Typical of this technique is a moment early in the novel when Mirel’s frustration at the tedium of shtetl existence is generalized in a passage of description that deliberately blurs the source of the feelings described:
Short damp days followed in quick succession, driving the shtetl ever deeper into winter. Neither indoors nor outdoors offered anything to awaken interest, stirring instead the same indifferent discontent toward everything around, so that one might as well stop every overgrown girl who occasionally strolled down the main street in smartly dressed self-importance, vent one’s frustration on her, and rebuke her in the voice of an older, deeply discontented woman:
—Why are you so choosy, you? … Why don’t you get married? Why? [2.2]
Above all, by creating vivid images through unexpected use of language, Bergelson’s style presents the reader with new ways of seeing and feeling. So, for example, the grief that overcomes Mirel when she finally recognizes the futility of all her struggles is perceived as an all-embracing anguish that has a manifest physical presence: “The whole house was dark, silent and forlorn. The night had utterly enveloped it, had everywhere coiled itself around the extinguished shtetl and far beyond, encircling the surrounding fields where the desolation of all those asleep beat quietly on the ground” (4.5). Encouraging a nonlinear reading, the densely layered narrative steadily suggests an ever-widening range of alternatives for comprehending superficially commonplace situations.
The actual phrase nokh alemen, “the end of everything,” is used only three times in the novel, twice near the beginning and once at the end. In Part 1, reluctantly recognizing that he has lost Mirel for good, Velvl muses: “Did this mean that the betrothal was really over, that this was the end of everything?” (1.4). When Mirel makes the irretrievable decision to marry Shmulik, a man she dislikes, she enters her father’s deserted house late in the afternoon of the Fast of Esther and is confronted by a vision of utter desolation: “Mirel could see no one. No one stopped her, no one was made happier by her arrival. Something, it seemed, was too late here, had already ended” (2.8). Finally, in Part 4 the phrase, in stressing the void left by the death of Mirel’s father, anticipates her own ultimate effacement: “the desolation that follows when everything has ended clung to the walls and ceiling, calling again to mind that Reb Gedalye was now dead and that Gitele had now no single place on earth” (4.2).
In seeking to assess what is left after profound change, this phrase, from which the novel draws its title, defines the frustration of almost all the major characters, who realize by the end of all their searching that what they thought would make them happy is, when all is said and done, unattainable. The extent to which each is able to accept that he will never achieve the happiness he seeks is what finally determines his capacity or incapacity to go on living.
NOTES
1. David Bergelson, At the Depot, in A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas, ed. and trans. Ruth Wisse (New York: Behrman House, 1973), 79–139; repr. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986, 79–139.
2. David Bergelson, “The Deaf Man” and “Two Roads,” in No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present, ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 416–18; 424–43.
3. In English as “Departing,” in The Stories of David Bergelson: Yiddish Short Fiction from Russia, trans. Golda Werman (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 25–154; as Descent, trans. Joseph Sherman (New York: Modern Language Association, Texts and Translations Series, 1999).
4. For more about the Kultur-lige, see Hillel Kazovsky, The Artists of the Kultur-lige (English and Russian) (Jerusalem-Moscow: Michael Greenberg, 2003).
5. For more detail, see David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 60–87.
6. Some of these have recently been published in English translation; see Joachim Neugroschel, trans., The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005).
7. There are two English versions of this story: “Impoverished,” in The Stories of David Bergelson, trans. Golda Werman, 14–24; and “The Déclassés,” in The Mendele Review (TMR), trans. Joseph Sherman, Vol. 09.009.
8. A reworked version of this piece appears in English as “Civil War,” in Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet Yiddish Writers, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, trans. Seth Wolitz (New York: Schocken, 1977), 84–123.
9. English translation, under this title, by Joseph Sherman in Midstream 54, no. 4 (July/August 2008): 39–40.
10. “Two Murderers,” translated by Joachim Neugroschel, in The Shadows of Berlin, 1–8; “Old Age,” translated by Joachim Neugroschel, in The Shadows of Berlin, 9–20; “Obsolescence,” translated by Joseph Sherman, Midstream 38, no. 5 (July/August 2002): 37–42.
11. “Hershl Toker,” translated by Joseph Sherman, Midstream 37, no. 8 (December 2001): 24–29. I have critically examined this story in some detail; see Joseph Sherman, “‘Who Is Pulling the Cart?’ Bergelson and the Party Line, 1919–1927,’ Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe 1, no. 52 (2004): 5–36.
12. An English translation of this essay can be found in Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh, eds., David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), 347–55.
13. Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) had published his dystopian satire We in Prague, while in Berlin Boris Pilnyak (1894–1937) had brought out his novella Mahogany, which satirizes NEP-men—unscrupulous profiteers who exploited the capitalistic aspects of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921–29) for personal gain—who descend on a provincial town seeking to snap up mahogany furniture from impoverished townspeople, and offers a sympathetic depiction of a Trotskyite who is unhappy with the changes he finds here, his hometown. Both were viciously persecuted.
14. To ensure his survival, the young Yiddish writer Shmuel Gordon (1909–1998), who had ingenuously published some poems in Literarishe bleter, was compelled to make a groveling public apology for this lapse.
15. For a fuller discussion, see Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005).
16. See Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 216, 235–40.
17. For a detailed analysis of this play see Jeffrey Veidlinger, “Du lebst, mayn folk: Prints Ruveni in Historical Context,” in Sherman and Estraikh, eds., David Bergelson, 248–68.
18. For a fuller discussion, see Joseph Sherman, “‘Jewish Nationalism’ in Bergelson’s Last Book,” in Sherman and Estraikh, eds., David Bergelson, 285–305.
19. See Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 45.
20. Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 20–21.
21. Rubenstein and Naumov, Secret Pogrom, 150–51.
22. For an analysis of one such story, see Joseph Sherman, “A Note on Bergelson’s ‘Obsolescence,’” Midstream 38, no. 5 (July/August 2002): 37–42.
23. Rubenstein and Naumov, Secret Pogrom, 157–58.
24. Ibid., 478.
25. All fifteen were condemned, fourteen to death and one to a term of exile, but one died in prison before the sentence could be carried out.
26. Hirsh Remenik, ed., Dovid Bergelson: Oysgeveylte verk (Moscow: Melukhefarlagfun kinstlerisher literatur, 1961).
27. His surname is pronounced “Boor-ness.”
28. See, for instance, Mikhail Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 190–200.
29. These are among a number of illuminating insights offered in an analysis of the novel by Susan Ann Slotnick, “The Novel Form in the Works of David Bergelson,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 19
78, 55–171.
30. This is suggested in a severely Marxist reading of the novel by Yekheskel Dobrushin, Dovid Bergelson (Moscow: Emes, 1947), 67–69.
31. Slotnick, “The Novel Form,” 167–69.
32. For a fuller discussion of this influence, see Daniela Mantovan, “Language and Style in Nokh alemen (1913): Bergelson’s Debt to Flaubert,” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 89–112.
Part 1
Velvl Burnes
1.1
For four long years the provincial, small-town engagement dragged on between them, and ended in the following way.
She, Reb* Gedalye Hurvits’s only child Mirele, eventually returned the betrothal contract and once more took to keeping company with the crippled student Lipkis.
The rejected fiancé’s nouveau-riche father, enormously wealthy and genteelly taciturn, constantly paced about in his study with a cigarette between his lips, musing on his three great estates and wondering whether it was perhaps unbecoming for him to remember either the name of the man to whom he’d almost become related by marriage or the returned betrothal contract. Dark and tall, he was an unlearned individual who, having acquired a veneer of refinement, had, at the age of forty-eight, started regularly attending both afternoon and evening prayer services in the nearby study house.
And his mother, a squat, obese woman whose asthma obliged her to breathe hoarsely and with difficulty, like a force-fed goose, first became aware of the returned contract considerably later when, sunburned and disconsolate, she returned from abroad without having found any cure at all. Quietly and dolefully she cursed the former fiancée in virtually the same breath as that dismal Marienbad* which had frittered away her strength and spirits to no effect. Repeatedly shaking and rubbing one of her rheumatic legs, she brooded silently:
—God knew whether she’d ever live to see her son’s wedding.
One evening, when she was hosting out-of-town guests in her house, she caught sight of Mirele and the crippled student passing the open window nearby. No longer able to contain herself, she thrust her head outside, and shouted after Mirele at the top of her hoarse and breathless voice:
—He’s a pauper already, that father of hers!—and that’s the way he’ll always be! So why’s she still frisking about like a bitch in heat, that one?—Yes, her, that one right over there!
And he, the tall, handsome twenty-seven-year-old bachelor, could not endure it. Then and there he rebuked his mother:
—Hush! Hush! Just look at her.
By nature he was a patient and quiet young man, loved his nouveau-riche, genteelly reserved father, and wanted everything to be conducted as quietly and courteously in their own home as in the homes of the Gentile landowners with whom, through his father, he’d been involved in business dealings from the time he was sixteen years old. However, since he found it distasteful to remain in the shtetl and watch Mirele strolling about every evening with the crippled student, his father leased the Bitznev farm in the nearby village for him† and he moved there, not too far away, settling into the whitewashed landowner’s cottage, which shared the same courtyard as the house of the village priest.
Here in the quiet, deserted village the Gentiles called him Panicz, ‘little master,’ and doffed their caps to him, and his two younger sisters with their overweight, wheezing mother often came to visit, bringing him gifts of home-baked pastries. In his own home he always smiled at his sisters because they were being tutored by a university student and because they were still meeting her, the young woman who’d returned the betrothal contract to him. He pressed their hands and asked them:
—How are you? How are you getting on?
Here in his own home he wanted to show his mother exactly the same respect that mothers received in the homes of those landowners who ran estates they either owned or leased in the neighborhood. He always remained standing in her presence, and since courtesy dictated that he could address her in neither the familiar nor the formal mode, he always spoke to her in the third person:
—Would Mother like to drink tea? Would Mother perhaps like to lie down?
Only when, complaining about her illness and bewailing the fact that he didn’t get married, she began cursing her, the young woman who’d returned the betrothal contract, was he displeased, and pulling a somewhat sour face he rebuked her angrily but politely in the same way he would rebuke her angrily and politely in his father’s house:
—Hush! Hush! Just look at her.
He seldom returned to his parents’ home and then only when business made it necessary. There he conducted himself courteously and quietly, like a welcome guest from out of town, smiling politely as he stood opposite his sisters, or slowly lifted the little boy who ran past, placed him on the table, stroked his grubby cheeks, and asked winningly:
—What are you doing, eh? Are you running around?
He spent almost all his time there with his father in the small, perpetually smoke-filled study, discussing various commercial transactions, thinking of the dowry money—his six thousand and Mirele’s three thousand rubles, all still on deposit with the old Count of Kashperivke—and fearful that his father would soon start in again:
—Yes, those six thousand rubles still lying with the Count … What’ll become of those six thousand rubles on deposit with the old Count of Kashperivke?
At that time Reb Gedalye Hurvits, the man who was to have been his father-in-law, an absent-minded Torah scholar of distinguished lineage with little head for business, was in serious financial difficulty, and his creditors stood about in the marketplace every afternoon openly calculating what he was worth:
—It seems that he’s invested five thousand rubles in the Kashperivke woods … and three thousand in Zhorzhovke poppy seed. And what about the mill? How much did he lose in that unlucky Ternov mill after Shavuot?*
Why Reb Gedalye didn’t withdraw his three thousand rubles from the Count was impossible to fathom, and, as Velvl sat in the small study, he wanted his father to go on smoking his cigarettes in silence, to go on pacing back and forth for as long as possible, and to go on thinking as he did about the man who would have been his father-in-law:
Apparently he understood his only child very well … To this day he’d apparently not given up hope about making the match.
Once, late on a Sunday afternoon, when the whole house stood almost deserted awaiting the return of those of its occupants who’d gone out, he lingered longer than usual in that dark little study with his father. At length he heard his younger sister, who’d only just returned from her walk, taking off her corset in an adjoining room and wondering aloud about something.
—How do you like that Mirele? Can you understand her?
Obviously Mirele had met his sister on the promenade only a moment before, had stopped her there, and had asked her something, which was why here, in this half-darkened room, his heart leapt and he abruptly forgot what he’d just been discussing with his father. Perhaps three times he repeated the same pointless words, overcome with a powerful desire to join his sister in her room and question her about her encounter, but he composed himself, remained where he was in the study, and in the end asked nothing of her. Later, with other members of the household, his sister came out with him, saw him seat himself in his buggy and drive o. to spend the night on his farm. As he pulled away from the house, he merely smiled at her and nodded somewhat too vigorously. He knew that Mirele, escorted by the crippled student, was quite capable of accosting his sister on the promenade and shamelessly inquiring after him, her former fiancé:
—What’s Velvl doing at present?
—Why don’t we ever see Velvl in town?
Anything was possible with Mirele. That other incident, for example—when had it taken place? Only the other day, in company with the crippled student, she’d gone into the town’s only grocery store in the middle of the marketplace regardless of the fact that she’d recognized his buggy waiting for him outside and knew that he must be inside himself. At th
e time he’d been overcome with confusion, had wanted to get out of the shop as quickly as possible, and had asked the shopkeeper more loudly than normal:
—Please see that the account is prepared by Sunday … at least not later than Sunday.
And then, without hesitation, she’d stopped him to ask:
—Did he really think it suited him, that soft light beard he’d recently permitted himself to grow?
The crippled student, standing with someone in the doorway of the shop, wanted to show that he wasn’t in the slightest concerned that Mirele was talking to her former fiancé, so he shouted out rather too loudly:
—Who says that a through draft can be harmful? Does it say so in black and white in the medical textbooks?
As Velvl’s perfectly healthy young man’s heart began beating abnormally fast, he imagined that he did well to smile and answer with a barb:
—Some people like beards, and some do not.
Anyway, he made known that he still had his pride and was quite capable of defending himself. And the main thing … the main thing was that he’d done well to repeat loudly to the shopkeeper:
—Could he be certain that his account would be prepared by Sunday?
In this way he’d at least given her to understand that he was a busy man wholly engrossed by his farm, and cared very little for the idle chatter she engaged in every day with the crippled student.
The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) Page 5