and Done (extract)’, trans. by Gerald Stillman, Jewish Currents, 32.8 (Sept. 1978), 19–25. [Yiddish: Nokh alemen] C36. ‘Without a Name’, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel in No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present, ed. by Joachim Neugroschel (New York/London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002), pp. 418–24. [Yiddish: ‘On a nomen’] C37. ‘The Witness’, trans. by Rae Lobel and Joseph King, in ‘Jewish Life’ Anthology, 1946– 1956 (New York: Jewish Life, 1956), pp. 159–69. [Yiddish: ‘An eydes’] C38. ‘The Witness’, trans. by Joseph Leftwich in An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Literature, ed. by Joseph Leftwich (The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1974), pp. 55–64. [Yiddish: ‘An eydes’]

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Index of Titles Abisl ash B184 Af dem hundert eynstn viorst see Oyf der hundert un eynster viorst Af hundert mit eynter viorst see Oyf der hundert un eynster viorst Ahin tsu vegs B7 Akh, du liber Oygustin A61, B295 Ale verk A58 Aleksandr Barash B344 Aleksandrovke A15 Altvarg A15, A16, A44, A58, B88, B92, C22, C23 Amerike B51 Amolike broydes B149, B165 Among refugees C1 Arbetloze un arbetloze B196 Arum brunim B212 Arum vokzal A1, A2, A6, A13, A16, A23, A58, C2 Ash A44 At night C3 At the depot C2 Bafrayt Sholem-Aleykhems shtot A61, B307 Bagegenish tsvishn an advokat un a redaktor B240 Bagrisung dem Kh. Ber Slutski B361a Bal-makhshoves B49 Bam Dnyepr see Baym Dnyepr Bam telefon see Baym telefon Bam voyenkom in der heym see Baym voyenkom in der heym Banakht see Bay nakht Barg-aroyf B234 Bariton A16, A23, A58, B126 Basmalke “Emes” B10 Bay a brenendigen shtedtel B48 Bay nakht A13, A16, A58, B18, C3 Baym Dnyepr A20, A21, A25, B224, B227, B231–33, B235, B238–45, B251, B256, B258, B264, B267–69 Baym pantser-tsug see Lebn pantser-tsug Baym telefon A35, A37, A57, B166 Baym voyenkom in der heym A35 Baynakht see Bay nakht Besarabier idn B302 Beshas oyfshtand B146 Bester fargenign iz a rayze iber der Volga B114 Bilder, stsenes, bagegenishen oyf dem tsienistishen kongres B68 Birebidzshaner see Birobidzshaner Birger Voli Brener A16, A44, B141, B143, B174, C6 Birgerkrig A15, A16, A58, C7 Birobidzshan B205, B247 Birobidzshan, an algemeyner iberzikht A38, C19 Birobidzshan boyt zikh un vet zikh boyen B346 Birobidzshan, di yidishe oytonomye gegnt B222 Birobidzshan tsvishn Leningrad un Moskve B201

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Birobidzshaner A22, B204, B206, B208, B212–17 Birobidzshaner fragmenten A44 Bisl ash see Abisl ash Bletlekh B264 Blindkeyt A16, A58, B104, C4 Blindness C4 Blut far blut, toyt far toyt B275 Boarding house of the three sisters C5 Bolshevistisher koyekh B217 Botoshko see Botshko Botshko B31, B35 Briv fun Dovid Bergelson B87, B376, B377 Briv in redaktsye B32, B78 Briv tsu der yunger yidisher inteligents B17 Broyt-mil A19 Buryan B167 Citizen Woli Brenner C6 Civil war C7 Convert C8 Daniel B313 Deaf man C9 Declassé C10 Departing C11 Derhoybene vet zign A61 Dertseylungen A44 Descent C12 Dikhtung un gezelshaftlekhkayt B22 Dinamishe rege A16, A58, B124 Dniepropetrovsk B309 Dos hobn geton daytshn B321 Dos hobn geton fashistn A61 Dos iz er B288 Dos iz es dokh B368 Dovid Bergelson in shul A21 Dovid Bergelson makht a rayze in Keshenev B60 Dovid Bergelson shildert idishe balebatim B82 Dovid Bergelson vegn dem Granovski-teater B136 Dovid Bergelson vegn farsheydene literarishe problemen B182 Dovid Bergelson vegn zayn sheferisher arbet B223 Dray plenums B317 Dray tsentren B91 Droyb A7, A13, A16, A23, A26, A57, A58, B25, C25, C29 Dzshiro-Dzshiro A16, A44, B175, B179, B270 Entfer Sh. Niger’n B105 Erev der shlakht B39 Erev Oktober yontev B215 Ershte hayzer B213, B218 Es vet a ruekh in tatn B371 Eserevke B158 Eskadrilye ‘Felker-frayntshaft’ B280 Etyudn tsum tsveytn teyl ‘Baym Dnyepr’ B210 Eybiker knekht A16, A44, B144

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Eydele zakh B257 Eydes A44, A50, A52, A57, A59, B380, C37, C38 Eydes, eyner fun a milyon B335 Eynems a veg A15, A16, A21, A35, A39, A57, A58, B111, B113 Eyner, vos shraybt di ‘briv’ B211 Far mayn Sovetish heymland B345 Far 12 toyzent dolar fast er 40 teg B89, C13 Far vos bin ikh far Birobidzshan B228 Farkishefter shnayder B316 Farshvendung fun kinstlerisher energi B99 Fayvl Sito B190 Fayvls mayses A16, B27 Fedemer funem Keltser pogrom B349 Filipov B153 Filipovs kerper B164 Finf mentshn trinken tey B373 Folk a giber A61, B305 For 12,000 bucks C13 Forshraybndik B339 Frayntshaft A50, A52, A57, A61, B312, B320 Fresh A59, B26, B28 Freylekhs in Moskver yidishn melukhe-teater B336 Friling A44, C28 FSSR, di festung fun der velt-demokratye A61 Fuftsn milyon B103 Fun ‘Birobidzshaner’ A60 Fun heym tsu heym B354 Fun ‘Penek’ B378 Gantse derfer idishe farmers in Rumenyen shtarben B70 Gast B214 Geburt A16, B145, B147 Gedalye der groyser B54 Gedenkt B283 Gefil fun yugnt B369 Geklibene verk A16 Gelekhter un trehren B73 General Yankev Kreyzer B318 General Yankev Kreyzer katevet di daytshn B323 Geshehner oyf brokh B30 Geshikhte vegn Lenin B156 Geshtorbener ‘Mordekhai’ oyfn Dvinsker besalmen B83 Get B11 Get fun Simkhes-Toyre B259 Geven iz nakht un gevorn iz tog see Un geven iz nakht un gevorn iz tog Giro-Giro see Dzshiro-Dzshiro Goldene kaykele A5, B13 Golikhovke B135 Goyrl vert bashlosn A61, B289 Grod zi A50, A52, A59, A60, B353, B363 Groys lebn fodert a groyse kunst B221 Groyser dertsierishe kraft B347 Groyser literarisher ovnt in Moskve B363c

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Gut gesheft B284 Gzeyre af yidn A44 Hazkore B233 Held: fun di shreklekhe teg in Ukraine B69 Hershl Toker A15, A16, A35, A52, A57, B98, C14 Heylige protsesye B238 Heysblutike brider B296 Hinter a brenendikn shtetl A15, A16, A58 Hirshl Toker see Hershl Toker Hole through which life slips C15 Iber eyn trit A16, B138, B148 Ibergeburt A35, A57 Idishe ayzen-bahn B85 Idishe heldn B272 Idishe komunisten fun Rusland makhen vieder pogromen B47 Idishe literatur un idisher leben in Amerika B52 Idishe oytonome gegnt in Biro-Bidzshan un ir badaytung B220 Idishe retung B356 Idishe tragedye vos shpielt zikh itst op in Lita B7 Idn in Vitebsk B286 Idn un di milhome mit Hitlern A45 Ilya Erenburg, Bergelson, Mikhoels B273 Impoverished C16 In a backwoods town C17 In a fargrebter shtot A8, A13, A16, A23, A58, B12, C17 In a farlozenem hoyf in miten nakht B36 In a farpeysekhdikn aker A15 In a kolvirt B193 In a raykher familye B56 In a roytn vinkl A16, A44 In a Sovetishn shabes A16 In a tog a vokhedikn A16, A44, B170, B176 In a vinterdikn shturem A52, B361 In avangard B256 In der guralnye B198 In der heym B24 In der komune A31 In der sho fun goyrldikn oyspruv B384 In der sho fun oyspruv A61 In eyn heldnrey A61, B299 In eynem a zumer A13, A16, A23, A58, B20 In fartunklte tsaytn B19, B21 In klem B160 In land fun sotsyaler gerekhtikeyt B324 In pansion fun di dray shvester A16, A44, A58, B123, C5, C18 In park B226 In polish af der keyt B112 In shayn fun shayters A50, A52, A57 In step A16, A44, B177 In the boarding house C18 Jewish Autonomous Region C19

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Joseph Schur C20 Joseph Shorr C21 Kabren A16, A23, A58, B53 Kabtsanishe bekherel B33 Kapitl fun a dertseylung B4 Kapitl fun tsveytn bukh ‘Bam Dnyepr’ B267 Kapitlen fun ‘Mides-hadin’ B163 Kartapukh A50 Kemft far ayer rekht tsu lebn als idn B276, B277 Kh’vel lebn! B290, B381 Khaver Shakhne B333 Khaverte Bronye A31, A44, B203, B274 Khezhbm vos yeder id darf zikh itst opgebn B348 Khoyves A15, A16, A58, B64, B131, B133, C26 Kiev A61, B297, B306 Komunistishe shtetele in miten Besarabye B72 Kontributsye A35 Kraft fun viln B271 Kranker doler un a khoylevater galekh A31, A44 Kranker mensh B55 Kristen velkhe hoben ayngeshtelt zeyer leben tsu reten iden B45 Lage fun di yidishe shuln B40 Land zol konen zayne heldn B186 Lebn in a shtetl in Sovet-rusland B115 Lebn pantser-tsug A35, A40, A62, B253 Leksik-problemen in der yidisher literatur B246, B254 Lenins a vinkel B66 Letster Rosheshone A13, A16, A23, A27, A58, B6 Lign in shleyer B366 Likht B352 Lokh durkh velkhn eyner hot farloyrn A16, B181, C15 Loyn un shtrof B337, B343 Magidovitsh bahalt zikh oys fun a shpion B242 Magidovitsh filt, er hot opgetsolt der velt B243 Magidovitsh’n vert epes klor B245 Matushka idish B195 Mayne bagegenishn mit Y. L. Perets B329 Mayse B192 Mayse-bikhl A10, A14 Mayse mit a shlukerts B802 Mayse mit gvirim A16, B183 Mayse mit zibn feygelekh B16 Mayse vegn kvaln un leym B109 Me benkt keyn dorem A15 Men greyt di zelbst-shuts B239 Menshen-kener B79 Mentsh mit der krumer bak A44 Mentshlekhe derhoybnkayt B363a Meshumed hot oyfgeboyt a kristlikhe melukhe B81 Meshumedes A13, A16, A58, C8 Mides-hadin A16, A18, A21, A58, B90, B102, B132, B149–51, B153–55, B157–64

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Mikhoels: etyudn B382 Mikhoels tsurik in zayn Tevye-geshtaltn B315 Milkhome un di yidish-sovetishe literatur A60, B310 Mir trakhtn vegn lebn B229 Mir, vos lebn A31 Mit eyn nakht veyniger A16, B116, C24 Mit Y. L. Perets in Berditshev B331 Mit Y. L. Perets in Kiev B340 Moderner davner B139 Moskve B107 Nakhmen der farber B248 Nakht A44 Natsi troymt vegn Nyu York B301 Naye dertseylungen A50, A52 Naye groyse idishe talantn in Sovet-rusland B120 Nayer sort oyfgekumene idishe gvirim B80 Nayer talantfuler proze-shrayber in Sovetn-farband B121 Nayn un tsvantsik yor vert alt di Sovetishe ordenung B355 Nekhe B157 Nepmanishe inyonim A44 Nokh alemen A3, A13, A16, A21, A24, A57, A58, C33, C34, C35 Nokh’n pogrom B232 Nomberg, der kholesh B122 Note A16, A23, A28, A58 Note mit zayne vayber B58 Noveln A56 Obsolescence C22 Odes: briv fun Sovetn-farband B187 Ohn a nomen see On a nomen Old age C23 On a nomen A13, A16, A23, A58, C36 On a tsudek B194 On a zayt B8 One night less C24 Onheyb A44 Onheyb funem sof B9 Onheyb Kislev 5679 B29 Operatsyes, khasenes un revolutsyes B37 Opgang A11, A13, A16, A54, A58, A60, A63, B23, C11, C12 Opklayb A44 Oyf ale fir B285 Oyf dem shvel fun ‘der velt’ un ‘yener velt’ B108 Oyf der bafrayter gas B18a Oyf der hundert un eynster viorst A15, A16, A58 Oyf tsepukenish B282 Oyfgerufener B161 Oyfn besoylem B1 Oyfn breg B71 Oysgeklibene shriftn A60 Oysgevelte verk A57 Oysroten zey B328 Penek A33, B172, B173, B378

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Penek un di yomim-neroim B207 Penek un Mani B269 Peneks Rosheshone B258 Pinke Veyl B151 Pionern B383 Pretendentn af ’n ‘veg’ keyn Krim B110 Prints Ruveni A49, A60, B325 Prisker B216 Problemen fun der yidisher literatur B180 Profesor fun Shikago B374 Profesor Kalmens iz gliklekh B372 Proklamatsye B230 Proletarishe kunst B202 Proletarishe proze-kunst B197, B199, B385 Proletarisher yontev B185 Prostak A44 Protses iber di henker fun Belzener kontslager B338 Rabonim baym gubernator B231 Raykher bruder B129 Remnants C25 Revolution and the Zussmans C26 Revolutsyonerer gayst A12 Rive un Elik B370 Roman: ertsehlung A16, A23, A57, B67 Royte f lekn B159 Royter armeyer B42 S’geshleg in ganovim-shtibl B235 Sambatye B127 Satsgevet B188 Sdom brent! B327 Serls kheylek A16, A44, A58 Shabesdike khale B134, B137 Shefe B178 Sheyndl di groyse B268 Sheyvet Gedalye A16, A23, A29, A34, A58 Shmuel Voltsis B155 Sholem-Aleykhem A41 Sholem-Aleykhem, der groyser humanist B263 Sholem-Aleykhem, tsum akhtsikstn yor fun zayn geburt B262 Sholem-Aleykhem un di folks-shprakh B106 Shpasige un rihrende stsenes B75 Shpurn fun dem Keltser pogrom B350 Shriftn (zamlung), Farlag ‘Amerike’ B95 Shtark vi dos lebn A61 Shtetl in tol A34 Shtodt fun same idishe Nikolayevske soldaten B86 Shturem oysbahaltener un f lisiker A15 Shturemteg A15, A16 Shverer kharakter A50, A51, A52, B360 Shvester A16, A58, B101, C27 Sisters C27 Skhar-tirkhe A16, B142, B143

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Skulptor A50, A52, A56, A57 Sonim A16, A44, B140 Sovetn-farband, der virklekher farteydiker funem yidishn folk B363b Sovetn-farband hot gezigt a dank Stalins firershaft B341 Sovetisher id B294 Sovetishe idn un amerikaner idn hobn eyn oyfgabe B288 Sovetishe yugnt B362 Spivak afn farher B154 Spring C28 Squash C29 Stantsye Kotlet see Stantsye Kotlyet Stantsye Kotlyet A16, A34, B74 Story’s end C30 Taykhn in Birobidzshan B225 Tepikh fun ‘Moral un rekht’ B100 Tog-bukh fun a Sovetishn shrayber B209 Toyber A4, A13, A16, A19, A21, A23, A30, A34, A57, A58, A60, B2, B125, C9 Trot nokh trot A35 Tsaytung-korektor Magidovitsh B241 Tsenrubldiker A16, A17, A58, A59, B128, B130 Tsores vos idishe komunisten hoben nebekh oystsushtehn B46 Tsu ale fraynt fun der yidisher literatur un yidisher kultur B43 Tsu der yidisher efntlekhkayt B50 Tsu gast A36, A42, A44, B250, B260 Tsu gast bay di Rusishe shkheynim B375 Tsu gast bay Mendele’n B252 Tsu nitsokhn! B334 Tsugast see Tsu gast Tsugvintn A16 Tsum yontev B357 Tsurik in der ‘khevre’ B261 Tsvey arestantkes B162 Tsvey kristen iden-fraynd B62 Tsvey partizaner A35 Tsvey rotskhim A16, A44, A52, A57, B93, B152, C31 Tsvey shkheynim A44 Tsvey vegn A13, A16, A58, B3, C32 Tsvey vegn farnakht A9 Tsvey veltn A53, A55, B358, B364, B367–75 Tsvey yor foterlendishe milkhome A61, B300 Tsveyte Ester hamalkah B59 Tsveyter miting fun forshteyer funem yidishn folk B278 Tsveyter vikhtiger brif fun Besarabye B60a Tsvishn berg A50, A52, A56 Tsvishn emigrantn A15, A16, A58, A59, C1 Tsvishn lebedike mentshn A31, B189 Tsvishn shkheynim A52 Tsvishn tsvelf punktn A15, A16, A58 Tsvishn verter zaynen oykh faran ‘gvirim’ B44 Two murderers C31 Two roads C32

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Umbakanter briv fun Dovid Bergelson B379 Un geven iz nakht un gevorn iz tog A47, A48, B303, B308 Undzer Kiev A61, B311 Undzer yontev B342 Undzerer a mentsh A61, B298, B304 Unter der zun fun der Sovetisher konstitutsye A61 Unter der zun fun der Stalinisher konstitutsye B314 Unter’n trayb fun vintn B119 Varshtat shteyt leydig B244 Vartndig B255 Varyas kamf mit der Sovetn-makht B118 Vegn der yidisher folksshul in Poyln B41 Velt-ayn, velt-oys see Velt-oys, velt-ayn Velt-oys, velt-ayn A16, A58, B143 Velt-tribune far yidishe sovetishe shrayber B293 Ver? B279 Ver vagt? B365 Verk A13 Vi azoy men derkent a guten literarishen bukh B57 Vi azoy vet oyszen dos idishe lebn in Rusland B97 Vi heymishe iden reden fun Dr. Hertsl’s zuhn B61 Vider tsvishn lebedige mentshn B200 Vikhtike bagegenish B265 Volodye B322 Vos a teater-direktor hot mir dertsehlt B65 Vos der yunger yidisher dor veyst nit B359 Vos hot Got gepoyelt? B14 Vove Burnes B5 When all is said and done C33, C34, C35 Without a name C36 Witness C37, C38 Y. Kipneses ‘Khadoshim un teg’ B169 Y. L. Perets: shtrikhen B34 Y. L. Perets un di khsidishe ideologye B63 Y. L. Perets un ‘folkstimlekhe geshikhtn’ B330 Yankev-Nosn Viderpolier B15 Yankl der furman B251 Yeremenko der groyser B76 Yidishe shriftshteler letoyves di yidishe folksshuln B3 Yidn un di foterlendishe milkhome A46 Yisroel Shrayer B319 Yona Grigoryevitsh A35 Yontev fun di valn B249 Yontev fun felker A61, B326 Yordim A13, A16, A23, A32, A57, A58, B25, C10, C16 Yortsayt-likht A50, A52, A56, A57 Yosef Shur A13, A16, A58, A59, C20, C21 Yosl der shtarker B237 Yubilar A16, B117 Yubilyar see Yubilar Yunge yorn B266

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Yunger Sovetisher yid A61, B287 Yuzi Spivak B150 Z. Vaynper B171 Zalmenke iz do B367 Zay-gezunt mayne Amerikaner khaveyrim-arbeter B168 Zayne koshere leftsn B96 Zekharye, der binen-tsukhter B236 Zelik Broder A31 Zeltener sof A15, A16, A35, A58, B94, C30 Zey blaybn on a tsudek B191 Zeyer khezhbm mit yidn B291 Zeyer shrek far unzer heldishkeyt B219 Zig far idisher kultur B351 Zig un nekome B332 Zol di velt zayn an eydes B281 Zorg A44 Zun-bashaynter riz A43

Periodicals to which Bergelson Contributed Titles are followed by their place of publication and the years during which Bergelson’s contributions appeared. Also included here are periodicals in which works by Bergelson were printed, or reprinted, posthumously Aktyaber [Minsk] 1934 Almanakh tsum 10-yehrigen yubileum fun Moment [Warsaw] 1921 Bikher-velt [Kiev] 1919 Bikher-velt [Warsaw] 1924 Bobruisker vokhenblat [Bobruisk (Belarus)] 1912 Emes [Moscow] 1926 Eygns [Kiev] 1918, 1920 Eynikayt [Moscow] 1942–45 Eynikayt [New York] 1945–46 Farmest [Kharkov/Kiev] 1934–35 Folkstsaytung [Warsaw] 1926 Foroys [Warsaw] 1938 Forpost [Birobidzshan] 1936–38, 1940 Forverts [New York] 1922–26 Frayhayt [New York] 1926–29, 1931–36, 1938–48 Fraynd [Warsaw] 1934–35 Fun tsayt tsu tsayt [Kiev] 1911–12 Goldene keyt [Tel-Aviv] 1951, 1962 Grininke beymelekh [Vilnius] 1914–15, 1936 Haynt [Warsaw] 1923 Heymland [Moscow] 1947–48 Iberboy [Warsaw] 1934 Idishe velt [St. Petersburg] 1912 Idisher almanakh [Kiev] 1910 Ilustrirte velt [Warsaw] 1919 In shpan [Vilnius] 1926 Khaver [Vilnius] 1921, 1937 Kiever vort [Kiev] 1910

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Literarishe bleter [Warsaw] 1925, 1928–30, 1932–33 Literarishe tribune [Lodz] 1930, 1932 Milgroym [Berlin] Bergelson co-edited vol. 1 (1922) with M. Wischnitzer and Der Nister Moment [Warsaw] 1925 Naye tsayt [Kiev] 1917 Naye velt [Warsaw] 1910 Oyfgang [Kiev] 1919 Oyfkum [New York] 1929 Parizer tsaytshrift [Paris] 1957 Ringen [Warsaw] 1921 Royte velt [Kharkov/Kiev] 1928 Shtern [Minsk] 1926, 1933, 1940–41 Shtrom [Moscow] 1922 Shul un lebn [Warsaw] 1923 Sovetish [Moscow] 1935, 1938–39 Sovetish heymland [Moscow] 1968, 1970, 1974–76 Sovetishe literatur [Kiev] 1939–40 Tshernovitser bleter [Czernowitz] 1933 Tsukunft [New York] 1921 Vokh [Vilnius] 1915 Vuhin [Kiev] 1911–1912 Yidishe kultur [New York] 1942–47 Yidishe velt [Vilnius] 1928 Yudishe tribune [Warsaw] 1923 Yudishe velt [Vilnius] 1913–15 Yudishe vort [St. Petersburg] 1916 Yungvald [Moscow] 1927 Zamlbikher [New York] 1952

Secondary Sources in English and Yiddish This is necessarily a selective list: although there is not a tremendous amount of secondary literature in English on Bergelson, the critical and biographical material on him in Yiddish is vast. In compiling this section, I made much use of unpublished bibliographic work by Hugh Denman, as well as the Ephim Jeshurin Bibliographical Archive at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Mention should also be made of Avrom Novershtern’s doctoral dissertation in Hebrew, Aspektim mivniyim ba-proza shel David Bergelson me-reshitah ad ‘Mides-hadin’ ( Jerusalem, 1980), which has an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

English CLIFFORD, DAFNA, ‘From Exile to Exile: Bergelson’s Berlin Years’, in Yiddish and the Left, ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2001), pp. 242–58 ESTRAIKH, GENNADY, ‘David Bergelson: From Fellow Traveller to Soviet Classic’, Slavic Almanach, 7.10 (2001), 191–222 —— In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005) GARRETT, LEAH, ‘Trains and Train Travel in Modern Yiddish Literature’, Jewish Social Studies, 7.2 (Winter 2001), 67–88 KIRSCHENBAUM, BLOSSOM, ‘Love and Money in Dovid Bergelson’s “At the Depot” ’, Yiddish, 10.2–3 (1996), 115–20 LIPTZIN, SOL, ‘The World of Bergelson’, Congress Weekly, 23.17 (7 May 1956), 7–8

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MADISON, CHARLES A., ‘Dovid Bergelson, Novelist of Psychological Refinement’, in Charles Madison, Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and Major Writers (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968; repr. New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 426–48 RUBENSTEIN, JOSHUA and NAUMOV, VLADIMIR P., eds, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); see especially pp. 144–59 for testimony by David Bergelson SHERMAN, JOSEPH, ‘Bergelson and Chekhov: Convergences and Departures’, in The Yiddish Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Ritchie Robertson, Studies in Yiddish, 5 (London: Legenda, 2005), pp. 117–33 —— ‘Creative Freedom and the Party Line’, Midstream, 37.8 (2001), 20–23 —— ‘A Note on David Bergelson’s “Obsolescence” ’, Midstream, 38.5 ( July–Aug. 2002), 37–38 —— ‘The Vignette as Threnody: Grief as Aesthetic in Shapiro and Bergelson’, Slavic Almanach, 4.5–6 (1997), 130–45 —— ‘Who is Pulling the Cart? Bergelson and the Party Line’, Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1 (2004), 5–36 SLOTNICK, SUSAN ANN, ‘David Bergelson and the Metamorphosis of Tradition’, Jewish Book Annual, 41 (1983), 122–32 —— The Novel Form in the Works of David Bergelson (Unpublished PhD Thesis, Columbia University, 1978). With an extensive bibliography of Bergelson’s works in Yiddish WOLITZ, SETH, ‘Language as Ideology in Nokh alemen’, Yiddish, 5.1 (1983), 56–64 —— ‘The Power of Style: A Tribute to Dovid Bergelson’, Jewish Affairs (Spring 1997), 128–35 —— ‘The Two “Yordim”: I. Bashevis Singer’s Debt to Dovid Bergelson’, in Recovering the Canon: Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. by David Neal Miller (Leiden: Brill, 1986), pp. 1–10

Yiddish AUSLAENDER, NAHUM, ‘Dovid Bergelson’, in Veg-ayn veg-oys: literarishe epizodn (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1924), pp. 20–35 BERGELSON, DAVID, Oysgeklibene shriftn (Buenos Aires: Yoysef Lifshits-fond fun der Literatur-gezelshaft baym YIVO, 1971). Includes critical and biographical essays by S. Rozshanski, A. Vayter, N. Mayzel, S. Niger, B. J. Bialostotsky, I. B. Singer, Y. Gil, and H. Shoshkes BRIANSKI, SHLOYME, D. Bergelson in shpigl fun der kritik, 1909–1923 (Kiev: Farlag fun der alukrainisher vishnshaftlekher akademye, 1934) DAMESEK, A., ‘Dovid Bergelson: Der nayer etap in zayn shafn’, Di royte velt (Nov./Dec. 1929), 167–80 DOBRUSHIN, YEKHEZKEL, Dovid Bergelson (Moscow: Emes, 1947) ERIK, MAX, ‘Dovid Bergelson’, Yidishe kultur ( June–July 1964), 38–43 FINKELSHTEYN, ABE, ‘Bikher fun Dovid Bergelson’, Sovetish heymland, 4 ( July 1964), 148–50. A comprehensive list of Bergelson’s works in Yiddish, Russian, and Ukrainian published in book form in tsarist Russia or the Soviet Union FOGELMAN, L., ‘In der idisher velt: Dovid Bergelson’s atake oyfn “Forverts” ’, Forverts, 13 July 1946, p. 6 GIL, Y., ‘Dovid Bergelson in zayn Sovetishn period’, Zamlbikher, 8 (1952), 120–29 GLEYZER, MUNYE, ‘Dovid Bergelson in di yorn fun der groyser foterlendisher milkhome’, Sovetish heymland, 7 (1974), 149–52 HOFER, YEKHIEL, ‘Dovid Bergelson’, Di goldene keyt, 25 (1956), 11–24

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KAHAN, ITSIK, ‘Dovid Bergelsons nign in der yidisher proze-kunst’, Tsukunft, 74 (Dec. 1969), 430–34 KAUFMANN, DALIA, ‘Fir gilgulim fun Bergelsons dertseylung “Botshko” ’, Yerusholayimer almanakh, 4 (1975), 216–21 KENIG, LEO, ‘Dikhter, vos kenen nisht lakhn: vegn Dovid Bergelson biz der revolutsye’, Shrayber un verk (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1929), pp. 172–85 KESNER, L., ‘Dos lokh un der beygl’, Undzer bukh ( July–Aug. 1926), 209–16. [Response to Bergelson’s article ‘An entfer Sh. Niger’n’ in Frayhayt (Aug. 22, 1926)] KLITENIK, SH., ‘Vegn Bergelsons biz-Sovetisher shafung’, Verk un shrayber (Moscow: Emes, 1935), pp. 5–33 KORN, RACHEL, ‘Dovid Bergelson: fun mides-horakhmim biz mides-hadin’, Di goldene keyt, 43 (1962), 9–26 —— ‘Mayn bakenen zikh mit Bergelsonen’, Literarishe bleter (2 Nov. 1934), 731–32 KVITKO, LEYB, ‘Mayn ershte bakantshaft mit Dovid Bergelson’, Yidishe kultur (Feb.–March 1941), 13–16 LOYTSKER, KHAIM, ‘Shtrikhn fun Dovid Bergelsons shprakh-stil’, Sovetish heymland, 3 (1972), 162–70 LYUBOMIRSKI, YESHUE, ‘Bergelson der dramaturg’, Sovetish heymland, 8 (1974), 160–65 ‘Materyaln tsu Bergelsons bio-bibliografye’, Visnshaft un revolutsye, 1.2 (1934), 67 MAYZEL, NAKHMAN, ‘Dovid Bergelson’, Forgeyer un mittsaytler (New York: YKUF, 1946), pp. 304–41 —— Dovid Bergelson: 30 yor shafn (New York: Kooperativer folks-farlag fun internatsyonaln arbeter ordn, 1940) —— Onhoybn: Dovid Bergelson (Kibuts Alonim: Bet Nahman Maizel, 1977) —— ‘Perets Hirshbeyn, Dovid Begelson un Der Nister’, Kegnzaytike hashpoes in velt-shafn (Warsaw: Yidish bukh, 1965), pp. 303–25 —— Vegn Bergelson’s ‘Nokh alemen’ (Kiev: Kunst-ferlag, 1914) NIGER, SHMUEL, ‘Dovid Bergelson’, Yidishe shrayber in Sovet-rusland (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1958), pp. 282–341 —— ‘Di kunst-teorye un di kunst fun Dovid Bergelson’, Lezer, dikhter, kritiker, I (New York: Yidisher kultur farlag, 1928), pp. 156–64 NOVERSHTERN, AVROM, ‘Der held un zayne handlungen in Dovid Bergelsons frie dertseylungen’, Di goldene keyt, 94 (1977), 132–43 —— ‘Hundert yor Dovid Bergelson: materyaln tsu zayn lebn un shafn’, Di goldene keyt, 115 (1985), 44–58 PIEKARZ, MENDEL, ‘Dovid Bergelson’, in A shpigl oyf a shteyn, ed. by Benyamin Hrushovski, Avrom Sutzkever, and Khone Shmeruk (Tel-Aviv: Di goldene keyt, 1964), pp. 724–37 POMERANTZ, A., ‘Dovid Bergelson: tsum 30-yorign yubiley zint s’iz dershinen zayn ersht bukh “Arum vokzal” ’, Frayhayt, 31 Dec. 1939, p. 3 —— ‘Di mizinke fun der Sovetisher idisher literatur gefint zikh oyfn front: fun Dovid Bergelson biz Dora Kheynika’, Frayhayt, 31 May 1942, p. 6 RAVITSH, MEYLEKH, ‘Bergelson’, Literarishe bleter, 30 May 1930, p. 403 —— ‘Dovid Bergelson un di muzik’, Fraye arbayter shtime, 12 Feb. 1937, pp. 5, 7 SHKAROVSKI, SHAYE, ‘Dovid Bergelson’s roman “Baym Dnyepr” ’, Frayhayt, 10 Nov. 1940, pp. 3, 2 SHTERNBERG, YANKEV, ‘80 yor Dovid Bergelson’, Sovetish heymland ( July–Aug. 1964), 3–20 SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS, ‘Dovid Bergelson’, Forverts, 27 Aug. 1950, section 2, p. 5; section 1, p. 7 —— ‘Vegn Dovid Bergelsons “Baym Dnyepr” ’, Globus, 5 (Nov. 1932), 56–65 ‘Tsu Dovid Bergelsons 85-tn geburtstog’, Sovetish heymland, 8 (Aug. 1969), 114–26. Includes an extensive bibliography of secondary literature

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WEINPER, Z., ‘Dovid Bergelson: tsu zayn draysig-yorign gang barg-aroyf ’, Frayhayt, 21 July 1940, p. 5 WISSE, RUTH, ‘Stil un politik in Bergelsons verk’, Yugntruf, 16 (Dec. 1968), 16–20 —— ‘Vegn Dovid Bergelsons dertseylung “Yoysef Shur” ’, Di goldene keyt, 77 (1972), 133–44 ZITNITZKY, PINKHAS LAZARO, ‘Dovid Bergelson — shtrikhn un kharakteristik’, A halber yorhundert idishe literatur (Buenos Aires: Eygns, 1952), pp. 269–379

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Appendices ❖

Bergelson’s Literary Theory

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A PPE NDIX A

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Belles-lettres and the Social Order David Bergelson (First published in Bikher-velt, Kiev, August 1919, cols. 5–16) 1 We live in a time of great turmoil. Every day brings with it new disappointments and new hopes. Old forms lose their worth; new forms are not created. The analytic observer’s gaze f loats over the formlessness and void of the time and perceives only disconnected features, bare outlines that are directly connected to the most important development of the present: to the process of rebuilding the life of society, and to the results which that rebuilding ought to bring. Yet society has finally come to the inmost conviction that it lives within a far less organized structure than some animals or even than some insects, and, in passing over to a new social formation, is obliged to renounce old forms. In this, belles-lettres are fundamentally at one with society, but belles-lettres depend too much on form to be able to renounce their established genres. In addition, belles-lettres are, for the most part, the outcome of that which is outworn: they are directed by past impressions. Not for nothing does Gorky admit that the stasis of conservatism enchants him. Nothing seizes the writer’s soul so much as unchanging established forms, and then comes the process of artistic creation — the poet frees himself from confinement ... In this time of turmoil, society and belles-lettres must consequently part ways. The social formation seeks brand-new ways for itself. The glance of its avantgarde is turned only to that outline that draws up, if not the contours of the new society, then at least the contours of chaos that hold sway around it at the moment when old worlds collapse. And this outline must be abstract, because life has not yet created any images around it, and the outline itself is too undeveloped and too new to have attracted its own images. Poetry, however, knows only of such outlines as consist of allusions to imagery. Being essentially progressive and entirely on the side of social order, poetry must nevertheless base itself instead on old, outworn imagery and remain isolated. The social order that strives towards brand-new creation no longer notices either the old world or the traditions of its image-making. It abstracts the outlines of poetry, and then poetry appears ludicrous to it.

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For poetry, even in relatively peaceful times an encounter with those who understood only abstract lines was not precluded. On one hand this might be the unsophisticated reader without formal education who had not grown up with the tradition of imagery; on the other hand it might be the narrow pragmatist who wanders through an exhibition of pictures like an outsider, removes the spectacles from his short-sighted eyes, takes a close look, and does not understand: why does the public stand for hours opposite these pictures and regard them with such great interest? He sees nothing more than bare outlines! Next to such a viewer, the painter could certainly feel very isolated ... Nevertheless, the poet’s isolation had never yet reached such a level as it has at the present time when, in the name of its new reconstruction, the social formation has been compelled to negate and, for a shorter or longer period, to disregard all former life-forms, together with the traditions attached to all their shapes and visual representations. But if the isolation of poetry in general is very great at present, the isolation of Yiddish poetry is shocking. Several scattered elements that take no direct part in the rebuilding process of the social formation, and have not been entirely engrossed by the chaotic condition of the world, can be found among the middle classes of every nation. Their attitude to poetry has not been altered, and at the same time they still present in their own persons the more cohesive peaceful forms on which poetry bases its explorations. Among us Jews, however, the middle class is totally uninterested in Yiddish creativity. For Yiddish poetry, as a result, there is left on one hand the simple, unsophisticated reader who has not come to maturity with the tradition of word pictures and comprehends only those sketches that consist of primitive outlines; to put it another way, he comprehends only the lubok.1 And on the other hand, Yiddish poetry is left with the intellectual reader who, incidentally, has partly been brought up on foreign poetry and comes to us from alien traditions. In those alien traditions, the ear of the outsider fails to register almost every aspect of any treatment that carries a national-subjective character, and apprehends nothing more than its broad human meaning — its universalized intention. As a result, some sections of our readership have acquired an entirely unique attribute: they have accustomed themselves to overlooking huge groups of individual human beings, and to focusing their attention exclusively on humanity in general — they glance over poetry with eyes that seek only its universal application. They did this even in wholly peaceful times. Now, however, when this kind of reader cannot and dare not stand outside the brand-new social formation, it is easier for him than for others to recognize only those bare outlines, that universalism that has a direct bearing upon the new objects of social searching. To put it another way, this reader perceives nothing more than the chaotic lubok. 2 A clear illustration of the chasm which, during the present period of turmoil, is beginning to sunder modern art from modern society is the fact that, in recent years, almost all the best and most admired Russian poets and writers have fallen silent. The writers alone are certainly not to blame for this, but rather the source

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from which they drew their inspiration, the bricks and mortar from which they built and shaped their poetry. For the time being, however, the rapidly advancing social formation has created no new bricks or mortar for poetry and the result of this is silence — an empty place. A clear illustration of the chasm which, during the present period, is starting to sunder modern Jewish art from modern Jewish society is the attitude to our own new artistic creations. A particularly clear and concrete example is the coldness with which the anthology Eygns was received, and it is worthwhile to pause on this instance more fully. Many expected that this anthology would bring with it something of ‘our own’, and at any other time this would simply have meant our Jewish ‘own’. To put it another way, the book would have been scrutinized for its Jewish sociopsychological intention. It is clear, however, that during the present time of turmoil, the only kind of socio-psychological intention that can satisfy the reader is one that bears one or another kind of connection with the reconstruction process of the social formation — to that aspect on which his undivided attention, all his sufferings and joys, have now been concentrated. After all, the very air is now saturated with universal searchings and universal questions, and the reader seeks elucidation of all these searchings and questions in every newly published book. Many would similarly have searched for these in the anthology Eygns, but did this volume justify their hopes? Der Nister has invariably been equal to the task of making his work more universal than any realistic writer.2 He deals always with abstractions, with universal archetypes. In his story ‘Tsum barg’ (To the mountain), the mountain is just one such universal archetype; others include the forest, the wanderer, the young man, the old man, the beggar, the dog, and so on. Nevertheless, in Der Nister’s work all this derives from the same authentic Jewish lineage as the imagery that colours all his work with a uniquely hidden tenderness, because Der Nister has also inherited from the old world the bricks and mortar with which he builds and shapes — in himself he is both the style of Hasidic mystical creativity and the revelation of its highest meaning; he is himself ‘the wanderer’. Exactly like the Jewish mystic, he leaves the main road, retiring to a corner somewhere in a forest, where none can observe him. He is one who ‘sees without being seen’, he is a ‘hidden one’, and all alone he perceives everything that takes place on the main road. He sees that ‘the old man is dead’ and ‘bowed as though engaged in the ritual purification of the corpse’ he enters the old man’s ruined abode; he crosses ‘over the threshold and over the old man’ and knows that he is not responsible:3 s’iz nor dayn zun, fun glik dayn tog, geyt oyf un shaynt oyf himlen dayne, un oyfgeyn vet un vet ersht oyfgeyn [...] [It is only your sun. Your day rises up for joy, and will rise up and will always rise up [...]]

There is no doubt that we have here before us a socio-psychological phenomenon: among us Jews an entire generation has recognized that its ‘old man is dead’ and

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has stepped over him, and among a people whose attitude towards its past is, as a result of certain circumstances, greatly hypertrophied, this is a sufficiently moving phenomenon. Our highly developed intellectual, however, is firmly locked into the ranks of the modern social formation, so is he able to turn and peer into a corner that is our very own at a time when the social formation is preoccupied with much that is more immediate and more important? Together with the whole of humanity, he is now treading over an entire dead world ... I have paused on no more than a single image from Der Nister’s stories. The remaining images are no less important and interesting. In his two new stories, Der Nister has also come to us with a fresh new spring of language: Iz yeger gegangen a khaye tsu fangen vi tomed er geyt zikh mit hunt un fardreyt zikh in vald tsvishn velder. Hot plutsem getrofn dem veg durkhgelofn a hind iz a frume mit oygn mit shtume, un kosher-dershrokn un hot zikh farhaltn. Un shteyen iz geblibn mit hirshelekh zibn, mit kinderlekh kleyne, mit pitselekh sheyne un a freg hot gegebn: ‘Yeger, vos kloybstu, yeger, vos roybstu, di mame fun kinder, tsi kinder fun muter?’ 4 [A hunter goes hunting, in search of his prey in the forest; as always his dogs are beside him; he loses his way in the woods, in the bushes. Suddenly, there on the road, he meets with an innocent doe, her eyes full of silence; stricken with terror, she stands there unmoving. And stands there and stands there, with all her young fawns, her seven small children, her sweet pretty darlings, and asks him this question: ‘O hunter, why must you, O hunter, why would you, why tear from the mother her children, from the children their mother?’] — translated by Lawrence Alan Rosenwald

But what significance does this have at the present, most intensified moment when the social formation is compelled to admit that for the undefined essence of its further creation it possesses neither language nor word, and what does work of this kind contribute to this undefined essence? It is therefore no surprise that Jewish society has given no grateful thanks for this chastely fresh spring of language. 3 The earliest Christian bards (soon after the appearance of Christianity) were very bad poets. The first Christian sculptors rapidly became unskilled in accurately reproducing the forms of the human body; at that time, Christians were content with painting the vague image of a dove or with a sketch of Christ’s monogram [the fish]. Eventually they were unable to make more than a cross — two bare lines — but for the believing Christian these were wholly adequate and meaningful: in these lines he saw the symbol of his faith, and in their starkness, the sign that he was rejecting the old world and its old established forms; on the contrary, the more bare the lines were, the more possibilities existed to insert new content into them; all this, obviously, depended on the extent of his zeal, but by then zeal could be an authentic outcome of the time. I mention this in relation to something else: It is little wonder that some deliberately want to rank Markish higher than such substantial God-blessed talents as Hofshteyn5 and Kvitko. In the present

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chaotic condition of the world, an enormous role is played not by the content of the shout, but by its strength, because there is more than enough content in the present time itself, and if a shout merely reaches us from somewhere, we are instantly ready to foist meaning on it. It goes without saying that thanks to the impulse of a deep-rooted, healthy sense of what is true art, some will still agree that Kvitko commands profound and powerful images; others will continue to sense the divine presence that rests upon Hofshteyn’s musically caressing, outwardly commonplace verse: di zun hot haynt tsum nayem pantser maynem di letste goldn liske tsugelayt. Today the sun brightens my new-made armour with all the gilded glory of its light. — translated by Lawrence Alan Rosenwald

Perhaps someone else will note that in the first line the stress falls on the nun in every word, and in the second line the stress falls throughout on the soft lamed. In general we shall have to listen attentively to his quiet tread that approaches us from distant roads: vu reder vu blinde far vintn farshayte alts moln un moln di heymloze shtoybn. where wheels, all unseeing, with wanton winds blowing, are grinding the dust, the dust in its roaming. — translated by Lawrence Alan Rosenwald

In addition his tread, as with a true poet, is convincingly quiet; it radiates the respectful ‘taking off of shoes’, the integrity of him who walks around the holy, eternally burning bramble bush. He is in truth ‘girded up in sunshine’, he possesses the most refined, deeply artistic colours in which to transmit his vision, to create feelings; and he accompanies them ‘without fear into all the black caves of world and being’. Because of this, however, others in addition to M[oyshe] Litvakov will find in Markish ‘the signs of overcoming the national in the Yiddish lyric’, ‘the pulsing springs of universalism’, because not without reason — so says Litvakov — does Markish so greatly love words ‘simply for their own sake’. The matter is far more elementary, however: every time Markish lacks both words and content, he fills the gap with a shout, ‘simply for its own sake’. He says himself, ‘Let the world care about me’, and we cannot deny him the assertiveness of his will. He is totally devoid of abstraction; as a result, the socially vigilant Litvakov arrives opportunely and is zealous enough to fill these bare cries with the entire universal meaning of the time. Markish6 is poor in images, and even those images he does possess are more narrative than visual: kumt on fun ergets a vint, kert iber fun eyn zayt oyf der tsveyter a fardreyte blat, khapt oyfn veg a shtikl shtroy, git in der luftn a fardrey es un farshvindt.

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From somewhere comes a gust of wind, turns a twisted leaf over and over, seizes a piece of straw along the way, reverses it in the air and disappears. — translated by Lawrence Alan Rosenwald

But poverty of imagery means poverty of impressions, and nothing so much distinguishes the artist as his unique manner of conceiving impressions. The more impressions an artist has, the more he possesses impulses that do not permit him to rest but summon him and rouse him; the more images an artist absorbs into himself from childhood on, the more substance, the more possibilities, he possesses. No one is more solitary than the artist, because the artist uniquely comprehends not only life situations as a whole, but also their most minute details as well. He apprehends each individual image differently from everyone else around him. He glances around him, astonished that no one else notices the same things that he does. He is one alone, he is solitary. And he exerts all his energy to emerge from this solitude — he does not rest until he has compelled all around him to see with the same eyes as he does. In this way, for example, L[eyb] Kvitko7 compels us to share the same feelings as he does on moonlit nights: [...] epes kumen nekht un s’vert di shtot a harfe, a groyse harfe mit dine-dine kantn sharfe, un yeder mentsh vert a tsarte zilber-strune, vos finkelt blaykh un tsit zikh tsu levone. ikh bin di ekste dan, di strune gor di letste, un zeltn ven s’rirt on a hant mikh a geshetste. ikh brum nor, brum nor, brum far mayne shkheynim, ven yunge vayse sheydim rirn fun zey eynem; emets shpilt oyf undz un gist un f list gefiln un fangt dem tifn himl mit a sod a shtiln... levone shprekht in mitn drinen ... nor s’farshteyt alts nisht, nit mayn harts un mit mayn zinen ... And there are nights on which the city sings like a tall harp, with edges sharp as blades, and every man, like a tender, silver string, dully sparkling, draws towards the moon. And of these strings I am the last and least, and seldom does a treasured finger pluck me. I only vibrate, vibrate to the strings beside me, as young white ghosts touch one or another; someone is playing us, and pouring a f low of feelings, and with a quiet secret holds the deep sky. And all the while the moon is speaking, yet neither heart nor mind can understand ... — translated by Lawrence Alan Rosenwald

Here, little by little, we are pervaded by Kvitko’s feeling towards the night, and by the time we come to the last lines, we can say in unison with him: ikh farshtey nit gornisht, gornisht ... I understand nothing, nothing.

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Consequently, the creative process consists of two moments: of deriving the unique image from its place of origin, and of the necessity for, and the means by which, to convince others of their truth. None of this, however, is in any way applicable to Markish, because essentially everyone can see that ‘the wind turns over a leaf and snatches up a piece of straw’ and it is totally unnecessary to convince anyone of this. But, as has been noted, now is a time, exactly as at the beginning of Christianity, when bare outlines lead the way, and with zeal, essential new content can also be inserted into Markish’s bare outlines. In a time of radical social change, images are a defect — they recall the old social order too much, they do not permit the essence of the new time to be fitted into themselves. Image-building bases itself on old forms, and old forms no longer exist — they have been nullified by the ideology of the new social formation. Kvitko imagines yet again a large hall: mit henger oyf der stel fun lompn blitsn, mit shpinvebs oyf di vent fun groyse bilder, un oyf der brik — fun yunge valsn — kritsn ... With chains of gleaming lamps that shine like stars upon the ceiling, and cobwebs on the walls of portraits, and on the f loor, new waltzes’ scars. — translated by Lawrence Alan Rosenwald

But if old forms are rendered null and void, if no young couples have ever in their lives danced a waltz, then the ‘scratch’ depicted on the dance f loor summons up no pictorial associations whatever; it is some sort of superf luous, dissociated scratch — it is ludicrous. The old forms on which Kvitko bases his rich, full-bodied use of imagery are now void. Ideologically Kvitko’s lines are abstracted until they become wholly bare. Here once again the anthology Eygns must be mentioned. There is no doubt that, in an artistic sense, this was the first anthology with which our emergent Yiddish literature could lay claim to being a serious literature: until now, such prose and such verse had never before been produced among us. When account is taken of the fact that we are separated by great distances from our young writers in America, Lithuania, Poland, and Galicia, it is clear why the anthology Eygns is not five times thicker than it is. But did the anthology have waiting for it the outstretched hand that should have received it? No one so much as mentioned Y[ekhezkel] Dobrushin’s highly successful still-life ‘In shtetl’ [In the little market town], a piece that will certainly endure in the literature as a memorial to the ‘shtetl-cemetery’. In general, the Yiddish press barely commented on the anthology, and society at large gave it very little thought. In addition, there is the temper of the times — the fear of established forms connected to the old world is great: outlines are being detached and remain bare, and all bare outlines assuredly resemble one another. Because of this, it undeniably transpired that several participants in the anthology — myself among them — contributed nothing particularly new ‘of their own’. Avrom Rapoport [in ‘In fartunklte tsaytn’; later Yoysef Shor] had the misfortune to place his shoes next to his bed in exactly the same way as Reb Gedalye Hurvits in

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Nokh alemen [When all is said and done]. But if so, he is nothing more than a variation on the old, and the old is generally of no interest. At present, this is void together with the whole of the old world. 4 What lies ahead for belles-lettres in general and Yiddish belles-lettres in particular? Cheap, rather than genuine futurism, that has use neither for old image-making nor for wholeness of form, will assuredly come as much to us as to Greater Russia as a whole, and will boast itself the sister of the new social order. But futurism is too much a kind of ‘intellectual lubok’ to sway the masses, and because it lacks wholeness of form, the intelligentsia, too, can be inf luenced by it only intellectually rather than intuitively — its meaning will have to be surmised rather than perceived. Art, however, also possesses even a distinct physiological significance for us: the relaxed auditory nerve, for example, demands sustenance and thus engenders the need to hear music. For some time, the work of certain nerves will be suspended in the new social order, but with the passage of time they will accumulate colossal energy and will demand a great deal of sustenance, and the great regeneration of art will begin. Christianity, which in its earliest period so strongly persecuted the symbols, art, and artists of the old world, eventually created so many new opportunities for art after its decisive victory that Christianity itself became enchanted by them, sanctified many works of art, and decorated its temples with them. In truth, Christianity too could create nothing ex nihilo — in this sense, after its triumph it was obliged to compromise, and a considerable time after its appearance, Christianity itself crowned the Ephesian Diana (formerly an idolatrous cult) with the name ‘Holy Mother’. After its irreversible victory, the new social formation must and will strike a compromise in regard to the old life-forms of art which will, by the way, by that time no longer pose the slightest danger to it. A considerable time will have to elapse until then, however, and until such time, true belles-lettres, will be, if not fanatically persecuted, then at least unacknowledged by society — they will be isolated and, for the reasons mentioned earlier, Yiddish belles-lettres will find themselves in even more frightening isolation than the belles-lettres of any other people. And having already begun, this isolation continues. Translated by Joseph Sherman Notes to Appendix A 1. Lubok, a colourful print made either from a woodcut or a copper engraving, is a simple type of folk art that became popular in Russia at the beginning of the sixteenth century during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. The content of the lubki was initially mainly religious, since they provided cheap alternatives to expensive icons, but they soon came to depict a variety of secular subjects. Usually rendered in three or four contrasting colours, lubki are bright, cheerful, and expressive, containing both images and text. Their drawings are very elementary, with no consideration given to scale or perspective. Street merchants would sell them outside monasteries, in markets, and at fairs.

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2. In 1907, under the pen-name Der Nister, ‘the Hidden One’, Pinkhes Kahanovitsh (1884–1950) published his first Yiddish poem, ‘Baym taykh’ (At the river), in the Vilna periodical Folksshtime (People’s Voice). Later the same year he issued his first book, a slim volume entitled Gedankn un motivn: lider in proze (Thoughts and themes: poems in prose), which combined rhymed and unrhymed passages in prose, a style Nister employed until 1910. Hostile to both naturalism and realism, Der Nister reclaimed the language of Jewish mysticism for modern secular literary discourse, but most critics did not understand what he was doing and only grudgingly acknowledged his mastery of language and innovative forms. Between 1915 and 1920, he was an enthusiastic participant in the work of the Kiev Group. In the first volume of Eygns he published two stories — ‘Tsum barg’ (To the mountain) and ‘Sheydim’ (Demons). 3. ‘Tsum barg’ appeared first in the Kiev journal Kleyne bibliotek, no. 5 (Kiev: Kunst-farlag, 1914) before it was republished in Eygns. It was later included in Der Nister’s anthology, Gedakht (Imagined) (Berlin: Yidisher literarisher farlag, 1922), a revised, expanded edition of which appeared seven years later (Kiev: Farlag kultur-lige, 1929), pp. 37–80. Although there is as yet no English translation of this story, a German translation, ‘Zum Berg’, is published in Unterm Zaun: Jiddische Erzählungen, Ausgewählt und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Daniela MantovanKromer (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1988), pp. 62–101. Here an old man addresses his companion, a young geyer (wanderer), after they have completed their quest to visit an ancient mountain-dweller, a former geyer who dies as soon as they come. The immediate cause of the joy that will ‘make the day rise up’ is the completion of the quest. The full passage reads as follows: — geyer, ze: du geyst atsind af velt avek, fundanen haynt fun shvel arop. du tretst ariber — af ir, af mir un iber zokn ... nor ze un veys: s’iz nor dayn zun, fun glik dayn tog, geyt oyf un shaynt af himlen dayne, un oyfgeyn vet un vet ersht oyfgeyn — un undzer zun fargangen ... geven a tsayt iz er [der zokn] gegan, geven a tsayt bin ikh gegan, atsindert shoyn far undz tsu ruen — far yingere tsu tuen ... atsindert gey ... nor hit zikh farn yeger ... (Gedakht, p. 44) 4. This passage is also from ‘Tsum barg’; see Gedakht, p. 47. 5. David Hofshteyn (1889–1952) was among the most highly educated of the Kiev Group. Steeped in traditional Jewish learning, he also completed his matura, the tsarist matriculation examinations, before studying at the Kiev Commercial Institute and attending lectures in the faculty of philology at Kiev University. Equally proficient in Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Hebrew — for which he retained a lifelong love — Hofshteyn began composing verse first in Hebrew, and later in Russian and Ukrainian. He was only able to publish his Yiddish verse after the revolution, when his earliest poems appeared in the Kiev periodical Naye tsayt (New Times). From the beginning of 1918, he was an active member of the Kultur-lige, editing and contributing to several journals including Eygns, to the first issue of which he gave four poems: ‘Friling’ (Spring), ‘Bay vegn’ (Along roads), ‘In gas’ (In the street), and ‘In vinterfarnakhtn’ (During winter evenings), the most often-quoted example of the Yiddish landscape lyric, a form that Hofshteyn created. 6. To the first issue of Eygns, Peretz Markish (1895–1952) contributed three poems: ‘Fartog’ (Early morning), ‘Harbst’ (Autumn), and ‘Farnakht’ (At evening). 7. Leyb Kvitko (1890–1952), an only surviving child orphaned at the age of nine, was brought up in great poverty by his grandmother. The need to support her curtailed his education and drove him early to diverse kinds of manual labour. He began writing very young, later asserting that his inspiration came ‘not from any school, tutor or study — only from the air which was troubled, full of secrets, slaughters, turmoil and terrifyingly interesting happenings’. On the eve of the revolution, Kvitko went to Kiev where Bergelson responded to his work with warm encouragement, and the Kiev urban literati welcomed him as an ‘unspoiled’ folk talent. Nine of his early lyrics were published in the first issue of Eygns; the extracts cited here by Bergelson are from the poems ‘Ikh veys nit gornisht’ (I know nothing), ‘Aza bloye nakht’ (Such a blue night), and ‘Ven es vert di nakht a harfe’ (When night becomes a harp). All these poems, together with those published in his first book Trit (Paces) (Kiev: Kiever farlag, 1919), were republished in Berlin in a collected volume entitled Grin groz (Green grass) (Berlin: Yidisher literarisher farlag, 1922).

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Three Centres (Characteristics) David Bergelson (First published In shpan 1, Vilna-Berlin, April, 1926, pp. 84–96) 1 The American Yiddish centre: Economically, it finds itself in better circumstances than any other Yiddish centre. Its spiritual essence: recidivism to the old, exclusively Jewish, mistake. Both its grand and petit bourgeois components, known as ‘allrightniks’, are now repeating that exceptionally fruitless and wholly comic little chapter of Jewish history: They want to assimilate and cannot. How many times has this not happened? At any rate, in Jewish history, such unsuccessful attempts are as frequent as the attempts to return to the ancient land of Canaan. Jews wanted to assimilate with Arameans, Arabs, Spaniards, Italians, Germans, Russians, Poles, and who not? In every new land to which they emigrated, the aff luent Jewish classes felt it worth their while to bolster their well-being at the expense of troublesome national pretensions, and in every such land they began to believe yet again: here ‘emancipation’ and ‘redemption’ will take place. This was the case not only in countries of new emigration. Even in places where they had long been settled, with the opening of every progressive new chapter in the history of the surrounding population, the aff luent Jewish classes immediately revived both their dormant tendencies towards assimilation, and their belief in that bizarre reverse analogy that if a revolution could give others the opportunity of becoming a nation again, why could it not also give the Jews the opportunity to cease being a nation? And everywhere, with every new attempt, they invariably touched the nervecentre of assimilation — the language of the Other, into whose new maw they instantly wanted to throw themselves, with the concomitant feeling that if baptismal water converted merely the body, language would convert the soul as well ... This tendency to convert the soul through the medium of a foreign language — the expression of a foreign soul — was most often blatant among the aff luent Jewish

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classes, but they always wanted to drag the impoverished Jewish masses along with them; thanks to these masses, they were repeatedly rebuffed. In the course of time, instead of adapting their unique wholeness to a foreign language, the impervious masses simply adapted the foreign language to their own inner wholeness. As a result we acquired: Judaeo-Aramaic that resembled true Aramaic as little as Judaeo-Spanish resembled Spanish and a Judaeo-Arabic which the Arabs of the time understood as little as today’s Germans understand Yiddish. Now the same process is taking place in America. Following established norms of Jewish history, the tendency towards assimilation on the part of the local ‘allrightniks’ is starting to draw the Jewish masses towards a new English Yiddish. Leading the resistance to this over there is the more socially conscious Jewish worker, who is wholly content with Yiddish, which is dear, comfortable, and personal to him — that socially conscious Jewish worker who does not believe in the privileges of assimilation, has no need of them, and, having expended his energy to no avail in the course of hundreds of years, has now no more time to lose, nor any desire to transform himself together with several future generations into an uncreative, impotent stammerer. He fights with the aid of his Yiddish school; he fights with the fact that he and his household live out their lives through the medium of the Yiddish language. This socially conscious Jewish worker is our only force for unification in America. His battle is long and hard. He relies on the general proletarian struggle of the Jewish working masses over there to free himself from the inf luence of the ‘allrightniks’. In a certain measure, however, his success depends also on us — on those Yiddish cultural supplies that, in the course of his difficult battle, we shall provide from other Yiddish centres. In the measure by which the cultural baggage thus supplied will be richer and more suited to the needs of general modern labouring life, by so much will it be easier for the socially conscious Jewish worker in America to broaden his base, and to combat the self-interested tendency towards assimilation of the moneyed Jews around him. Considered in this way, neither Yiddish, nor Yiddish culture, nor Yiddish art is the fruit of any sweetly scented nationalism in America. To a certain extent, Jewish culture in America, as everywhere else, is Jewish civil war. Yiddish was born at a time when the protective silk of the seamless national bridal canopy over the heads of the productive Jewish masses was rent asunder, and before their eyes a broader, deeper, more transparent and universally human heaven was revealed. The achievements of the Yiddish language are the results of the resistance offered by the Jewish proletarian to his aff luent Jewish neighbour, in whose aspirations he had no interest. 2 The Yiddish centre in Poland has only recently convinced itself that economic ruin is not exclusively bound up with civil war or social revolution. For the time being, it is still difficult to say what conclusion it might draw from this conviction. The

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Polish centre gives the impression of an impossibly large ‘assembly’ at which all four million Polish Jews quarrel with each other, and none except a small minority are as yet clear what they want. It is filled with confusion, with clamour, with heartrending cries of woe from the unemployed, and with a Zionism shot through with clinical indifference to local collapse and displaying interest in it only in so far as it can be useful in promoting the cause of Palestine. When the Yiddish centre in Poland is analysed as a creator of culture, a picture that is more or less clear emerges: There the struggle for the realization of national-cultural self-determination is being waged solely by the Jewish working class in concert with those intellectuals united with it either politically or ideologically. Moreover, the Jewish working class is still divided against itself; with ever higher and higher walls, widespread Zionism cuts it off from the impoverished classes all around and does not permit any new cadres to join forces with it. A variety of Talmud Torahs and Tarbut schools1 drag the lower and middle classes back to Mount Sinai, disrupting the struggle against the local governing power and the surrounding population, which almost instinctually cannot tolerate any Jewish national-cultural self-definition. To be sure, tendencies towards assimilation among the petit-bourgeois majority have not yet achieved that concrete expression prevalent among the American ‘allrightniks’ — the great majority of the déclassé Jewish population speaks Yiddish. Unavoidably, however, the sterile Yiddish speech of this conservative orthodox and semi-orthodox majority demonstrates the bankruptcy of that sentimental Yiddishism which was supposed to become the second ‘silken bridal canopy’ over the heads of the entire Jewish people. Even with its Yiddish speech, this majority is very far from serving the purposes of modern Yiddish culture: generally it aims either in precisely the opposite direction, or it aims in no direction at all. For the most part, it is conservative-religious. As an intermediary, doomed element, it is also intrinsically doomed as a culturally creative factor both in universal human life and in its own. We have no need of a second Hasidic era, and now it will create nothing more. Because of its conservative backwardness, it will take no risks for the new Yiddish culture and will under no circumstances defend it. And even if the Polish centre did suddenly wish to defend it, it is comprised for the most part of unproductive elements that, in every instance of serious conf lict, will not represent any kind of political force whatever. The Yiddish words with which this Jewish majority communicates are consequently just as unproductive as they are themselves, and which serve, like worn-out straw, exclusively for the bourgeois yellow-press newspapers they read; they are nothing more than the ‘dear readers’ addressed by this newspaper trash, and embody in themselves the Yiddish writer’s delusion, his false hope that if such readers swallow the Yiddish yellow press with such avidity, they will eventually also begin to read literary works of art. Such literary works, which rarely find a way into their homes, must not concern themselves with modern human content, however, and must not be shaped in any new artistic forms. As though all of one mind, stubborn and linguistically deprived, they set these preconditions for any Yiddish book. And even if a Yiddish book is found acceptable, if, for instance, Sholem Asch’s Kidesh hashem (Sanctification of

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the Holy Name) or Opatoshu’s In poylishe velder (In Polish woods) does find its way into their homes, such books do not become bricks in a building that encloses Yiddish culture there, but random pieces of clinker on which to set a pot beside the stove. The Yiddish book does not uplift them, does not purify them, does not reach their children in school; it creates no traditions of any kind, and leaves no traces whatever on their commonplace, generally unproductive lives, because they set no value on our cultural assets and do nothing to increase them, as do the Jewish proletariat and the intellectuals among them. Like a grey monochromatic mass with the uniform mentality of shopkeepers, they no longer even offer any subject matter worthy of the Yiddish writer’s creative contribution to Yiddish literature. They form a grey workaday background, dotted with the f lickering penny candles of outworn Sabbaths and outworn holy days. To begin a narrative about them means beginning yet again from, ‘Once there was a rabbi and his wife’, returning to stale old clericalism, to spiritual and material poverty, isolating oneself from universal modern thought. Dragged willy-nilly along, the worker and the proletarian are smothered in their benighted medieval prayer-house existence, and the tiny group of Jewish agricultural workers and farmers is perforce merged into the greyness of their way of life; they disappear under the all-purpose yellow, patched prayer-shawl of impoverished ‘Jewish piety’ and do not survive to evolve into a new class. In their barren milieu, such powerful talents as Weissenberg soon spend themselves and grow enfeebled, and all that is left for such noteworthy talents as Sholem Asch is either to repeat themselves ad infinitum or to confront a way of life that is alien to their artistic propensities. There is not the slightest sense in beating the Yiddish writers in Poland and demanding that they produce great work from this kind of backward Jewish life all around them. The battered Weissenberg, so it seems to us, continually stared at those in our community who made such demands with the terrified eyes of a simple working-class woman who is beaten by her husband because she does not bear him any children. He stared in this kind of terror for so long that he seemed to grow befuddled. But why has such a writer as Weissenberg not come to his senses? Why even now, harried and goaded as he is, has he not yet dared to point to the snuffedout life of this great grey mass and say: — ‘Why are you beating me? ... Look at the masses — it’s their fault ...’ Why has his robust instinct feared to repudiate the masses as an idol, and has submitted instead to being driven wild and remaining a perpetual object of mockery for all sorts of trivial scribblers? Because this great grey Yiddish-chomping mass is numerically vast; it consists of millions, and its mentality has to date rejected not only Weissenberg, not only the better part of Sholem Asch, but even communal workers, several party leaders, and teachers. In recent years this mentality has stamped its mark on Yiddish literature in Poland, and blurred and hidden from sight the true addressee of Yiddish culture — the Jewish proletarian and the Jewish worker who have created it. As a mother follows after her lost child, so in recent years the Jewish worker in Poland has followed Yiddish literature — every Jewish worker from Bialystok who sends his two gulden earned in blood to YIVO2 and writes a few words to accompany them:

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‘I do not have enough to buy food, but all the same I must express my thanks in some way for the bright moments that Yiddish literature has given my life’. In Poland of late, Yiddishist circles and Yiddish writers have forgotten about the Jewish working class, the true proprietors of Yiddish creativity, and have unconsciously been drawn into the process of demonstrating the bankruptcy of international Yiddishism. To remind them that they have lost their way, another Yiddish centre, one that is even now in the fervent process of economic and spiritual reconstruction, will be the life-giving Yiddish centre in Russia. 3 The best part of the Jewish intelligentsia in Soviet Russia, with the Yevsektsia at its head, has been destined to stand in closer, more fundamental contact with the Jewish masses — not merely in ideological contact, but basically by joining them in the constructive work of rebuilding at a time of enormous change. Tightly bound to the Jewish proletariat and carrying out its decisions, the better part of the Jewish intelligentsia continues the process of productivization among the Jewish masses: it opens up possibilities for the Jewish agricultural worker, it assists the Jewish labourer to realize his right to work in every field of all-union heavy industry, it achieves certain privileges of citizenship for the craftsman even as it reconstructs his inner psychology, enlarges his spiritual baggage, and shields him from the inf luence of the uprooted petit-bourgeois orthodox-Zionism around him. Not only does it create for the children of the masses well-established Yiddish schools which the Jewish father, even if he still dreams of assimilation somewhere or other, must nevertheless appreciate for the definite advantages they give his child in life; with the help of the Jewish proletariat, the better part of the intelligentsia is now also achieving sociopolitical and national-cultural recognition for Jews in Soviet Russia. For years, the superior Jewish intellectual could only dream of such a substantial and fortunate union with the Jewish masses. Not counting those adherents of the Haskalah in former days who, with their motto, ‘Luck and blessing lies in the ploughshare’,3 encouraged agricultural labour, even for the ever-committed Party worker so literal a union with the working masses could only have been a f light of fancy. In the first place, the intellectual’s inf luence was limited by the tiny number of genuine Jewish workers in every town who in themselves represented nothing more than a latent force. Except in heightened political moments, even in these small workers’ circles the intellectual was more a mentor than an activist, and for the masses, apart from a small strike in the local professional union, he remained nothing more than a pedagogue, a facilitator, an intellectual whose work still remained to be done in the future and who placed his trust in some infinitely remote socialistic World to Come. As a result, his role in wider Jewish life was distinguished only in rare moments of exceptionally sharp political conf lict, when he suddenly appeared before a huge assembly with trenchant language and organizational skills that were usefully employed on the spot — employed only for the time being, and forgotten immediately afterwards. As far the ordinary Jewish professional intellectual was concerned, he was always

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a dissonance in small-town Jewish life; his education seemingly forever severed the threads that might bind him to the masses, and generally drove him to an alien environment — in the best case, to personal intellectual searching. The grey Jewish establishment of shopkeepers and petty dealers spat the Jewish intelligentsia organically out of itself: this mass left not the slightest room for intellectual activity on its plateau of immobility. It drove such activity away, and if a Jewish writer, seemingly by force, did at one or another time attempt to bring a Jewish intellectual into the shtetl, he was eventually obliged to turn him either into an impractical speculative thinker or into a solitary outcast there. This circumstance was an extreme sign of unique, ‘perfectly Jewish’ immobility — the signifier of a preserved life that was ‘complete’ and ‘had no need’ of improvement of any kind from a new progressive element, whatever it might be, that called itself intellectual — the shtetl no longer had anything more to learn from its own intelligentsia. At first this attitude limited the possibilities of the new Yiddish literature: the intellectual was left with nothing more than a bare outline — an outline that could very often be dynamic, meandering, but without any connection whatever to the life around it. In general, this monochromatic Jewish life has slipped into the new Yiddish literature a monochromatic grey material that excludes the colourfulness of classes, and consequently narrows to the point of choking the Yiddish prose writer’s full range of expression, and almost completely restricts his intuitive selection of types. An average shopkeeper, a poor shopkeeper, a rich shopkeeper, a broker — everything revolves around trade. One keeps his merchandise at home, another keeps it elsewhere, a third is forever running round it and never looking at it, but all belong to the same way of life, to the same class. With such a dearth of colouring, the Yiddish prose writer very often found himself in the position of a chef who is given the same raw ingredients day in and day out, and is then ordered to prepare a tasty new dish from them every time. This has resulted in limited talents dying out among Jews immediately after their first prose work; only graphomaniacs or exceptionally great masters who could synthesize well were able to survive and leave many volumes behind them. For example, during the course of his whole life, Sholem Aleichem’s luminous eyes saw on the Jewish horizon nothing more than four types: the broker, the worker, the Jewish orphan, and the harried Jewish housewife. All the rest of his types, apart from minor exceptions that are no measure of his creative ability, were not new, but a new synthesis of the old Tevye with the old Menakhem-Mendl and Motl the cantor’s son. The same can be said of the Yiddish poets whom the monotonous gelidity of Jewish life drove away, just as it generally drove away the Jewish intellectual. The Yiddish poet, one might say, was that capable, banished intellectual who, instead of going off to what was alien, went off into himself, into moods of solipsism — this is particularly true of our new poets in America. But now Yiddish literature in Soviet Russia has entirely different perspectives. From year to year, the class shift of the Jewish population, the inescapable

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imperative to productivization dictated to it by the socio-political attitudes in the country, destroys more and more of grey Jewish monochromatism and fills Jewish life with ever more colours. Perhaps Russia is not the only country that has given the Jews equality before the law. Jews also have equality before the law in America and, on paper, in other countries as well. Jews have always cried out, ‘We want equality before the law’, but the great majority intended to do nothing more than utilize this legal equality to strengthen their position as a socially monochromatic trader class. Equality before the law meant being able to keep the shop open whenever one wanted to, both on the Sabbath and on Sunday; it meant being freely able to send one’s children to alien schools and alien universities; it meant not bearing any creative responsibility oneself. Soviet Russia is, however, the only country that gives not solely on paper, but with an iron hand and in full consciousness demands also that the equality she gives be used. She demands that Jews select from among themselves a stratum of farmers, an army of workers, ranks of her own teachers and officials, Jewish schools and technical colleges, Jewish judges, Jewish lawyers, Jewish Soviets with Jewish militias, Jewish agronomists, Jewish departments in the universities, Jewish scholars and professors, Jewish leaders and government ministers. She unites the Jewish intelligentsia with the Jewish masses, she analyses and paints grey Jewish life with a kaleidoscope of colours, and consequently she also creates new Jewish possibilities for the new Jewish artist. Somewhere there on the steppes occupied by Jewish farming villages, somewhere at the machine in the factory or in the workshop of the Jewish craftsman, this new Jewish artist is already ripening. Following sunrise and sunset behind the plough, filing his way between running rails of iron and steel, returning home from his work — everywhere he finds himself, he pauses in thought for a moment, and fills his eye with the surrounding colourfulness of newly f lourishing Jewish life. Colourful fertilization, the song of labour and of self-sacrifice for world liberation — this will be the content of the new Yiddish book he will write; this will be the content of the new Jewish art in Soviet Russia. Well, and what about destruction, the destruction of the Jewish majority who are deeply affected by the declining Jewish shtetlekh and have been shoved out of their economic position by the new way of life? Certainly, the new Jewish artist will also see destruction around him, unavoidable destruction crying to the heavens — the full severity of the law, the rod of social justice, poverty and need, fearful cries of woe against violent death — all this, but with the perspective of a new, young regeneration, with a more assured hope of a steady, slow — perhaps very slow — renewal. Soviet Russia is a revitalized powerful country which will not permit itself to be enslaved, a country with natural riches that wants to and must build itself up. It is filled with a constructive lust for life, it has need of countless building hands, and for the ruined Jewish masses, for all those that have hands to assist this work, the future is bright and glowing. ***

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The new Jewish life in Soviet Russia will liberate Yiddish literature from its inherited monochromatism. But Yiddish literature will also be liberated from a far more burdensome legacy there. The ‘leaven’ of Yiddish literature, as everyone knows, was kneaded not by the Jewish scholar and not even by the conventional Jewish householder, but by those who were granted no voice in the community — the Jewish women’s tailor, the working man, and the Jewish maidservant, none of whom had access to the culture of the Talmudist. These proletarians still carried within themselves an amalgam of two distinct elements: the burgeoning genesis of the future Jewish worker lived peacefully side by side with the world-view and psychology of the conventional Jewish householder. Yiddish literature was obliged to wait a long time for this slow-developing Jewish worker, and as a result it often addressed the second element that its original creators carried within themselves — the poor Jewish householder and the prosperous employer, neither of whom actually called Yiddish literature into life, nor had any desire to carry it on their shoulders. Because of its barren attitude of mind, this class abandoned the Hebrew language and pulled itself up by its bootstraps in order to join, with meticulous attention to detail, the dance of assimilation of the moneyed classes. For those on this social level, Yiddish literature was a hanger-on, a stepchild — they wanted to f lee from it, and ‘this thing’ ran after them. As a result, the growth of Yiddish literature was superficial, for what can a literature be, if even those who are described in it and for whose sake it is created, do not read it and shake themselves free of it? This, the Yiddish writer was obliged to feel, and could not avoid feeling. With clenched teeth, with tightly compressed lips, he took heart and wrote, wrote ‘into vacancy’, wrote with hope that the Jewish bourgeoisie would eventually improve, that it would ultimately come to feel and understand. And this false hope for great masses of readers undeniably caused Yiddish literature temporarily to forget and forsake its truly loyal worker-readers who were numerically far smaller, but who, for that very reason, were organically united with the creation of the artistic Yiddish word. Socio-political interactions in Soviet Russia, which have deprived the moneyed Jewish middle class of both its self-satisfaction and its belief in the material benefits to be derived from union with an alien culture, have as a matter of course also liberated the Yiddish writer over there from the inf luence of this class and from the one-sided obligations he bore in regard to it. Does this mean that Jewish classes other than Jewish workers will not feature in Soviet Yiddish literature? Other Jewish classes will, and assuredly must, also feature — they will feature in so far as their path to productivization is unavoidable, in so far as their fulfilment is intertwined with the fulfilment of the great new road that leads to the great liberation of the world. Translated by Joseph Sherman

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Notes to Appendix B 1. Launched in Warsaw in 1922, Tarbut schools were a Zionist network of Hebrew-language educational institutions, operating primarily in the eastern regions of Poland and in territories previously controlled by Russia, that between the wars operated kindergartens, elementary schools, secondary schools, teachers’ seminaries, adult education courses, lending libraries, and an educational publishing house. They were secular in nature, offering general studies in the sciences and humanities, Polish studies (by order of the government), and Hebrew studies. Their ideology was Zionist-nationalist, directed at guiding Jewish students towards playing a pioneering role in Palestine. 2. The Institute for Jewish Research, the Yiddish acronym for which is YIVO, was founded in 1925 in Berlin and later established its headquarters in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), to record the history and research the language, literature, and culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe. From its inception, YIVO was profoundly aware that the language and culture of Eastern European Jewry were undergoing radical changes in a rapidly modernizing world, and needed to keep pace with it. As a result, YIVO’s founders were tireless in collecting documents and archival records of Jewish communities across Eastern Europe, as well as encouraging the development of the Yiddish language and its literature. 3. In sokhe ligt mazl un brokhe: this is a quotation from the well-loved pro-Zionist Yiddish song, Di sokhe (The plough) by Eliakum Zunser (1836–1913), popularly known as ‘Lyokumkhe badkhn’, a Lithuanian folk poet and singer who was arguably the greatest wedding jester of all time. Born into a poor family in Vilna, he started life braiding lace in Kovno, where he became associated with the devout, moralistic Musar movement of Rabbi Israel Salanter. His talent as a rhymester soon made him famous all over Eastern Europe, and he was in great demand at weddings, where he delivered homilies and extempore songs, attracting great crowds eager to hear him perform. He was steadily drawn to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and attempted to instruct and aid his people by drawing them away from obscurantism and superstition. To this end in 1861 he published his first book of songs, Shirim khadashim (New songs). After a series of personal tragedies, however, he grew wary of too much assimilation. Following the pogroms after the assassination of Alexander II, he passionately embraced the Zionist ideal, affiliating himself with the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement, and urging Jews to abandon peddling and become farmers. In 1889 he emigrated to New York where he opened a print shop and continued to write poems committed to Zionism. He was saved from penury in his last years by a benefit held at Cooper Union on 30 March 1905, which raised enough money to give him a pension. All his songs have simple words and catchy tunes, and are devoted to the difficult lives of the labouring masses.

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INDEX ❖

Personal names and surnames are romanized according to the YIVO system except for persons who have either published in English or are best known under an anglicized orthography. Abakumov, Viktor 65 Abramovitsh, Rafael 194, 208 Agnon, Shmuel Yoysef 27, 73 n. 72, 74 n. 99 Ahad ha-Am 8, 17, 71 Aizenberg, Avrom 228 Albatros 28, 29 Alberton, Meyer 228, 229 Aleksandrov, Georgi 58, 62 Almi, A. 211, 212 Alter, Viktor 58 Altman, Nathan 85 America 2, 24, 31, 35, 37, 39, 45, 47, 50, 51, 58, 72 n. 58, 84, 87, 115, 191, 194, 200, 201 n. 5, 205–21, 230, 232, 270, 280, 281, 284 n. 8, 344, 348, 352, 353 American labour movement 184, 200 anti-Semitism 3, 14, 23, 26, 39, 58, 60, 69, 137, 138, 211, 238, 241, 275, 277, 286, 292, 294, 303 Aronson, Boris (Borukh) 72 Asch, Sholem 9, 19, 29, 32, 36, 45, 51, 87, 177, 179, 185, 187, 195, 199, 202, 205, 206, 349 Babel, Isaac 23, 44, 53, 228 Bakhmutski, Aleksandr 231 Bal-Dimyen see Shtif, Nokhem Bal-Makhshoves 72, 85, 187 Baltrušaitis, Jurgis 25, 73 n. 64, 81 Balzac, Honoré de 93 Bashevis Singer, Isaac 155, 156, 182, 310 Bastomski, Shloyme 114, 115 Bechtel, Delphine 152, 154 belles-lettres 8, 14, 18, 21, 25, 38, 45, 51, 169, 185, 199, 208, 338–46 Bely, Andrei 25 Ben-Haim 85 Benjamin, Walter 246 Berdichev 71 n. 22, 77 n.191, 224, 294, 295, 297, 300, 304 nn.19 & 21 & 24. Berdichevsky, Micah Yoysef 8, 17, 27 Bergelson, David (Dovid) ‘Ahin tsu vegs’ (On the way there) 12 ‘Altvarg’ (Obsolescence) 38 and children’s literature 18, 20, 117–26 and Eynikayt 60, 64, 249–65 and Forverts 2, 30, 36, 37, 65, 84, 88, 183–201, 205, 208, 212, 213

Bergelson.indb 357

and Frayhayt 2, 37, 40, 41, 45, 48, 50, 183, 192, 194, 206, 208–15 and Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee 2, 3, 57–70, 249–65 and music 30, 35, 83 and theatre 45, 47, 48, 60, 85, 86, 212, 216, 228, 230, 231, 265, 284 ‘An eydes’ (A witness) 245, 288–93 ‘Arum vokzal’ (At the depot) 10, 12, 90, 92, 131, 174 as an editor 16, 21, 25, 32, 207, 208, 229 ‘A zeltener sof ’ (An unusual ending) 43, 190 Baym Dnyepr (At the Dnieper) 47, 53, 54, 55, 56, 64, 91, 174, 180, 212, 215, 222, 228, 231, 236–46, 261, 271 ‘Baym telefon’ (At the telephone) 47, 48, 55, 212, 284 Birebidzhan (pamphlet) 231, 270 Birebidzhan (play) 230, 231 Birebidzhaner (Migrants to Birobidzhan) 53, 55, 216, 223, 228, 270 Birgerkrig 189, 197, 237 ‘Blut’ (Blood) 10 ‘Botshko’ 43, 50, 189, 195 ‘Der gesheyener oyfbrokh’ (The awakening [into the modern] has occurred) 32 ‘Der letster rosheshone’ (The last Rosh ha-Shanah) 12 ‘Der royter armeyer’ (The Red Army soldier) 42 ‘Der skulptor’ (The sculptor) 245, 294–303 ‘Der toyber’ (The deaf man) 10, 12, 47, 87, 92, 174, 231, 284 Di broytmil (The flour mill) 47 ‘Di drite’ (The third one) 10 ‘Dikhtung un gezelshaftlekhkayt’ (Belles-lettres and the social order) 21, 169, 338–45 ‘Dos kabtsonishe bekherl’ (The pauper’s goblet) 187, 193 ‘Dray tsentren’ (Three centres) 37, 38, 153, 164, 191, 200, 207, 259, 270, 347–54 ‘Erev der shlakht’ (On the eve of the battle) 195–97 Geven iz nakht un gevorn iz tog (Night fell and day followed) 64 ‘Hersh[l] Toker’ 38, 192, 208 ‘In a fargrebter shtot’ (In a backwoods town) 12

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INDEX

in Berlin 25–52, 150–64 ‘In eynem a zumer’ (During a certain summer) 20 ‘In fartunklte tsaytn’ (In darkened times) 18, 174, 344 In goles: Ravrebe (In exile: Ravrebe) 12, 129 in Kiev 7–24 Kh’vel lebn (I will live!) 60, 253 ‘Lenins vinkl’ (Lenin’s nook) 196, 197 Mides-hadin (The full severity of the law) 40, 41, 47, 48, 54, 90, 174–81, 200, 216, 228 ‘Mit eyn nakht veyniker’ (One night less) 159 Naye dertseylungen (New stories) 64, 285–303 Nokh alemen (When all is said and done) 1, 16, 22, 32, 92, 95, 131, 174, 188, 194, 195, 236, 236, 344–45 Oybn un untn (Above and below) 47 ‘Oyf der hundert un eynster vyorst’ (At the hundred and first mile) 48 ‘Onheyb Kislev 5769’ (The beginning of [the month of] Kislev [November/December] 1919) 33, 168 Opgang (Descent) 18, 174, 188, 203, 206 Prints Ruveni 60, 62, 245, 265, 266, 269–83, 305 Shturemteg (Days of storm) 43–45, 196 ‘Shvester’ (Sisters) 38 ‘Stantsye Kotlyet’ (Kotlyet station) 38 trip to the United States 45, 210–13 trips to the Soviet Union 41, 42, 50, 215, 216 Tsugvintn (collection) (Draughts of wind) 45, 50 ‘Tsugvintn’ (story) 170–74, 181 ‘Tsvey rotskhim’ (Two murderers) 38, 83, 165 ‘Tsvey vegn’ (Two roads) 12, 129 Tsvey veltn (Two worlds) 61, 77 n. 198, 216–18, 232, 270 ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ (Among refugees) 153, 247 Velt-oys, velt-ayn (A world goes, a world comes) 45 Yidn un di foterlendishe milkhome (Jews and the war for the Fatherland) 57, 251 Yidn un di milkhome mit hitlern (Jews and the war with Hitler) 226 n. 6, 250 ‘Yoysef Shor (Shur)’ 18, 71, 129–48, 344 Bergelson, Dreyze (David’s mother) 7 Bergelson, Lev (David’s son) vii, 18, 51, 58, 79–88, 233 Bergelson, Tsiporah (Tsipe) (David’s wife) 18, 79–81, 86, 88, 212 Bergelson, Yakov (David’s brother) 7, 16 Berlewi, Henryk 27, 28, 34 Berlin 2, 4, 25–32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 45–50, 65, 68, 72 n. 45, 73 nn. 66 & 67 & 72 & 75 & 76, 74 n. 105, 75 nn. 106 & 120, 76 n. 135, 81, 83, 85– 87, 116, 129, 130, 150–55, 157–64, 165 n. 22, 169, 178, 186–88, 190–94, 201 n.11, 203 n. 37, 205–08, 212–16, 222, 223, 247 n. 18, 251, 270, 304 n. 14, 355 n. 2 Bershadsky, Yeshaye 9 Bialik, Khaym Nakhmen 16, 18, 27, 28, 71 n. 7, 74 nn. 99 & 105, 79, 115 Bikher-velt 21, 338

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Bilototsky, B.J. 310, 334 Birobidzhan 2, 52, 53, 56, 59, 61, 66, 69, 215–18, 222–35, 250, 260, 270, 278 Birobidzhaner shtern 59, 230 Birzhevye vedomosti 103 Bolshevik 2, 4, 8, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 57, 68, 69, 73 n. 64, 79, 120, 128 n. 32, 130, 178, 179, 180, 188, 191, 194, 195, 200, 202 n. 18, 205, 206, 223, 227, 256, 257, 261 Boraisha, Menakhem 48, 213 Boym, Svetlana 162 Brecht, Bertolt 28 Brodsky family (Kiev) 8, 70 n. 6, 134, 149 n. 22 Brody 70 n. 6, 149 n. 22 Bronshteyn, Yasha 53, 56 Buber, Martin 26, 27, 304 nn. 20 & 25 Buchwald, Nathaniel 211 Bundism 14, 20, 58, 206, 238 Byelorussia 19, 66, 148 n. 10, 186, 254, 256 Byelorussian State Yiddish Theatre 47 Café Monopol 29 Cahan, Abraham 2, 3, 37, 38, 45, 183–203, 205–12 capitalism 2, 41, 47, 131, 207 Central Asia 278 Chagall, Marc 31, 85 Chaikov, Iosif 27, 33, 72 Charlottenburg 25 Charney, Daniel 25, 26, 34, 37, 38, 73, 85, 202, 207, 208 Chekhov, Anton 8, 10, 84, 111 n. 30, 128 n. 36, 148 n. 15, 201, 271, 334 Chernobyl 70 n. 1, 147 n. 17 Christianity 50, 104–07, 110 n. 17, 133, 139, 140–41, 149 n. 27, 175–77, 179–80, 273, 274, 279, 280, 281, 341 Chubinsky, Borukh 270 civil war 2, 23, 28, 31, 33, 41, 43, 45, 79, 80, 130, 154, 169, 170, 187, 189, 197, 216, 237, 294, 348 Cold War 3, 67, 70, 232, 266 Comintern 2, 39, 48, 50, 208, 213 Communist Party Line 3, 23, 24, 25, 32, 36–37, 39–43, 45, 48, 50, 52–55, 59, 60, 62, 64, 66, 87, 153, 162–64, 181, 198, 213, 216, 218–19, 224, 226, 227, 230–31, 271, 278, 284 n. 8, 286, 287, 293, 297, 299, 303 n. 12, 351 cosmopolitanism 25, 66–68, 211, 266, 304 n. 17 Crimea 2, 41, 67, 231, 250 Days of Awe 278 Denikin, Anton 23 Denmark 51, 88, 215 Der emes 24, 25, 33, 34, 36–38, 41, 48, 56, 191, 192, 194, 198, 206 Der hoyzfraynd 124 Der Nister 16, 17, 21, 23, 25, 29, 30, 32–34, 91, 109, 152, 170, 175, 231, 285, 340, 341, 346

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INDEX Der oyfkum 45, 211 Der shtern 62 Der tog 37, 38, 190, 207, 208, 210 Der yidisher almanakh 12 Di khalyastre 28, 34 Di komunistishe velt 24 Di naye tsayt 20 Di royte velt 34, 75, 247 Di yidishe velt 16, 18, 129 Die Jüdische Moderne 26 Die Jüdische Rundschau 26, 31 Die Welt 26 Dierick, August 169, 173 Dinezon, Yankev 7 Dobin, Hirsh 228 Döblin, Alfred 26, 30, 32 Dobrushin, Yekhezkel 16, 17, 20, 31, 35, 131, 175, 224, 303, 344 Dos folk 10 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 111 n. 30, 201 Dubnov, Shimon 20, 28, 29, 75, 150, 151, 205, 206 Dunets, Khatskl 53, 56 Ehrenburg, Ilya 25, 59, 61, 248, 252, 253, 264, 265, 303 Ehrlich, Henryk 58 Einhorn, David 29, 85, 205 Einstein, Albert 35, 83, 252 Eisenstein, Sergei 271, 272 Eliasberg, Alexander 32 emigration 2, 18, 25, 29, 30, 32, 35, 37, 42, 45, 51, 56, 70, 150, 155, 174, 187, 207, 347 Epshteyn, Mark 72 Epshteyn, Shakhno 58, 59 Epstein, Melech 209, 210, 212, 213, 215 Estonia 73 n. 66, 198 Europe 1, 2, 14, 17, 25, 29, 66, 84, 137, 156, 185–87, 194, 206, 220 n. 39, 252, 255, 270, 279, 280, 286 expressionism 21, 28, 35, 168, 169, 173 extermination camps 73 n. 66, 249, 259, 261–63, 267 n. 31, 289, 290, 293, 303 n. 14 Eygns 4, 18, 21, 23, 72, 91, 129, 340, 344, 346 Eynikayt 59, 60, 64, 66, 69, 217, 249–65, 285, 286 Fadeev, Aleksandr 44 Falkovitsh, Yoel Berish 124 Far Eastern district 224, 228–29 Fast, Howard 219 Fefer, Itsik 31, 53, 59, 66, 67, 69, 279, 280 fellow-travellers 3, 23, 37, 207, 213 Feuchtwanger, Lion 229 First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers 52, 53, 215, 286 Flaubert, Gustave 16, 44, 84, 92–108 Folksshtime 346 Forpost 229, 230

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359

Forverts 2, 3, 30, 36, 37, 38, 41, 65, 73 n. 61, 84, 88, 183–204, 205–09, 212, 213, 219, 306 Frayhayt 2, 37–41, 45, 47, 48, 50, 67, 124, 183, 192, 194, 206, 208–15, 219 Fraynd (St Petersburg) 12 Fraynd (Warsaw) 225 Frischmann, David 9, 27 Gaisin 18, 80 Geshelina, Leah 17 Gezerd 36, 222, 229, 233 n. 3 ghettos 73 n. 66, 253–55, 288 Gil, Y. 310, 334 Gildin, Khaym 31, 247 Gitelis, Sh. 116 Glants-Leyeles, Aaron 210, 212 Glatshteyn, Yankev 211 Glatstein, Israel 85 Glazman, Borukh 206 Gnessin, Uri-Nissen 8, 27 Godiner, Shmuel Nissen 224 Goldberg, Benzion 67, 232 Goldblat, Moyshe 229–30 Goldfaden, Avrom 304 Gomel 47, 284 n. 8 Gordon, Shmuel 48 Gorelik, Shmaryahu 16, 29 Gorky, Maksim 54, 111 n. 30, 227, 271, 286, 338 Gothot-Mersch, Claudine 93, 94, 104, 110 Granach, Alexander 30, 85 Granovsky, Alexander 45 Great Patriotic War (USSR) 62, 64, 265, 272 Great Terror 55–56, 270 Grinberg, Uri-Tsvi 28, 29 Grininke beymelekh 18, 114–16, 127 Gronemann, Sammy 26 Grossman, Vasily 59, 248, 262, 264, 265, 303 Habimah Theatre 28, 60, 85 Halkin, Shmuel 64, 271 ha-Shiloah 7, 71 n.7 Hasidism 7, 26, 30, 31, 70 n. 1, 79, 84, 87, 123, 132, 135–37, 145, 148 n. 17, 149 n. 25, 151, 170, 277, 294, 296, 304 n. 20, 305 nn. 29 & 32, 340, 349 ha-Zman 9 Hebrew 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 16, 17, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 57, 60, 64, 71 n. 19, 74 nn. 95 & 99, 79, 84, 90, 92, 95, 107, 109 n. 4, 113, 114, 115, 123, 127 nn. 9 & 11, 130, 134, 135, 136, 138, 142, 143, 145, 148 n.10, 150, 153, 167, 175, 220 n. 21, 239, 241, 253, 272, 274, 276, 277, 281, 283, 284 nn. 22 & 23, 291, 300, 346 n. 5, 354, 355 n. 1 Heymland 216, 232 High Holy Days 107, 198, 257, 275 Hindenburg, Paul von 35 Hirshbeyn, Peretz 84, 85, 207 Hitler, Adolf 51, 58, 251, 252, 304

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360

INDEX

Hofer, Yekhiel 90 Hofshteyn, David 16, 21, 23, 33, 34, 59, 66, 68, 85, 209, 219, 224, 341, 342, 346 Holocaust 4, 60, 62, 64, 67, 70, 156, 245, 248–68, 273, 278, 285–88, 296, 302 Hugo, Victor 71 Hurwitz, Saul Israel (Shay Ish) 27 impressionism 21, 44, 168 In poylishe velder 350 In shpan 37–40, 191, 207, 208, 214, 347 Inzl 37 Jakobson, Roman 151 Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC) 2, 3, 58, 59, 60, 62–67, 69, 231, 249, 266, 269, 280, 285, 295 Jewish national identity 1, 3, 7, 17, 37, 39, 59–62, 66, 68, 71 n. 7, 206, 231, 232, 264, 269, 273, 283, 285–86, 292, 305 n. 30, 348 Jhering, Herbert 30 Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) 29, 67 Kaganovich, Lazar 60, 67 Kaganovitsh, Motl 72 Kalinin, Mikhail 224, 228 Kalmanovitsh, Zelig-Hirsh 25, 72, 73 n. 66 Kalmanson, Elkhonon 9 Kar, Abraham 85 Karmen, Roman 262 Kataev, Valentin 44 Katel, M. 229 Katz, Leo 212 Katz, Moyshe 124 Kazakevitsh, Emanuel 231, 270 Kazakevitsh, Henekh 34 Kenig, Leo 17 Kerr, Alfred 30 Kharik, Izi 31, 55, 224 Kharkov 16, 23, 34, 73 n. 76, 75 n. 127, 121, 247 n. 19 Khashin, Alexander 37, 207, 216 Khavkin, Matvei 226, 227, 230 Kiev 1, 4, 7–10, 12–18, 20–25, 28, 29, 31, 34, 43, 47, 52, 54, 56, 57, 62, 65, 66, 70, 72 nn. 40 & 58, 80, 85, 91, 116, 120, 128 n. 34, 129, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 148 n. 9, 149 nn. 20 & 22 & 27, 167, 168, 170, 174, 178, 187, 196, 205, 207, 209, 224, 226, 232, 238, 259, 260, 261, 294, 346 nn. 5 &.7 Kiev Group 1, 4, 16, 21, 28, 34, 65, 91, 303 n. 6, 346 nn. 2 & 5 Kipnis, Itsik 178, 269 Kletskin, Boris 14, 16, 19, 24, 37, 45, 75, 81, 191, 196, 207 Klinov, Shayke (Yeshayahu) 85 Kol nidre 65, 84, 277 Komunistishe fon 20 Korn, Rokhl 64, 65

Bergelson.indb 360

Kovno (Kaunas) 25, 37, 56, 81, 127 n. 16, 150, 186, 187, 264, 355 n. 3 Krasnaya zvezda 248, 254, 262, 264 Kreyzer, Yakov 249, 251 Krutikov, Mikhail 131 Krylov, Ivan 71 Kulbak, Moyshe 29, 34–36, 170, 175, 230 Kultur-lige 1, 2, 20, 23, 25, 47, 80, 115, 116, 346 n. 5 Kushnirov, Arn 31, 33, 309 Kussevitzky, Moyshe 64, 65 Kvitko, Leyb 16, 21, 23, 25, 29, 30, 33, 34, 50, 59, 66, 68, 202, 341–44, 346 Lapin, Berl 211 Lasker, Emmanuel 29, 85 Latvia 35, 187, 198, 264 Latzki-Bertoldi, Zev-Wolf 25, 29, 73 n. 63, 75 n. 106 Lavrentiev, Lavrenti 224 Lenin, V.I. 8, 34, 38–39, 69, 196, 197, 203 n. 47, 239, 241, 247 n. 17, 271 Leningrad 215, 232, 254 Lestschinsky, Yakov 25, 29, 38, 75, 85, 187–89, 192, 193, 200, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 212 Lewin, Samuil (Shmuel) 151 Leyvik, H. 34, 48, 207, 209, 210, 213, 216 Liberberg, Joseph 225–29 Lidsky, Yakov 10 Linder, N. B. 211 Lissitzky, El (Lazar) 27, 28, 34 Literarishe bleter 31, 34, 45, 47, 48, 50, 74, 116, 152, 191, 213 Literarishe monatsshriftn 10, 21 Literaturnaya gazeta 286 Lithuania 25, 44, 60, 81, 115, 127 n. 16, 198, 344, 355 n. 2 Litvakov, Moyshe 20–22, 32, 33, 38, 42–44, 48, 50, 55, 56, 76, 198, 206, 214, 216, 342 Livshits, Moyshe 33 Loker, Berl 206 Lovestone, Jay 213 Loytsker, Khaym 62 Lozovsky, Solomon 57–59, 69 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 23 Lurie, Note 229 Malenkov, Georgi 69 Malraux, André 53 Maltinski, Khaym 231 Markish, Esther 231 Markish, Peretz 20, 21, 23, 28, 31, 34, 50, 52, 55, 59, 61, 66, 68, 177, 215, 224, 226, 341, 344, 346 Marxism 22, 31, 34, 35, 40, 41, 43, 131, 174, 207, 240, 252, 293 Mayzel, Nakhmen 7, 10, 12–14, 16, 20, 30, 34, 43, 47, 49, 50, 53, 54, 71, 74, 89, 92, 167, 173, 191, 213, 214, 216, 237, 238, 273, 303, 310, 334 Medem, Gina 85

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INDEX Meir (Meyerson), Golda 66 Melamed, Meylekh 83 Mendele Moykher Sforim 7, 9, 32, 54, 89, 170, 171, 182, 270, 294 Mensheviks 8 Mikhoels, Shloyme 45, 47, 48, 55–61, 65–67, 85, 229, 269, 280, 283 Milgroym 32–34, 152 Minsk 43, 56, 60, 206, 269, 270 Miron, Dan 108, 109 modernism 1, 3, 4, 10, 14, 16, 17, 21, 22, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 45, 47, 74 n. 95, 91, 92, 152, 167, 174, 207 Molodowsky, Kadya 20, 21 Moment 32 Morgn-frayhayt see Frayhayt Moscow 2, 3, 4, 23, 24, 25, 27, 31, 34, 36, 37, 41, 43, 48, 50, 52, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 70, 73 n.64, 76 n.132 & 135, 80, 81, 85, 87, 130, 153, 169, 171, 172, 177, 178, 182 n. 11, 187, 188, 192, 200, 201, 205, 208, 214, 216, 217, 22 n. 22, 224, 226, 227, 229, 230, 232, 233 nn. 2 & 8, 249, 251, 252, 266 n. 6, 267 n.10, 270, 280 Moscow Association of Proletarian Poets 34 Moscow Association of Yiddish Writers and Artists 24, 34 Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (GOSET) 28, 45, 47, 48, 56, 60, 85, 216, 222, 229, 265, 269, 271, 272, 273, 283 n. 1, 284 nn. 8 & 20 Nabokov, Vladimir 25, 165 Naye lebn 227 Naye tsayt 10 Nazism 2, 4, 27, 51, 57, 58, 59, 60, 64, 66, 88, 155, 215, 231, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 255, 258, 259, 263–66, 270–71, 274–75, 279, 280–83, 286, 289, 292, 294 New York 2, 3, 24, 30–31, 34, 37, 45, 52, 60, 67, 71 n. 19, 73 nn. 59 & 61 & 67, 89, 124, 155, 169, 184, 185, 191, 194, 201 n. 3, 207, 210–13, 216, 218, 224, 226–27, 252, 255, 273, 303 n. 2, 355 n. 3 Niger, Shmuel 3, 4, 12, 14, 37–40, 43, 44, 70, 73, 89, 91, 114, 129, 173, 177, 180, 191, 202, 208, 210, 214, 217, 218, 224, 270, 273, 310, 334 Nomberg, Hirsh-Dovid 29, 85, 187 Novershtern, Avrom 129, 135, 169, 177, 178 Novick, Peysekh (Paul) 67, 212–15, 219 Noy, Dov 118 Nusinov, Isaac 44, 45, 59, 61, 214 Odessa 7, 14, 16, 18, 79, 80, 232 Oistrakh, David 61 Okhrimovo 7, 211 Olgin, Moyshe (Moissaye) 47, 205, 207, 213 Opatoshu, Joseph 34, 37, 52, 85, 185, 191, 207–10, 214–16, 226 Orshanski, Ber 206 ORT 34, 75 n. 116, 115

Bergelson.indb 361

361

Osherowitch, Mendel 3, 213 Oyslender, Nokhem 31, 168, 172 Pale of Settlement 8, 18, 136, 256, 276, 279 Palestine 20, 27, 29, 30, 37, 41, 48, 60, 65, 68, 70, 73 n. 72, 74 n. 99, 153, 206, 213, 225, 269, 273, 305 n. 30, 349, 355 n. 1 Passover 68, 117, 118, 128 n. 33, 133, 136, 138–41, 144, 296, 297 Pasternak, Boris 23, 53 Pasternak, Leonid 27 Peretz, Yitskhok-Leybush 9–14, 31, 32, 89, 302, 305 Petliura, Symon 22, 165, 195 Pilnyak, Boris 48 Piłsudski, Jósef 36 Pinski, David 216 Piscator, Erwin 29, 30 Po’alei Zion 7, 37, 73 n. 63 pogroms 18, 70 n. 6, 74 n. 95, 80, 139, 141, 149 nn. 22 & 27, 169, 238–40, 304 n. 21, 306 Poland 14, 26, 28, 35, 36, 39, 44, 47, 50, 56, 64, 68, 81,115, 148 n. 10, 156, 164, 191, 200, 201 n. 11, 214, 249, 258, 294, 303 n. 14, 344, 348–51, 355 nn. 1 &2 Polytechnic Institute (Kiev) 8 Pravda 59, 256, 257 Prilutski, Noyekh 187 propaganda 3, 32, 43, 52, 56–59, 62, 67, 69, 70, 120, 130, 194, 195, 200, 203 n. 33, 208, 214, 222, 225, 231, 253, 270, 292 Raboy, Isaac 48 Rada (of Independent Ukraine) 1, 20, 22 Radlov, Sergei 47 Rafalski, Mikhail 47 Ravitsh, Meylekh 28, 34 Rawidowicz, Simon 27 realism 20, 35, 53, 105, 173, 181, 346 n. 2 Red Army 23, 42, 57, 59, 80, 170, 172, 175, 178, 179, 195, 212, 249, 251, 254, 256, 258, 259, 261, 263– 65, 275, 279, 281, 287, 295 Reed, John 205 Remenik, Hirsh 91 revolution 1, 3, 4, 8, 12, 18, 22–24, 31–33, 36–37, 39, 40–41, 43, 44–45, 51, 57, 70, 91, 119, 120, 128 n. 32, 130, 147, 167–82, 186, 198, 205, 209, 211, 223, 227, 238, 256, 280, 286, 346 nn. 5 & 7, 347, 348 Reyzen, Avrom 12, 48, 85, 207, 213 Riga 35, 56, 135, 186 Ringen 184 Romania 60, 198 Romanisches Café 29, 85, 152, 187, 206, 210, 220 nn. 24 & 25 Rontsh, Yitskhok Elkhonon 211 Rosenfeld, Jonah 192, 193, 205 Rosh ha-Shanah 12, 84, 257, 277, 278, 296

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INDEX

Rosin, Abraham (Ben-Adir) 25, 73 Roskies, David G. 120, 154, 320 Roth, Philip 240 Rovina, Hanna 85 Rozenfeld, Yankev 228 Rozhansky, Shmuel 273, 310, 334 Rubin, Israel 152 Russo-Japanese War 8 Rybak, Issachar-Ber 25, 27 Sabbath 20, 84, 140, 171, 176, 179, 180, 210, 220 n. 37, 257, 297, 304 n. 20, 350, 353 Schiller, Friedrich 271 Schnitzler, Arthur 10 Schocken, Salman 27 Schwartz, Maurice 72 Schwarzbard, Shalom 165 Segal, Lazar 72 Seidman, Naomi 266 Shabad, Tsemakh 187 Shakespeare, William 29, 271 Shapiro, Lamed 213 Shatzky, Jacob 211 Shaykevitsh, Nokhem-Meyer (Shomer) 7, 212, 220 n. 39 Shcherbakov, Aleksandr 62 Sherman, Joseph 153 Shestov, Lev 9 Shklovsky, Viktor 157, 162, 163 Shmeruk, Chone (Khone) 114, 127 Shneer, David 306 Shneer-Okun, Zalmen 278 Shneerson, Fishl 85 Shneour, Zalmen 27, 74 n. 105, 185, 187, 201 n. 11, 202 n. 12, 203 n. 53 Sholem Aleichem 9, 32, 54, 56, 89, 90, 91, 99, 110, 114, 116, 127, 149, 155, 156, 170, 178, 220, 270, 294, 352 Sholem Aleichem Club (Berlin) 35, 81, 83, 206 Sholokhov, Mikhail 60 Shomer see Shaykevitsh, Nokhem-Meyer Shoshkes, H. 310, 334 Shtern 43, 56 shtetl 9, 10, 12, 18, 21, 31, 32, 41, 43, 55, 71 n. 19, 79, 80, 83, 92, 95, 104–08, 119, 125, 131–33, 135–38, 140, 141, 144–45, 147, 155–56, 169, 170, 173, 176– 80, 196, 211, 238, 256, 276, 344, 352, 353 Shtif, Nokhem (Bal-Dimyen) 29, 34, 72 Shtrom 31–34, 43, 200 Simonov, Konstantin 262 Singalovsky, Aaron 35, 37, 75 Singer, Israel Joshua 20, 23, 34, 41, 47, 72, 183–85, 187, 189, 199, 200, 206, 209 Skoropadsky, Pavlo 22 Skvir 70 n. 1, 132, 135, 137, 139 Slotnick, Susan Ann 174, 175, 178–79, 180, 238, 306 socialism 4, 7, 8, 12, 14, 18, 20, 22, 35–37, 47, 48, 50,

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53, 61, 70, 73 n. 67, 119, 184, 200, 201 n. 3, 205–07, 211, 215, 217, 222, 224–27, 236, 238–44, 247 n. 15, 250, 259, 260, 266, 270, 271, 279, 303 n. 3, 307, 351 socialist realism 3, 4, 41, 47, 70, 181, 240, 241, 270, 271, 285, 286, 291, 296 Soviet Writers’ Union 53, 68 Sovinformburo 57, 62, 265, 267 n. 16 Spector, Mordechai 124 St Petersburg 12, 16, 138, 140, 146, 177 St Vladimir University 8 Stalin, Josef 38, 48, 52, 60, 67, 237, 269, 283, 286, 303 Stanislawski, Michael 239 Staudinger, Hermann 83 Steiner, Peter 162 Stencl, Avrom-Nokhem 34 Stybel, Abraham 27 Sukkot 68 symbolism 14, 21, 149 n. 27, 170, 181 Syrkin, Nakhmen 7, 20 Tagore, Rabindranath 29 Talnye 7, 70 n. 1, 149 n. 17 Tashkent 60 Tchernichowsky, Saul 27, 35, 73 n. 71, 74 n. 99 Territorialism 7, 20, 73 n. 67 Tisha b’Av 68, 84, 110 n. 17 Togblat 18 Tolstoy, Alexei 237 Tolstoy, Leo 111 n. 30, 148 n. 15, 201 n. 6, 271 Tribuna 230 Trotsky, Lev 23, 38 Tsaytlin, Hillel 10 Tshemerinsky, Khaym 10, 71 Tsherikover, Elias 29, 72, 187 Tsvetaeva, Marina 25 Turgenev, Ivan 8, 111 n. 30, 299 Twersky dynasty 7, 70 n. 1. 148 n. 17 Tynianov, Yuri 168 Ukraine 9, 18, 22, 23, 28, 60, 66, 69, 79, 80, 104, 148 n. 10, 154, 158, 165 n. 18, 169, 170, 182 n. 11, 186, 187, 188, 193, 195, 207, 250, 254, 260, 288, 294 Uman, 7, 9 Undzer vort 57 United States 2, 24, 30, 45, 47, 57, 58, 50, 66, 70 n. 1, 81, 85, 152, 153, 183, 184, 187, 190, 191, 201 n. 3, 205, 208, 210, 211, 216, 219, 250 Valencia, Heather 154, 158 Vaynroykh, Hershl 227 Vayter, A. 12, 310, 334 Vilna (Vilnius) 9, 10, 14, 16, 21, 28, 36, 45, 56, 64, 73 n. 66, 75 nn. 113 & 120, 81, 129, 174, 186, 264, 346 n. 2, 355 nn.2 & 3 Vinnitsa 18, 80

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INDEX Vispe 37 Vladek, Borukh 73, 208 Vokh 213, 214 Volkenshteyn, David 209 Vössische Zeitung 32 Warsaw 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 28, 29, 34, 37, 42, 45, 47, 50, 109 n. 8, 116, 124, 127 n. 9, 137, 177, 184, 186, 191, 207, 209, 213, 214, 225, 236, 253, 264, 303 n. 14, 355 n. 1 Warsaw Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists 50, 214 Weill, Kurt 28 Weimar Republic 2, 25, 27, 35, 45, 153, 206 Weinper, Zishe 26, 85, 211, 216, 218, 227 Weinreich, Max 29, 113, 127 n. 27 Weissenberg, Isaac Meyer 350 Weizmann, Chaim 71 Wiesel, Elie 266 Wischnitzer, Mark 32 Wischnitzer-Bernstein, Rachel 32 Wisse, Ruth R. 116, 129, 320, 335 Wolitz, Seth L. 163 World War I 4, 14, 16, 21, 25, 29, 35, 37, 73 n. 64, 81, 114, 148 n. 6, 150, 170, 186, 187, 208 World War II 56, 217, 237, 271, 275, 279 Yampolsky, Mikhail 238

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363

Yefroykin, Yisroel 187 Yekaterinoslav 20, 71 n. 19 Yevsektsia 25, 36, 38, 45, 48, 191, 198, 351 Yiddishism 1, 4, 20, 32, 38, 58, 74 n. 76, 75 n. 105, 87, 114, 115, 117, 126, 185, 207, 302, 349, 351 Yidishe ilustrirte tsaytung 206 Yidishe kultur 60 Yidishes tageblat 71 YIVO x, 29, 73 n. 66, 75 n. 120, 115, 188, 307, 333, 355 n. 2 YKOR 215, 250 YKUF 60, 216, 218, 232, 273 Yom Kippur 68, 84, 276, 277, 278, 284 n. 22, 294, 297 Zagorin, Neil 114 Zamyatin, Yevgeny 48 Zehlendorf 30, 46, 83, 84 Zhdanov, Andrei 62, 286 Zhitlovsky, Khaym 58, 74, 75, 207 Zingman, Kalman 29 Zionism 7, 17, 20, 21,26, 27, 37, 38, 41, 48, 50, 62, 65, 66,67, 134, 138, 141, 149 n. 25, 250, 257, 259, 260, 276, 277, 279, 283, 305 n. 30, 349, 351, 355 n. 1 & 3 Zunser, Eliakum 355 Zuskin, Benjamin 45, 85, 269 Zweig, Arnold 26, 30 Zweig, Stefan 71

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