Where the Jews Aren't

by Masha Gessen

  3

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  Bergelson came of age in a Jewish cultural world framed by the arguments of Dubnow and his contemporaries. He found himself in Odessa in 1916. Dubnow had left the city a decade earlier, but his friend Bialik was still there, in body if not in spirit—his heart was already in Palestine. Still, Bergelson and Bialik became fast friends, and Bialik was part of Bergelson’s wedding party. “Tsipeleh,” Bialik said, addressing the bride in his speech, “don’t give him to the Bolsheviks.”1 This was either the end of 1917 or the beginning of 1918;2 the Bolsheviks had already overturned the democratic provisional government and instituted what they called the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” but Jews in Odessa could still joke about them.

  Bergelson was getting married at the relatively old age of thirty-two. The bride’s name betrayed the fact that her parents did not speak Russian; in that language Tsipe Kutsenogaya means “lame chick.” In fact she was young, blue-eyed, and anything but lame: she was strong enough to see the writer through the second half of his life.

  Then the pogroms started. Not that they had ever stopped. Still, the Jews had not seen brutality on this scale in nearly four centuries. During the civil war of 1918–22, the different entities that called themselves the White Army, each led by its own general, attacked the Jews for their perceived support of the Bolsheviks and disloyalty to the czar. The self-proclaimed Ukrainian national army, commanded by Symon Petlyura, attacked the Jews for being Jews. The anarchists, led by Nestor Makhno, engaged in random violence, as did a long list of what were essentially roaming gangs. In all, more than two thousand pogroms were carried out in the three years following the Bolshevik revolution, killing nearly two hundred thousand Jews and leaving half a million homeless.3

  Bergelson had lost his vigilance at the wrong time. His young wife was pregnant. He decided to leave Odessa and contrived to take Tsipe out of the city, to her home shtetl, Gaisin, outside of Vinnitsa. He himself then went to Kyiv, promising to return before the baby came. The promise must have rung fantastical, if not false, from the beginning: in a land where new borders appeared and old ones shifted every day, separations had a way of becoming permanent.

  Yiddish life in wartime Kyiv was more active than ever. In January 1918 Ukraine had passed a law allowing minorities to form autonomous governments with broad rights, including taxation. For the next two years, even as Ukraine kept changing hands, an effort at developing a Jewish national autonomy continued. Within this effort, Bergelson took on editorial posts one after another, running short-lived and occasionally imaginary journals and fleeting cultural organizations. Bergelson’s son, Lev, was born in August, the month of his own birth, in Gaisin, during a pogrom. Traveling there was out of the question: a Jew journeying by rail could not expect to live.

  Bergelson arranged for a Ukrainian peasant named Petro to go to Gaisin, buy a horse and cart, load Tsipe and the three-month-old baby into it, and travel the endless 150 miles to Kyiv. Tsipe was under strict instructions not to speak whenever someone who fancied himself king of the road stopped the cart to check its contents; her blond hair and blue eyes allowed her to be passed off as Petro’s wife only as long as she did not utter a single heavily accented word in Ukrainian. It was a good thing the baby had not yet acquired language.

  Decades later, asked to write an article about his father, Lev began with a lament: “When I think back to my earliest childhood…I can…hear the snorting of horses, the creaking of carts, the rattle of train wheels, and whistles of locomotives….These pictures of the distant past settled in layers on later events in my long life, which I also see now as a long string of migrations from one city to another, from one country to another, associated each time with separating myself from a familiar environment, from friends and relatives, and, finally, from my beloved father.”4

  “A long string of migrations” is the Jew’s legacy. What Lev didn’t remember was that the first major move of his life placed him by his father’s side, and his father was living through one of the happiest times of his life. He was at the center of things, a sort of minister of Jewish affairs, running the Kultur-Lige, a cultural empire that was, it seemed, the epitome of Dubnow’s autonomist vision, or at least its cultural part. The founding declaration of the Kultur-Lige linked Yiddish culture to democracy and proclaimed it a “forward-looking” culture. It was democratic because it spoke the language of the masses, and it was the culture of the future because it was secular.5

  In addition to Bergelson’s old partners from the Kyiv Group, the Kultur-Lige included another writer who would travel on parallel paths with Bergelson for the rest of the two men’s lives. Perets Markish had come to Kyiv soon after he finished his service in the imperial army. He was now a prolific poet; Hofshteyn and Kvitko lauded his writing, though it left Bergelson pointedly cold. Still, the Kultur-Lige took into its fold not only every agent of Yiddish cultural production Bergelson could identify but also, at least nominally, dozens of schools, libraries, theaters, and universities.6 Moments of pure joy fed by great ambition would, however, give way to despair. Wave after wave of Jewish refugees from the pogroms swept into the city. No number of magazines and plays could feed them or shelter them. In fact, Bergelson and his overactive circle could not be sure of feeding or sheltering themselves for much longer. In 1920, the Bolsheviks took final control of Ukraine. By May of that year, though the work continued, the activists of the Kultur-Lige were spending their time talking about ways to escape. Bergelson wrote a letter addressed to “all friends of Yiddish art and culture in America.” He sent it to friends he had lost to that continent and to others, persons he had never seen.

  Amidst shockingly inhuman conditions, among ruined towns and villages razed, drowned in blood, and now obliterated, in the small desolate island of Kiev lives a small exhausted group—a group of Jewish writers, sculptors, painters and poets who, in great anguish and pain, drag out what is left of their lives over here….Will you provide this exhausted group of artists with visas and the material resources to travel across to America?7

  They waited for a response through the summer; none came. There must have been days of calm and even joy, when chestnut trees bloomed all over Bergelson’s beloved Kyiv, when the nights were warm and food seemed, if not plentiful, then at least within reach, in a land that was bursting with fruit and grain. Autumn brought fear of the impending cold and the hunger they knew the winter would bring. Tsipe fell ill with typhoid fever. Almost as soon as she recovered, a group of writers with Bergelson at its center crowded into a cattle car outfitted with a wood-burning stove and traveled north to Moscow. The five-hundred-mile journey through the freezing winter took ten days.8

  The Bolshevik government in Moscow was just then in the process of putting its Jewish house in order, screening out the Zionists and the Hebraists for their predominantly anti-Bolshevik stand and pulling the Yiddishists into the fold. Bialik and about a dozen other prominent Hebrew writers left the country, narrowly escaping death or jail.9 Dubnow, while not a Zionist, was a historian and a philosopher, and thus doubly inconvenient; he left. Markish moved to Warsaw. But Bergelson, for the first time in his life, seized his position on the side that had the power: he was a secular Yiddishist who believed in the organizing power of the word. He was granted housing, in an apartment repossessed from a bourgeois family, who most likely continued to occupy one or two rooms in the flat. The Bergelson family’s territory was a single room, grand, empty, and unheated.10 His new job title was Yiddish editor for the Yevsektsia (the name was short for “Jewish Section”), the Jewish committee of the Communist Party. He tried to start another literary magazine.11

  The Bolsheviks’ internationalist rhetoric, the job title, the rare privilege of a whole room notwithstanding, Bergelson’s instincts told him that this time he should keep moving. A poet friend working at the Lithuanian embassy fixed him up with a Lithuanian passport and, less than a year after arriving, the Bergelsons left Moscow. He stationed his family in a
small village outside of Kovno, the new Lithuanian capital, since Wilna was now a part of Poland. He then set off on a reconnaissance trip to Berlin—no easy task, since the way to Berlin lay through Poland, with which Lithuania had severed diplomatic ties. He had to travel by sea; once again it took him many days to traverse a short distance. In Berlin, he found a lively Yiddish literary scene—and a publisher, who was ready with an advance.12 Bergelson returned to Lithuania to collect his wife and child and undertook another arduous journey by boat; all three were terribly seasick. “Seriously and firmly we settled in Berlin, and spent thirteen happy years there,” his son would write decades later. “Yet, it seems to me, we always regarded ourselves as temporary and not particularly welcome residents.”13 Bergelson had been living in other people’s houses and other people’s cities for more than twenty years; he had learned that home was always elsewhere.

  But Berlin was the center of the universe. Its literary market was growing almost as fast, and as obscenely, as the German mark was falling. Several publishing houses specialized in Jewish literature. After the Great War, Berliners seemed hungry to read anything and everything, and the publishers counted on even greater demand than they had a right to. They figured, for example, that a vast readers’ market awaited them in Russia, where the Bolsheviks had fairly well annihilated book publishing, and they reprinted Russian and Jewish-Russian classics in Russian and other languages.14 After five years of running for his life, Bergelson suddenly discovered that he had become a classic writer: a Berlin publisher put out a six-volume edition of his collected works.15

  Everyone was coming to Berlin. Bialik was already there, as was his friend Dubnow. Der Nister and Kvitko, members of the Kyiv Group, came. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a relief organization, supported the poorer immigrants with grants.16 Anyone who did not have American dollars was poor, growing hundreds of times poorer every day: marks were counted by the hundreds, then by the millions, then billions, until, finally, a loaf of bread cost a trillion German marks. In addition, everyone was homeless in Berlin; refugees from Germany’s own war and from the Russian Revolution swelled the number of city residents so much that the local authorities instituted an apartment-rationing system. A rental contract required official permission, which was granted with difficulty and revoked with ease.17

  The Bergelsons moved from one small, unheated, and unsecure Berlin apartment to another for a couple of years, until they finally managed to settle in a garden house located on the property of Tsipe’s wealthier relatives.18 Bergelson returned to a comfortable routine familiar from long-ago days of relative peace and stability. He wrote in solitude in the mornings, behind a desk littered with pages and adorned with an overflowing ashtray and a chocolate bar, from which he took his reward when he deemed a page well written. He played the violin to relax, favoring lyrical melodies in a minor key. In the afternoons, he entertained artistic friends. Some of them were passing through on their way from somewhere to someplace, in the great Jewish resettlement of the interbellum; some belonged to the groups of young aspiring Jewish literary types who made the rounds of all the great men who now lived in Berlin.19 In the evenings, Bergelson often held court at the smoke-filled Romanisches Café, where every émigré faction—the Zionists, the Bundists, the Yiddishists—had its own marble table. He listened to other people’s poetry, played chess, which he had recently grown to love, and made his argument.20

  His cause, as ever, was modern Yiddish literature, a schizophrenic construction that might have existed fully in his imagination only, for this was the sole place where the austerity of modernist writing grew naturally out of the chaos of shtetl life. His opponents were Markish and an old rival of his from Kyiv, Moyshe Litvakov, who was now a leader of the Yevsektsia in Moscow; both argued for a Yiddish literature divorced from the past, a literature for which Yiddish was only a language, whatever that would mean. Here was something Dubnow, who saw in Yiddish the promise of continuity between shtetl life and city culture, between the past and the future, had not foreseen: an effort to keep the language while deleting the tradition and history behind it. Bergelson minced no words when writing about this Soviet stance: “Jewish communists in Russia decide that there are no longer Jews in the world,” he wrote in the American daily Forverts in March 1923. He accused Soviet Jews of “scratching off their own Jewishness until blood starts to run.”21

  Starting in December 1924, Bergelson presided over his own Jewish émigré cafe, the Sholem Aleichem Club, opened with the help of some friends and Aaron Singalovsky, the leader of Rehabilitation Through Training, a Jewish educational movement. Housed in a converted apartment, the café drew crowds with its acclaimed Ashkenazi kitchen, evening lectures, and concerts, including, it was said, one where Bergelson and Albert Einstein got out their violins and played together.22

  Meanwhile, Bergelson’s fellow refugees were growing wary of Berlin. German cabinets kept failing, resigning almost as soon as they took office, while the economy went from bad to ridiculous. “I am free, I am working; daily I receive page proofs from various publishers. Am I happy?” Dubnow wrote in his personal journal on the first anniversary of his arrival in Berlin. “No. It is impossible to be calm while breathing the air of anxiety. I am observing the ruins of Europe crumble ever more, burying the ideals and dreams of a recent past…extinguishing any hope for a European peace. As seductive as the promise of calm was in the spring of 1922, it has dissolved by the spring of 1923.”23 Half a year later, Dubnow made this entry: “It has come to this. Berlin is rehearsing a street pogrom, complete with the beatings of Jews. Yesterday the price of a loaf of bread went up from 25 to 140 billion. Crowds started attacking bread stores while in the Jewish neighborhoods they beat up Jewish passersby. Germany is facing a crisis: it is going to drown along with all of its culture, either in a sea of black or in a sea of red.”24 The most remarkable part of this diary entry is the date: autumn 1923, a full ten years before the “sea of black” officially arrived in Berlin.

  In 1924, Bialik moved to Tel Aviv, taking his publishing house, Dvir, with him. Der Nister and Kvitko edged in the opposite direction, relocating to Hamburg for now, to work for the Soviet trade mission. Markish moved to Moscow in 1926. Bergelson stayed put for the moment—as did Dubnow—perhaps because both enjoyed the constant affirmation of local publishers, who were reprinting their earlier work, and the influx of cash from America in the form of commissions for articles.

  Writing for the wealthy New York Yiddish daily Forverts was the best assignment going in Berlin. With its circulation of two hundred thousand,25 it could afford its editor Ab Cahan’s fascination with the Berlin Yiddish scene. Cahan kept a full-time bureau chief in the city, an Odessa-born economist, and regularly scouted out writers to adorn his literature page. An offer from Cahan promised salvation. “For the first time in my life, I have been seduced by the offer of money,” wrote Dubnow, whom Cahan had approached in January 1923. “The promise is of a minimum of 25 dollars per article, which, at today’s exchange rate, is a million German marks. This could actually save me from the apartment terror: I could purchase part of a villa or start making million-mark payments to landlords, which would keep their ire down and I could do my own scholarly work then, for it is impossible to work atop a volcano.”26 Soon enough, he did buy an apartment of his own, set up his library as he wanted it, and settled in to work.

  Bergelson’s anxiety, on the other hand, rose along with his expectations. He pestered Cahan with long letters, complaining that the American held pieces too long and paid too little. “All of this would be acceptable if the times were different,” he wrote in May 1924. “I would simply ask myself: what do you want from Ab Cahan? Ab Cahan must consider the interests of his paper first. If he publishes me only once, or at best, twice a month, it is a sign that the paper doesn’t need me three or four times a month. But I could only think this way if my family and I were not experiencing hunger. It is very different when one finds oneself in the loathsom
e, inhuman situation of permanent hunger. One then begins to become upset. One begins to think: even if I were only a small cog in a piece of machinery, I would still deserve to be fed. If Forverts needs me only on special occasions, then I should be valued no less than a typesetter, no less than a…bookkeeper [or] a janitor who cleans Forverts’s offices.” Bergelson might have exaggerated the depth of his despair, but he conveyed the level of his fear.27

  His belligerence paid off: he got a regular salary. Starting in August 1925, the weekly pay was a respectable forty dollars. But the writer’s relationship with Cahan never found its footing. Conventional wisdom in Yiddish-writing circles held that Cahan did not need Bergelson at his paper; he needed his name. Cahan claimed, privately, to be a fan of Bergelson’s writing, but in publishing practice he was hypercritical and conservative. He held the short stories for weeks and months on end. He used Bergelson more as a journalist than as a writer of belles lettres, which meant the spotlight was Cahan’s, not Bergelson’s.

  If one had to sum up Cahan’s complicated political views, one might say he was a prescient anti-Communist socialist. He had published John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World—but, oddly for a Yiddish-language publisher, he parted ways with the Soviets on the subject of assimilation: he preached Americanization just when the idea of Jewish autonomy had great traction with the Bolsheviks. Early on, Bergelson wrote virulently anti-Bolshevik pieces for Forverts, attacking the Yevsektsia with the sort of deadly precision characteristic of one who had known and perhaps loved the men he was attacking. Cahan never acknowledged the importance of Bergelson’s contribution to the debate, and Bergelson grew to resent him and, eventually, to regret his own stories. He could not afford to align himself so completely with someone who refused responsibility for his survival.