The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series)

by David Bergelson

  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 his trial in May 1952. Fifteen defendants, including the poets Peretz Markish, David Hofshteyn, Itsik Fefer, and Leyb Kvitko, were charged with capital offenses, ranging from treason and espionage to “bourgeois nationalism.”

  At their secret trial, the principal charge brought against the leaders of the JAFC was rooted 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 USSR.”19 At first the regime pretended to treat this proposal seriously, but Lazar Kaganovich, the only Jew in Stalin’s Politburo, expressed its true attitude when he told Mikhoels that “only actors and poets” could dream up something so absurd.20 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 postwar visits to the USSR of the left-wing Americans Peysekh (Paul) Novick, the editor of New York’s Morgn-frayhayt, and Sholem Aleichem’s son-in-law, the Yiddish journalist Benzion Goldberg. Anxious to assess the prospects for Jewish reconstruction after the war, these two journalists had naturally spent most of their time with Yiddish-speaking colleagues at the JAFC. Now security investigators perverted their visit into an 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 brutally treated. 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 the Great Terror in 1937–1938, 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 speak in turn to “confessions” extorted under duress. Those who during the war had been explicitly entrusted with rousing international 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. Nevertheless, 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.”21

  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-fourhour 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 USSR, 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 affrmation in denial that he had fictionally dramatized in some of his “Berlin” stories twenty years earlier.22

  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 Jewish parents to place their children in the few remaining schools. 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 encouragement of Yiddish culture by the Bolshevik regime was what had drawn him back to the USSR; 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 fulfill 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,” he said, “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?”23

  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 toward attaining the level of a real Soviet man, but did not quite reach it, and of that I am guilty.”24

  The indictment, and Fefer’s testimony on which it was founded, were so often exposed as fabrications by the defendants, in particular by Solomon Lozovsky—a former member of the Central Committee and deputy chairman of the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo)—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. Georgii Malenkov, 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 prearranged death sentences were handed down on 18 July. On 12 August 1952, his sixty-eighth birthday, Bergelson was one of thirteen defendants, including two women, to be shot.25 At the time of his arrest, the NKVD confiscated three sacks of manuscripts that, his widow believed, contained work that he had written with an increasing concern that it would never be published.

  For some 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 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, of which The End of Everything is the supreme example. 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 antagonism toward Yiddish in Jewish 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 willfully blinding himself to the dangers that lurked there, he was one of thousands caught in a tragic lie. During the agonizing years he and his fellow writers spent in prison, and again through the shocking weeks of the rigged “trial,” the extent of this lie would have certainly become clear to them. Their aims—to promote Yiddish language and culture by exercising their considerable talents as writers and poets—had been noble; how far they were to blame for trying to survive in a despotic system that grew increasingly more murderous and from which they could not escape is a question readers must answer for themselves.

  In 1961, nine years after his death, a volume of Bergelson’s selected work was published in Moscow during the Khrushchev “thaw.”26 This book, one of only six in Yiddish allowed into print between 1959 and 1961, is significant because it marked Bergelson’s official Soviet “rehabilitation” and identified those of his works that were acceptable to the party line of the 1960s. Among them, interestingly, was The End of Everything, which was republished in its entirety. The appreciation of a masterpiece, it would seem, can survive even the most brutal vicissitudes of ideology.

  2.

  Set in and around the unnamed but easily identifiable city of Kiev, with its action shifting between metropolis and shtetl during a period of intense capitalist growth between 1905 and 1914, When All Is Said and Done views the coterminous decay of tsarist rule and traditional Eastern European Jewish life through the tangled emotions of its depressive chief character, Mirel Hurvits. She is briefly jolted out of her neartotal self-absorption by the decline in fortunes of her father, Reb Gedalye, a refined and learned Jew whose old-fashioned business methods cannot compete with those of aggressive nouveaux riches like Avrom-Moyshe Burnes27 and Yankev-Yosl Zaydenovski. In a society dominated by material values, Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s bankruptcy becomes an embarrassment that renders him dead even while he is still alive: at his funeral his bier is rushed off to the cemetery “like something that ought to be hidden from sight as quickly as possible” (4.1).

  Though the outward pattern of Jewish life in both shtetl and city continues to follow the rhythm of the liturgical year, and the externals of festivals are carefully observed, religious observance has essentially been reduced to a means of acquiring or retaining social status. Thus only in prosperous middle age does the unlearned Avrom-Moyshe Burnes feel the necessity to start attending prayers regularly (1.1), while the crafty Yankev-Yosl Zaydenovski leads prayers in the synagogue chiefly to indulge the same vanity (2.9) that makes him entertain lavishly on Sabbaths and festivals (3.3). Even Reb Gedalye’s Judaism is more intellectual than spiritual: he reads such works of medieval Jewish philosophy as the Kuzari by the poet and thinker Judah Halevi, but he fails to bring up his daughter with any sense of religion (3.11). Avreml, the shtetl rabbi, is a figure of limited influence, reductively designated only by the diminutive of his personal name and daily undermined by his marriage to a commonplace social climber with a malicious streak.

  Mirel, a beautiful, hypersensitive young woman around whom every action in the novel turns, is continually in search of some undefined alternative to the tedium of bourgeois life both in the shtetl and in the metropolis.28 Her hopeless search for some meaning—the “central, overriding concern” she repeatedly mentions—and her failure to find a place for herself in a vacuous world certainly embodies the demoralization of an entire generation of young Russian Jews on the eve of revolution, yet her personal choices limit her life even further. She is not part of the intelligentsia, since she is scantily educated, has no desire to pursue further study, reads in a superficial and desultory manner, and remains rooted in a privileged class. At the age of seventeen, as Mirel herself recounts (2.3), she is betrothed to Velvl Burnes, an engagement that drags on for four years before it is broken off, making her twentyone when the novel opens. Since its events play out over a carefully marked period of two years, she is only twenty-four when she finally disappears without a trace. In so far as she rejects what she does not want without defining any clear alternative for herself to pursue, she justifies Herz’s dismissal of her as “a provincial tragedy” (2.11).

  Created in the shadow of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Mirel might seem at first glance to be a proto-feminist avant la lettre. On the surface she does many things radical for her sex, time, and class. Her closest friend in the shtetl is the fiercely independent midwife Schatz; she pursues at least one extramarital affair that is sexual, and scandalously undergoes an abortion to rid herself of an unwanted child; one of the books she reads suggests some intellectual interest in the position of women in society. Yet unlike her only female friend, who is a dedicated midwife, Mirel is totally self-centered and does nothing to establish an independent life for herself. She agrees to accept as her husband Shmu
lik Zaydenovski, a rich young man from the metropolis who is besotted with her, in a momentary access of pity for her ruined and desperately ill father, yet she can hardly be said to sacrifice herself for him, since she seeks to cancel her betrothal almost immediately after she has agreed to it. As soon as Shmulik tearfully resists, she submits (2.13) even as she absurdly attempts to preserve her liberty by demanding the right to a celibate marriage, from which she insists she must be free to leave whenever she chooses. She subsequently permits her husband to have conjugal relations with her for the same reason she marries him—indifference rather than choice. The narrative repeatedly stresses the extent to which, as an only child, she is both spoiled and selfish; she lacks any defining moral values and is wholly unable to empathize with others. Yet her conduct does not exclusively derive from caprice: a depressive personality, she is genuinely in a state of what the twentieth century called “existential angst.”