David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism

Literature written in Yiddish has been one of the unluckiest in modern history. The language was regarded for several centuries as a kind of kitchen patois, spoken by people towards the lower end of Jewish society in Eastern and Central Europe. Just as it was emerging as a serious literary language, those writing in it were either murdered in Nazi concentration camps, shot by the Soviets, or emigrated to the United States or South America. And the Jews of Israel chose Hebrew as the national language, leaving what remained of Yiddish-speaking literary life somewhat in limbo. Now, by the early 21st century, the language is dying, despite attempts by enthusiasts to revive it by way of summer courses and other activities in cities ranging from Paris to Vilnius.

In literary terms, Yiddish is often regarded as the language of folk tales from small country towns—shtetls—with a good deal of input involving religious ritual and custom. Authors such as Nobel Prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer have done little to dispel this idea, although he did write powerful realist novels such as Shadows on the Hudson. The Jewish dimension has therefore been very visible in Yiddish literature, sometimes giving gentile readers the idea that this was not quite for outsiders, unless they wanted to steep themselves in the finer points of specifically Jewish life and religiosity.

Dovid (or David) Bergelson wanted to break the mould. But his ultimate fate is as tragic as that of the Yiddish language itself: emerging as one of the few key Modernist writers in Yiddish, he was ultimately forced to conform to the edicts of Socialist Realism, but displeased the monstrous Stalinist régime, which was to prove fatal.

Dovid Bergelson was born in Uman in central Ukraine, then a Czarist province, in 1884. His father was a rich grain merchant, and his youngest son (one of nine siblings!) was given an eclectic education. But both of his parents died young and Dovid lived with various of his older siblings in Warsaw, Odessa and Kiev.

The major upheavals of 1905 passed him by. Bergelson was apparently more interested in literature than what was going on around him, and started writing in Hebrew, then Russian, but could not place his stories. He did not find it easy to start writing in Yiddish; the styles to be emulated seemed old-fashioned. He wanted to write tersely; his models were all verbose. He also wanted to write in a kind of Yiddish literary language, at one remove from the earthy colloquialisms of the majority of Yiddish writers at the time.

By 1910, Bergelson was enjoying some success with his short works. Although living in the city of Kiev, he tended to set his stories in small towns, where Yiddish was spoken. Yiddish was on the rise. Russian intellectuals wanted to show solidarity with Jews and a certain amount of liberalization was occurring in the Russian Empire. Just before WWI, the Kiev Group was established—a group of young Yiddish authors.

He married in 1917 in Odessa, but the family moved to Kiev for protection, as the pogroms raged. One of Bergelson’s manuscripts for a novel was destroyed in one such pogrom.

In 1920, the Russian Revolution had made Moscow the capital of the new Bolshevized Russia. Yiddish flourished and the mood was liberal. The Yiddish activists dreamed of a synthesis of Yiddish and universal culture. But Moscow was starving. By 1921, Dovid Bergelson was on his way to Berlin, attracted, as many other writers and intellectuals were, by improved living conditions.

He was to stay in Berlin until 1934. Many Russian intellectuals had fled Russia and ended up in Berlin, such as Andrey Bely, Ilya Ehrenburg, Vladimir Nabokov and Marina Tsvetaeva. The multilingual Bergelson appears to have felt at home there. The Weimar Republic had also attracted a whole host of Jewish writers, writing in Yiddish or, as in the case of Chaim Bialik, Hebrew. Bergelson mixed with such German writers as Alfred Döblin and Arnold Zweig. Bergelson and Albert Einstein once played violin solos at the same concert.

Gradually, however, with Hitler’s power on the rise, Dovid Bergelson began once again to look eastwards. He spent some time in Moscow in 1926. Maybe he was beginning to feel a yearning for Russia. At any rate he attacked Zionism and somewhat glorified the Soviet Union. During that fatal turning-point year in Bergelson’s fortunes, he was forced to renounce his previous writings, which had been more entertainment than agit-prop, according to the Soviet standards of the day. But maybe he did not conform enough. He was slowly slipping towards Socialist Realism, in an anxious attempt to prove how loyal he was to Russian-style Communism. And by 1929, Stalin had consolidated his power, and the literary scene became increasingly less liberal.

Dovid Bergelson did, however, see the other side of Jewish life, that of the USA. In 1929, he spent six months in New York, writing for the Yiddish press. But he found American Yiddish poetry élitist; he was already beginning to abandon Modernism in search of a more committed form of writing. By 1931, his visits to the Soviet Union were becoming ever longer.

In 1933, Bergelson spent a short while in exile in Denmark with his family. But his fate was sealed when, early the following year, he decided, as other key Yiddish writers had before him, to return to the Soviet Union. Maybe it is unfair to say that this was the beginning of the end for Dovid Bergelson, but from 1934 onwards, for the remaining 18 years of his life, he appears to have become bogged down in the intellectual and social swamp that Soviet Union had become. He visited Birobidzhan, the showcase republic set up for the Jews by Stalin, not far from Vladivostok.

After the assassination by Stalin of the prominent Jewish actor and cousin to Stalin’s personal physician, Solomon Mikhoels, in 1949, it was all over for Bergelson and a number of his Jewish writer colleagues as well. In his characteristically paranoid manner, Stalin began rounding up the Jewish intelligentsia in Russia, imagining all manner of plots. Stalin decided to eradicate Soviet Jewish culture, and one by one, Jewish intellectuals were arrested and put on trial. Dovid Bergelson spent the last couple years of his life in prison and was executed by firing squad on his 68th birthday in 1952.

This sad event for Yiddish literature occurred between 12th and 13th August 1952 and is termed the Night of the Murdered Poets. Executed along with Dovid Bergelson were Yiddish authors Peretz Markish, Itzik Fefer, Leib Kwitko, David Hofstein, Benjamin Zuskin, Solomon Lozovsky and Boris Shimeliovich.

The above is but a thumbnail sketch of the life of a complex man in complex times. The nuances and paradoxes only fully emerge in the chapters of David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism, edited by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh. This book strikes a happy balance between text and context, and the essays there cover everything from a close reading of his works to an examination of the literary, historical and cultural context in which those works were produced. This book is, in effect, more than the examination of the works of one author. The symbolic value of Bergelson’s fateful move from emerging as a Modernist author and ending up following the tenets of Socialist Realism forms the central leitmotif.

At the risk of over-simplification, it can be stated that when Bergelson described the decline and decay of the Jewish world in Eastern and Central Europe, and in a stylistically experimental fashion, he was at the top of his game. Once he started describing utopian change he was less convincing. One of the most stimulating essays in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism is one entitled “Language and Style” in Nokh Alemen by Daniela Mantovan of the University of Heidelberg. This novel, translated twice into English as When All is Said and Done, is regarded as Bergelson’s Modernist masterpiece, and first appeared in Yiddish in 1913.

The story bears some resemblance to Madame Bovary although the main female protagonist disappears rather than dies. None the less, as Mantovan claims, Bergelson was influenced by Flaubert’s use of style indirect libre, where the distinction is blurred between direct and reported speech, which in turn affects the perceptions and limitations of the narrator.

The story is mostly centred around the life of one woman and her suitor, rejected by the “Bovary-type” of woman. As Joseph Sherman puts it:

“..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.”

Mirele Hurvits, the woman protagonist, longs to escape the boredom of small-town life as the only and privileged daughter of a man with some status in the town. One step in this process is rejecting her lover. Mantovan:

“With her fiancé finally rejected, Mirele’s psychological make-up 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 decision 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 self-centred use of [him] both before and after her betrothal.”

The whole novels exemplifies an interplay between various sets of values and attitudes to class. The subtlety is in the narration, not the plot.

Bergelson’s second novel Descent was published in 1921 and tells of the mysterious suicide of a young pharmacist Meylekh in the small town of Rakitne (the very name of which has the ring of rachitis or rickets about it). The title – “Opgang” in Yiddish – can be interpreted as decline, descent, sunset, and one or two other downward allusions. The book begins with the funeral of Meylekh (the name, ironically, mean “king”) and the arrival of his friend Khayim-Moyshe to sort out the financial affairs of the dead man. The local townspeople are very unhelpful, fall silent at the first opportunity. It is not clear whether any of the womenfolk that Meylekh associated with pushed him over the edge. One critic, Dara Horn, is puzzled by the fact that Meylekh’s unexpected death could be owing to one of three women, his former fiancé Ethel, a recluse, Khave, a rather smart woman about town and Henke, who is the earthiest, most straightforward of the three. But this puzzle is never resolved. The novel shows how the glue of small-town society has come unstuck. There is no redemption. Not an particularly life-enhancing way of approaching life. But it has been suggested that Bergelson already identified the decline of Jewish society after the shake-up of World War One; so this negatively-charged novel comes as no surprise.

What is much more surprising is why, by the early 1930s, Dovid Bergelson had sold his artistic birthright to Socialist Realism, a credo that should have been utterly alien to the sensitive describer of the decline of the Jewish stetl. What had occurred during the 1920s to turn the author from a gloomy Modernist into an adept of modern [Stalinist] man, a eulogistic supporter of the new project for Jews in the Soviet Union, the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Republic in Birobidzhan? How had Bergelson, then living in Berlin and even visiting Jewish communities in the United States, managed to convince himself that Soviet Jewry would fare any better than Jews had for hundreds of years under rulers of a more or less anti-Semitic variety? Was Bergelson the victim of his own bouts of wish-fulfillment?

In 1929, Bergelson published a novel entitled Mides-hadin which translates as “with the full force of the law”, a Hebrew concept. Critic Michael Krutikov says that this novel marks the watershed between Bergelson’s Modernist and Socialist Realist periods. While he was already trying to adjust to the Socialist Realist mind set, he was still experimenting, using a mystical concept in the title of what was to become a novel of revolutionary struggle. Bergelson appears to still have had the mental space, living in Berlin as he still was, to have it both ways: literary experiment and political commitment did not yet exclude one another. But by 1932, in his novel Baym Dnyepr (On the Dniepr; Part Two 1940), Bergelson had crossed the river. Harriet Murav of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests that the author may have by now been “rewriting” both himself and history. You are almost reminded of the gin-soaked tears of Winston in 1984 as they run down the cheek of the new “convert” to Big Brotherism. The brainwashers had won the day.

Or had they? Murav suggests that while the surface of Baym Dnyepr conforms to the grand tenets of Socialist Realism, a number of stylistic devices used subtly by Bergelson undermine this surface reading. The very fact that the novel was enthusiastically planned as a five-volume suite, but in the end appeared as two volumes with almost a decade between them, points to a different reality than the hysteria of the Stalinist doctrine of “back to the future” with positive heroes following Lenin and their conscience.

Before his arrest and ultimate execution, Dovid Bergelson was to produce one more work of note: the play Prints Ruveni. This play was being rehearsed by the Director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre Shloyme Mikhoels, when Mikhoels was arrested and murdered on Stalin’s explicit orders on 12th January 1949. Mikhoels had hoped to turn Bergelson’s play into one of his theatre’s great achievements. But it was not to be. Within three years, Bergelson would also have fallen victim to Stalin’s irrational purge mentality. The play is based on the life of Prince David Reubeni (1490-1540), one of Judaism’s several false messiahs who ended up a victim of the Inquisition. Where was Bergelson going with this play, written in the Stalinist Soviet Union after the Holocaust? Was he in some complex way trying to square the circle of the Jewish state in Palestine and the life of Soviet Jewry? Was he implying that the Soviet Union might be swept away as Hitler’s Germany had been? Whatever the overt or covert message, Stalin must have interpreted the play, with a song sung in Hebrew, as a bridge too far as regards Jewish identity, because the message about a secular paradise seems to been overlooked by the dictator, and suspicions were aroused about other dreams.

The paradoxical nature of Dovid Bergelson’s life and the movement of his work from experimentation to conformity (with experiment and non-conformity still lurking beneath the surface) make the man and his writings a fascinating case in twentieth century literature written in one of Europe’s many literary languages.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

When All Is Said and Done, (novel), translated by Bernard Martin, Ohio University Press, Athens 1977

The Stories of David Bergelson – Yiddish Short Fiction From Russia, translated by Golda Werman, Syracuse University Press, 1996

Descent, (novel) translated by Joseph Sherman, Modern Language Association of America, New York, 2000

Shadows of Berlin, (stories) translated by Joachim Neugroschel, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2005

When All is Said and Done (novel), translated by Joseph Sherman, Yale University Press, [forthcoming 2008]

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DISCUSSION OF HIS WORK

David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism
edited by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh
Legenda
363 pages, $89.50
978-1-905981-12-0