Dovid
Bergelson

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During Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign of purges to weed out "rootless cosmopolitans," Bergelson was arrested with other Yiddish writers, scientists, and intellectuals who were part of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the Second World War (detailed in Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov's harrowing account, Stalin's Secret Porgrom). On August 12, 1952, on his 68th birthday, Bergelson was executed in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka prison.

The following is an extract of a newspaper clipping from the left-wing daily, Morgn Frayhayt that fell out of a volume of Bergelson's collected works here at the Book Center. The article was written by the paper's literary columnist, Moyshe Katz. The author gives an overview of Bergelson's emergence onto the Yiddish literary scene and the prominent features of his unique style. Published on August 2, 1959, the article reveals that Katz and his readers are still unaware of the exact details of Bergelson's imprisonment, trial, and execution.

Dovid Bergelson:
75 Years Since his Birth, 50 Years Since At the Depot
by Moyshe Katz (August 2, 1959)

Had Dovid Bergelson lived until today, the entire Yiddish cultural world—or at any rate the progressive Yiddish cultural world—would now be celebrating a two-fold anniversary: 75 years since Bergelson's birth in the tiny Ukrainian shtetl of Okhrimovka (in Russian: Sarny, near Uman), and 50 years since the original publication of his first printed work, At the Depot, in Warsaw, 1909. Tragically, his life was violently cut short — we believe in August of 1952 — by criminal hands that sought to damage and destroy the Jewish people together with the Soviet Union.

From the very start, the work that Bergelson created ensured his permanent and honored place in world literature (through translations into Russian and the other languages of Soviet nationalities) and his foremost status, naturally, in Yiddish literature.

Difficulties due to quality

That expression, "from the very start," is not quite accurate. Indeed, "from the very start" would indicate the very moment he began at the age of 13 to try his hand—first in Russian and Hebrew and then in Yiddish—and to submit his first pieces to various editors but kept running into closed doors. Add to this the fact is that his first printed piece of writing, At the Depot, published in book form in Warsaw in 1909—with Bergelson already 25 years old and more than a decade of failed literary attempts behind him—was printed with his own money; he had found no publisher. But that a book by this unknown writer was so quickly recognized as a first-class piece of writing by the critical establishment of the day (S. Niger, I. Vayter, among others) could propel the young Bergelson to the forefront of our literature, reveals that the publishing houses and literary journals had lagged in printing his work not on account of its possible flaws, rather on account of its quality.

Bergelson had shown as early as At the Depot that he was embarking on his own way of writing in his idiosyncratic, so-called "clear expressive" style and his method of "delving deep" that was entirely new to Yiddish literature. Bergelson's novelty lay in his unique, particular way of regarding and depicting Jewish life. In a certain way, Bergelson's At the Depot was yet another shtetl-genre book, yet another in a series of "shtetlach" books that had made Sholem Asch and Isaac Meir Weissenberg famous. But the main difference between these three shtetl book writers is that while Asch idealized and romanticized the old Jewish-Polish commercial town already on the verge of disappearance, Weissenberg painted a picture of the first signs of workers' revolt in the shtetl with thick, naturalistic colors. Bergelson, on the other hand, realistically depicted the Ukrainian shtetl, its decline, and inexorable death.

Bergelson's Style

Bergelson's realistic depiction and his colors were unusual, so much so that they still remain the outstanding trademarks of his work: no glossy, lacquer finish as in Sholem Asch's The Shtetl and no sharp black-and-white contrasts as in Weissenberg's A Shtetl; his were fine, delicate, colors half-engulfed by shadow, impressionistic half-shadows and half-words that depict characters more by their voices and silent responses to their surroundings than by distinct representation or plain and direct dialogue or monologue.

Back when Shmuel Niger sought—still with a certain amount of objectivity—to understand and characterize Soviet-Yiddish literature, he gave the following fine description of Dovid Bergelson's style:

"What the earlier writers (Mendele, Peretz, Sholem-Aleichem) did for the 'popular style' in Yiddish, Bergelson began to do for the emerging Yiddish style of Jewish national intellectuals. He injected into this style an internal order and rhythm. He strove to detect the quiet and not entirely established music of modern Yiddish in the same way that the three classic authors took on the tune of mama-loshn. With his Nokh alemen [When All is Said and Done], the modern Yiddish novel was born and a modern Yiddish style began to coalesce."

But Bergelson did not attract readers or stand out on account of his literary style alone. No less important, perhaps even more salient, were his depictions of Jewish life. As early as At the Depot, and later in When All is Said and Done, the short story "In a Backwoods Town," and especially in Opgang [Descent], Bergelson depicted and uncovered the decay of the old Jewish shtetl and its way of life, the decline of the bourgeois Yiddish intelligentsia that became estranged from the dying past and saw for itself no clear future.

I recall once in 1926, when we met in Berlin, I asked Bergelson, "Why do you present so many of your characters half-lit, half-colored, in hints and moods and they speak so seldom to one another?"

Bergelson looked at me very seriously, thought for a moment, and finally responded, "Why? Because most of them don't usually speak Yiddish or they don't know how to express themselves and their sensibilities in Yiddish. So I must speak for them and show them how they feel."

—Introduction and translation of Moyshe Katz's article by Robert Adler Peckerar