David Rafailovich Bergelson

Background

David Bergelson was born on August 12, 1884 in Okhrimovo near Kiev to a prosperous lumber and grain merchant, he was orphaned in his early teens and was subsequently raised by his elder brothers.

Career

The first of his works to attract literary notice was his novelette "Railroad Station", published in 1909, which brought him renown in Yiddish literary circles. It was followed in 1913 by "After All", a novel about the slow death of the Jewish middle class; its heroine is a young woman who vaguely but futilely dreams of freeing herself from her banal existence.

In 1921 he moved to Berlin, where he began to write for the New York Jewish Daily Forward. In 1926 he began the journal In Shpan, which held that Yiddish literature should be directed to the Jewish working class.

In 1929 he visited the United States, and after traveling in Europe, settled in Moscow in 1934. During the 1930s his major works included a collection of short stories called "Biro-Bidjaner" (1934) and two longer novels, "Penek and Dnieper", which chronicled the difficulty of adjusting to the new order in Russia.

During World War II he continued to write short stories, but in 1948 he suddenly disappeared from view. It was later learned that along with other Yiddish writers he had been arrested and imprisoned without trial, and had been shot on his sixty-eighth birthday.

His last novel, "Two Worlds", was published in Moscow in 1948.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Stories of David Bergelson: Yiddish Short Fiction from Russia (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art)

    (With little of his fiction available in English translati...)

  • The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson

    (Shadows of Berlin is, in part, a bleak chronicle of life ...)

  • The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series)

    (When All Is Said and Done is one of the great novels of t...)

    1913

Views

He supported the ideals of post-revolutionary Russia and his endorsement of Soviet ideology manifested itself in, among other things, work for the New York communist Yiddish paper, Morning Freiheit. His later writing also focused more on revolutionary themes than on the issue of social decay, which had featured in his earlier work.

Personality

A product of both Russian and Yiddish literary influences, his style is one of impressionism and understatement. A prevalent theme, particularly in his earlier writing, is the slow death of the Jewish middle class, and it is on this theme that he seems to have been at his best.

References

• A history of Yiddish literature
  1972