The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series)

by David Bergelson

  In a vigorous programmatic essay entitled “Dray tsentern” (Three Centers),12 which appeared in this journal’s first issue, Bergelson called on the Yiddish literary world to move its center of gravity to the Soviet Union. Dismissing America as a country of selfish opportunism and Poland as a reactionary outpost of religious orthodoxy, he claimed that those who, because they stood closest to the proletarian Jewish masses, could most effectively perpetuate Yiddish culture were to be found in the Soviet Union only. At a time when Yiddish-speaking communities worldwide were dwindling through assimilation, he argued, the Soviet Union was home to two million Jews whose home language was Yiddish; it supported Yiddish educational and cultural institutions and sponsored newspapers and publishing houses. In attempting to define a new direction for Yiddish culture, Bergelson’s essay exposed a fundamental contradiction between what Yiddish literature had already achieved, and what party functionaries now demanded it should accomplish. Predictably, therefore, his manifesto pleased neither the Left nor the Right.

  On 20 June 1926, by extraordinary coincidence, reviews of In shpan appeared simultaneously in two Yiddish dailies sundered ideologically and geographically: one by Litvakov in Der emes, and the other by Shmuel Niger (1883–1955) in New York’s liberal daily, Der tog (The Day). Litvakov, censuring Bergelson for being still “very far from true Communism,” categorically denied that his new journal was of any use to the party and its purposes. For diametrically opposite reasons, Niger assailed Bergelson’s tendentious stance by warning of the dangers to artistic creativity of harnessing individual talents to doctrinaire demands. Both attacks exposed the ideological bind in which Bergelson found himself. However much he might empathize with the ideals of the revolution, he was fundamentally a bourgeois intellectual, and In shpan itself, published jointly in Vilna and Berlin, was effectively an émigré publication. Nevertheless he was acutely aware that, having lost not only the subject matter of his earlier fiction but also his primary readership, he was urgently obliged to find both different themes and a secondary readership, which he thought he could best accomplish by becoming an apologist for the Soviet regime.

  Like all the most gifted of his Soviet Yiddish writer-colleagues, and thousands of Yiddish-speaking Jews worldwide, Bergelson steadily came to believe that only in the Soviet Union, the government of which both recognized and supported Yiddish, could the treasured ideal of defining Jewish identity through the promotion of Yiddish culture be realized. For this reason it was particularly significant that both issues of In shpan (April and May 1926) carried substantial extracts from his new novel Mides ha-din (The Full Severity of the Law), published in full three years later. While this novel can be read as a Bolshevik interpretation of the Civil War, in a deeper sense it is, typically for Bergelson, a metaphysical exploration of the forces of history, in which individuals remain uniquely incapable of fitting predetermined formulas.

  Since Bergelson had elected to put himself under its aegis, the Communist Party started making demands. In August 1926, during a visit to the Soviet Union, he attended a reception in Moscow at which Litvakov, the main speaker, stressed that Bergelson as a Soviet writer had to desist from writing what he insultingly called “entertaining light literature.” Angered more by Litvakov’s trivializing disparagement of his work than by his ideological censure, Bergelson nevertheless publicly declared that “the instructions that have been imparted to me on this evening, from beginning to end, I accept with love and deference.” He had come to believe that conforming to the party line was the only way he could continue contributing to Yiddish literary culture. To demonstrate his new commitment, in Kiev the following year he published the first edition of a new collection of engagé stories under the title Shturemteg (Days of Storm, 1927), which met with a mixed reception. The scandal provoked by his political reorientation greatly boosted his fame, however: in Russian and Ukrainian translation his work proved enormously popular in the Soviet Union, his name began to appear as a separate entry in Soviet literary encyclopedias, and between 1928 and 1930 Kletskin in Vilna published his collected Yiddish work in eight volumes.

  From November 1928 until May 1929 Frayhayt sponsored Bergelson on a tour of the United States, where he expressed shock at the country’s inflated commercialism and its intense mechanization of human life. Urged by American Communists to treasure his citizenship of the world’s first socialist state, and personally antipathetic to Zionist settlement in Palestine, Bergelson returned to Berlin. Barely five months later, the collapse of the New York stock exchange that precipitated the Great Depression confirmed in him his rejection of capitalism. In other respects, however, 1929 was a highly productive year. He republished The Full Severity of the Law; and his old friend Mayzel, now the editor of Warsaw’s Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages), dedicated an entire issue (Number 37) to Bergelson’s twenty years of literary achievement in which he featured one chapter from Bergelson’s newly begun novel, later known by its collective title Baym Dnyeper (On the Dnieper).

  Bergelson’s artistic sensibility instinctively inclined to subtlety and allusion, to speculation rather than to assurance, to the individual rather than to the collective. Soviet state propaganda, on the other hand, demanded art that worked in precisely the opposite way. In seeking to accommodate the party line, therefore, Bergelson was forced to work against his own artistic grain. The extent to which he succeeded in producing work of some quality even within the restrictions imposed by the party line demonstrated how far he was able to reinvent himself. The possibilities for continuing to do so were steadily closed off, however, by intensifying demands for conformity to the increasingly inflexible demands of Stalinist doctrine.

  By 1929, the climate in Yiddish literary circles changed abruptly in proportion to the change in Soviet society as a whole. Stalin had consolidated his grip on absolute power, and his demand for ideological conformity was first seen in a destructive political campaign waged against Russian-language writers who published abroad.13 To show unquestioning solidarity with the new party line, the functionaries of the Yevsektsia launched an analogous attack on Yiddish writers.14 At the same time, relations with the Jews in the West grew strained after Frayhayt, under pressure from Moscow, justified the Arab riots against Jewish settlers in Palestine as a revolt against the joint oppressions of Zionism and British imperialism. Like all Jewish left-wingers, Bergelson was compelled to reconsider his position. He chose to remain with Frayhayt, thus implicitly siding with stridently pro-Soviet colleagues and making a choice that grew increasingly irrevocable.

  In January 1932, after a further three-month visit to the Soviet Union, he announced his decision to return there permanently, a decision precipitated by Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933, when Bergelson and his family learned at first hand what Nazism meant. His son Lev, at that time a schoolboy of fifteen, was beaten in the streets, and the family’s apartment was searched. His wife and son left Germany almost immediately, and Bergelson joined them in Copenhagen. Although he found Denmark congenial, that country had no Yiddish-speaking community and its Jews had no interest in Yiddish belles lettres. Although his wife was reluctant to return to the Soviet Union, their son needed the acceptance of boys of his own age, and only the Soviet Union could guarantee him a university place. Consequently, at the beginning of 1934 Bergelson returned to the USSR, first visiting Birobidzhan, where a house had been built especially for him. Always an urban rather than a rural writer, however, he preferred to live in the capital.

  In Moscow, Bergelson enjoyed fame and prosperity for close to fifteen years. His books, protected like those of his Russian colleagues by the state-supported Writers’ Union, were printed in standard runs of thousands of copies, for which he received handsome royalties. In the spring of 1934, expectations that the Soviet Union would permit greater expansion of Yiddish culture were heightened when, on 7 May, the same day as the official opening of the important Kiev Yiddish Language Conference, the government upgraded the status of Birobid
zhan from Jewish National District to Jewish Autonomous Region, a change widely seen as another step toward the creation of a Jewish Autonomous Republic. Later that year Bergelson was chosen as one of the representatives of Moscow Yiddish literature at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, a propaganda parade of unity between men of letters and the party leadership, over the course of which Bergelson was several times openly praised. Behind its gala façade, however, this Congress was convened to enforce Stalin’s literary doctrine of “socialist realism,” which aimed to render the discourse of Soviet literature in all languages inseparable from the discourse of the regime. As only one of four Yiddish writers permitted formally to address the Congress, Bergelson in his speech welcomed Stalin’s directive that writers should become “engineers of human souls.” He had no choice now but to write according to party rules.

  Turning boilerplate party rhetoric into literary form, Bergelson now published a collection of stories titled Birebidzhaner (People of Birobidzhan), purportedly based on the glowing impressions he had gained during his visits there. This volume, unlike anything he had published before, startled Western readers. Its language, replete with Yiddishized acronyms for collective state enterprises, relied heavily on colloquialisms while the schematized plots and pasteboard personages of its tales predictably pitted progressive Soviet heroes against reactionary bourgeois villains. More than anything else, the collection’s uncritical exaggeration made it clear that it had been written to order. Bergelson then revised a number of his earlier stories to bring them into line with acceptable party doctrine, and these “adjustments” were reissued together with a few new stories in such later volumes as Trot nokh trot (Step by Step, 1938).

  A more complex problem beset Bergelson’s last major work, his ambitious, quasi-autobiographical novel On the Dnieper, of which only two of a planned five volumes finally appeared: the first, titled by the name of its chief character as Penek (1932), and the second, titled Yunge yorn (Years of Youth, 1940). On one hand, the novel at its best showed Bergelson at the height of his powers, re-creating the prerevolutionary period he understood perfectly; on the other, the actions and reactions of his characters were now predetermined by ideological imperatives. The plot sought to demonstrate how the rejected youngest son of a wealthy merchant could instinctually grow up fully equipped to assimilate into proletarian society. Although it went through five Yiddish and four Russian editions and was included in the Soviet literary canon, this novel was clearly the work of a writer divided against himself. In an essay published in 1937, Bergelson argued that Yiddish writers who so skillfully used folk idioms and oral constructions to depict traditional modes of Jewish life were regrettably at a loss when their characters left the shtetl. While this essay was intended to encourage Yiddish writers to present party-approved stereotypes in party-approved clichés, it unconsciously highlighted the catastrophic effect of ideological repression on literary art in general and on Yiddish writing in particular. Jewish writers, using an exclusively Jewish vernacular, were being asked to divorce themselves from the cultural world from which they derived both their language and their inspiration in order to write about life and events that—in accordance with party ideology—had no nationalcultural distinctiveness and therefore required only an impersonal, universal monotone. Bergelson had honed his remarkable gifts for the precise purpose of depicting the upper-middle classes of the decaying shtetl. Prevented by ideology from concerning himself with this “dead” world, he was left at a loss, not least because he excelled at irony and satire, and socialist realism was hostile to both. Though tightening repression did not initially affect Bergelson directly, the price he was forced to pay—like all the best of his Soviet contemporaries, whether they wrote in Yiddish or in Russian—was his artistic integrity.

  In 1937, the year in which Stalin set in motion the bloodbath known as the Great Terror, many prominent voices in Soviet Yiddish letters were silenced in a wave of arrests and judicial murders. 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 denunciation of the arraigned defendants. In the bitterest of ironies, among the earliest to be purged was the fanatically doctrinaire Moyshe Litvakov, absurdly accused of belonging to the same anti-Soviet terror group in Minsk as his bitterest ideological opponents, while other writers, notably those from Kiev—like Bergelson—who had been criticized for years as petit-bourgeois nationalists, were left unharmed for another decade because the strategy pursued at this period required some token preservation of national cultures. All the same, repression was everywhere. Foreign travel and emigration was forbidden; Yiddish education was significantly reduced. This negative trend was partially reversed after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in September 1939, when first eastern Poland, and then the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina, fell under Soviet rule, swelling the Jewish population of the USSR from three to more than five million. For its own propaganda purposes, the regime then made use of Yiddish education and media in those areas with deep-rooted Jewish life. 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.15

  When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 Bergelson was among many other Yiddish intellectuals, writers, and artists—including the whole of GOSET, the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre—evacuated to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where they remained until October 1943.16 There he was appointed one of the editors of Eynikayt (Unity), a new Yiddish periodical created to rally the world’s Yiddish speakers to the cause of what Soviet terminology called “the Great Patriotic War.” He also served as a member of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAFC), a body set up by Stalin in April 1942 under the chairmanship of the GOSET’s director Solomon Mikhoels to foster international Jewish support for the USSR. As reports of Nazi extermination atrocities began pouring in, Bergelson, under pressure from Mikhoels, returned to writing plays expressing solidarity with the war effort in general and with the national identity of the Jewish people in particular. In 1943 he produced Ikh’l lebn (I Will Live), a play set in contemporary Soviet times asserting an indomitable Jewish determination to survive, while in 1946 he completed Prints Ruveni (Prince Reuveni), first published, by virtue of the wartime alliance with the West, in the New York left-wing journal Yidishe kultur and reissued shortly thereafter in book form.17 While Ikh’l lebn was never performed in the USSR, Prints Ruveni, a historical drama based on the life of a sixteenth-century messianic figure who urged the Jewish people to self-redemption through force of arms, was in its final stage of rehearsal when Mikhoels was summoned to Minsk, where he was murdered on 13 January 1948 in an elaborately faked motor accident on direct orders from Stalin. Though Bergelson was no dramatist, and his plays were uniformly unsuccessful, the pain of contemporary events moved him to pen powerful expressions of Jewish national consciousness in the face of genocide.

  Bergelson had embraced the Soviet Union and its ideology because he believed it offered the best chance for both the survival and the promotion of Yiddish culture through which he believed Jewish national identity in the modern world could be defined. In the aftermath of Hitler’s genocide, he found a way through the iron carapace of Stalinist ideology to assert a pride in Jewish identity. 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, antireligious contempt for Judaism’s observances he had expressed in On the Dnieper—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; in other stories he drew on the teachings of Hasidic rabbis, on Jewish legend and folklore in skillful allusions evident only to fellow Jews.18

  After the war, in company with all other members of the JAFC, Bergelson was awarded the state medal “For Valiant Labor During the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945.” Such public acknowledgment of the work of the JAFC—and of how far the JAFC and its members openly identified themselves as Jews—exacted a heavy price. Both during and after the war, Soviet government policy was strict denial 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 in the USSR. 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 such prohibited emotions be shared. To the general Jewish public, the Soviet Union’s vote in favor 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 USSR. Pretexts were created to place the JAFC under suspicion as a subversive organization working with American and British spies; the very agencies in the West with which it had been specifically charged to deal during the war years were now used to incriminate it. Steps were progressively taken to restrict the activities of the JAFC. 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 labeled 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 Mikhoels was murdered the following January. 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.