Letteratura yiddish-russa

Dovid Bergelson, one of the most renowned and influential writers of the 1900s, was born in Ocrimovo, Ukraine, in 1884. In 1952, at the age of 68, after four years of prison, he died a victim of Stalin’s police. His work as a writer and literary man, which began with the publication in 1909 of the short story Arum Vokzal (At the Train Depot), and ended with two theatrical works, Ihk vel lebn (I Want to Live) and Printz Reuveni, written respectively in 1941 and 1942, spans a period of approximately thirty years. A rather short period, but one extraordinarily dense with dramatic events.
The progressive breakdown of the Russian empire, the dramatic and bloody revolutionary commotion of 1905 and the more historic one of 1917, are the events to which Bergelson was a direct witness in the years of his youth. In that phase of frenetic passage, the Russian society, and to an even greater extent, the Russian-Jewish society, was radically mutating its own characteristics. The Jewish population, settled in the stehtl, the village of tradition and small town with a Jewish majority, was modifying its ways of living, after massive waves of migration towards the United States, which had already initiated at the end of the eighteen hundreds, left the Jewish towns and villages empty. In the same time period, notable demographic transformations were recorded, with a progressive concentration of Jewish population in the big cities and in the big industrial centers. The progressive estrangement of religious orthodoxy and of traditional values was a consequence of these changes. The new generations were catapulted into political, social and economical turbulence, already at the threshold of modernism.
Bergelson lived immersed in these transformations; he was witness to the civil war which followed the fall of the Russian empire, and to the blood bath inflicted on Ukrainian Hebraism by Pletura and his Cossack followers (between 1917 and 1921, 1236 pogroms were counted in 530 Russian cities and towns, during which 60,000 Jews were killed). He, himself, luckily survived a pogrom, hidden in a basement, while just a meter away from the madness of the pillage, his son, Lev, was born.
In the wake of a massive intellectual emigration which included a large part of the Russian and Yiddish-Russian intellighenzia, and in consideration of the highly precarious situation, of impending danger and of poverty in the post-revolutionary years, Bergelson decided to leave Russia. He moved to Berlin in 1921, where he lived with his family, until 1933. During those years in Berlin, a series of dramatic events took place which profoundly marked Weimar’s Germany. In 1922, Walther Rathenau, the first Jew to hold the title of Minister of Foreign Affairs, was assassinate. Two financial disasters of huge proportions followed: In 1923, the dollar in Germany was quoted at 4.2 billion marcs, in 1929 a new, disastrous crash followed. The breakdown of German democracy was sanctioned in 1925 by the presidency of General Von Hindenburg. The political climate went from unstable to red-hot. German soil did not seem to be able to offer stable or even acceptable prospects to the Russian and Yiddish-Russian immigrants,who abandoned Germany in a return emigration initiating as early as 1925-26. Bergelson remained in Berlin until the last moment, witnessing the relentless rise of national-socialism. In 1933 he returned to the Soviet Union, settling in Moscow, where for a few years he alternated an intense literary activity with frequent trips within the Soviet Union. During the NEP years, the New Political Economy (1921-1935), enjoyed a relative security. Bergelson, who was crowned and protected by international fame and his choice in the pro-Soviet field, was at the center of the Yiddish-Soviet cultural life for about seven years. In 1941, after a national-socialist attack of the Soviet Union, Bergelson,as one of the founders of the Antifascist Committee, along with Shlomo Michaels, the great actor of the Yiddish theatre (Gosset) of Moscow and Ilia Ehrenburg, famous Jewish journalist and writer of the Russian language, drew up an appeal in support of the Soviet government in the fight against national-socialism which was transmitted on radio all over the world. The terrible years of world conflict followed, with the deportation at Tashkent, together with the greater part of Yiddish-speaking intellectuals. Back in Moscow, Bergelson witnessed the definitive dismantlement of the Jewish institutions, from the closing of the Yiddish newspaper Der Emes(The Truth), to the breakup of the antifascist committee in 1948 and the assassination, in the same year, of Shlomos Michaels. The arrests of intellectuals, writers and poets of the Yiddish language followed; on January 12, 1949, Bergelson was arrested by the secret police of the KGB and deported to a concentration camp. On the 12th of August, 1952 - he would have turned 68 on that day - he was executed along with other Yiddish writers and intellectuals.

The existential parable of Bergelson played an important role in his becoming a reporter of the change, of the mutations, the time’s most refined interpreter of the transition. The instability, the uncertainty of detachment, the traumatic advancement on the edge of history between a world which no longer exists and one which does not yet exist, are emblematic existential states of the period and at the same time powerful metaphors of an ineluctable end in the writings of Dovid Bergelson.
This author, whom the critics of the times defined as being the heir of Cechov, an impressionist of glacial winter colors and the limpid clarity of a monachal news reporter, is one of the great innovators of the Yiddish literary language.
But let’s see how we can describe the modernism of Dovid Bergelson.

A writer of atmospheres
In a volume which appeared in 1946, Nachman Maizel, critic, editor and Yiddish journalist, among the most productive of the first two decades of the 1900s, examines the literary works of Dovid Bergelson, who in youth had been his friend.
In his essay, Maizel reveals the extraordinary dynamics of the geneses of Bergelson’s novels. Bergelson wrote very slowly and dilated the creative process for years before giving birth to one of his novels or short stories. The starting point always began from the sensitive perceptions of an atmosphere. It was as if the atmosphere went right through him -- he could feel the thickness, the density of the air, the smell, the thermal and visual quality of the season. And within that atmosphere which he kept inside himself for a long period of time, he let the figures, characters and creatures take form, and they would accompany him for years, unraveling their imaginary tales which through time became, for his friends and for the author himself, the witnesses and the audience of his writings, the contour and the consistency of real lives.
In a letter to literary critic Shlomo Niger (July 8, 1910) Bergelson writes in regards to the atmosphere of his stories: “(...) in the long run, it has such an effect on my mood that it becomes impossible to sustain. The strange torment that rises from that atmosphere becomes the characteristic color of the world which surrounds the protagonist of the story. My aim at that point is to weave that atmosphere into the life and events which happen around him and, one could say, within him.” The incomparable realization of colorless, tormenting atmospheres, of blinding lights, of landscapes of the soul and winters of the sentiment, was probably due to this unusual procedure. The lexical choices of Bergelson tend to create a vision which recall a painting of precise details, often unusual details though they may be everyday. But it does not have to do with, for example, Dutch Flemish painting. It rather calls to mind certain expressionist paintings, dense with atmosphere and emotions. The constant repetition of terms, expressions, even entire sentences strengthens the sense of homogeneity -- a stylistic instrument, repetition, which creates a sense of an infinite, static circle. It would, nevertheless, be reductive to consider Bergelson a creator of atmospheres.

Language and writing
From a contrastive reading which uses as a reference point the language of the “classics” of modern Yiddish literature -- Mendele Moykher Sforim I. Lamed Peretz or Sholem Aleichem -- emerges the unequivocal originality and strong innovative substance of Bergelson’s writings. He radically transforms Yiddish, a language of clear oral connotation; one has only to think of the Yiddish of Sholem Aleichem, rich with a gushing vocality, an unrestrained and captivating verbosity, a language of sonorous gestures that, like in the Russian Skaz, tends towards characterization, progressive digression and the lively texture of the spoken word. In the novels of Bergelson, this very language becomes an eminently literary language; a rarefied, artificial and, above all, remote product; a Yiddish which is no longer voice but seems only to send back an echo of the voice.
The Yiddish of Bergelson is a revision of the still emphatic Yiddish of the illuminists, purified of every folkloristic and popular stratification, distilled in a sober yet sophisticated form -- elegant, full of shading, whether describing the decline of the shtetl or the vulgar world of the new rich, the decline of religion or the secret thoughts of a single man.
The rigorous structure of the ductus, its completely idiosyncratic anomalous syntax mark a new censure in regards to the vernacular language. Bergelson also places the reader in a rigid corset; he imposes attention and a strict distance from his object. The writing is sometimes difficult, alienating.
In many of his stories and in his most well-known novel, Noch alemen the author utilizes an indirect style -- in more precise terms, an indirect, free speech, spoken in the third person, which separates the speaker from what is said; almost as though the enunciation of a phrase were the archival articulation of an archaic text.

The Novel
Distance is not the only characteristic of the language of Mirele, the female protagonist of the novel Nohk alemen. The language is reduced to the essential -- atrophic, punctuated by silences, as if continuously referring to a fragmentation, to a loss of a language close to aphasia, to the impossibility itself of communicating. A careful reading of Noch alemen reveals an unexpected aspect of modernism. Not only is it the first Yiddish novel with a woman heroine, but it is also the first Yiddish novel of alienation, of existential unrest. Each of its protagonists is an isolated monad. Their language is often faltering, interrupted in the middle of a thought, as if caught by an unexplainable reluctance. It’s a language which falls back into itself before even being expressed.
Gdajle Hurwitz begins to talk to her daughter, Mirele, to tell her something very important, but she stops at the first word, she’s distracted, she reverts back, she’s silent. Her mother Gitele, closed in an impenetrable silence, incarnates the nearly total atrophy of the spoken word, a renunciation without any remedy. Mirele herself seems to continually run against the barrier of words, which, instead of serving as vehicles of meaning seem to preclude the possibility. Her speech is filled with monosyllables, half-phrases, caught between the enunciated and a thought still in search of a form. The reader passes, without being aware, from a “referred” and therefore objective reality, to the subjective vision of the protagonist, without any kind of mediation. This procedure which other authors of the 1900s have in common, from Dostojevski to Joyce, allows the reader to slip into the psyche of the character, to see through his eyes.
A static nature and extreme subjectivity are key concepts in the reading of this novel of Cechovian atmosphere, but so are the minute realism of the description of the everyday events, the localization of the story in a small, anonymous town, therefore giving it greater symbolic valor, the visionary realization of a nature that has finished to be nature and has become a metaphor of the soul. For this reason Noch alemen has become a modern masterpiece, whose reference point, on the one side, is an intellectual modernism very close to us, and on the other, the Hebrew humanitarianism.
Humanitarianism, already present in his first writings, cohabitates with the political commitment of the writer; Bergelson will explicitly make reference to it in his last works, the two plays Ich vel lebn and Printz Reuveni, in which, as in his appeal of 1941, it will become the last barrier against barbarism.

The group of Kiev
His first short stories come back systematically, returned to sender by editors who don’t enjoy risking, and accompanied by comments oscillating between a veiled admiration and the conviction that those texts were “too modern” for readers of the Yiddish language. By the age of 20, Bergelson had already written two of the stories that remain among his best known, without having been able to get them published. The second, Arum Vokzal, which had just been refused by a Yiddish magazine of Kiev, came to the light in Warsaw, thanks to the intervention of a group of the author’s friends who were determined to publish it, even at their own expense, if necessary. Those enterprising young men’s achievement, celebrated by the group’s getting good and drunk, marked the beginning of the dazzling literary career of Dovid Bergelson. The short story received enthusiastic reviews; Bergelson was noted as the rising star of modern fiction in the Yiddish language.
In the year that followed, the circle of friends was transformed into a group of literary men, writers, poets, literary critics and editors. The heated discussions led to continued meetings at Bergelson’s home, during which the group would “work” on new literature in the Yiddish language. Bergelson had kept the habit of reading what he was writing to his audience of writers and poets, modernists of verse, of prosody and of Yiddish prose. The meetings took place for a few years and accompanied the entire writing of the novel Noch alemen. The big, high class house of Kiev became a literary hotbed. The best minds in the Ukraine of the Yiddish language - Der Nister, Leib Kvitko, Peretz Markish, Jechezkel Dobrushin, Dovid Hofshtein - who were part of Bergelson’s circle, became known as the “Group of Kiev” a few years later.
Like Nachman Mayzel wrote in his memorialistic works, the history of those literary productions is also the history of a generation of writers who were drunk with liberty, caught up in the euphoria of a society in profound transformation, in the most fervid and heated period of Russian history. Those miraculous years between 1907 and 1920-21, besides being testimony to the Bolshevist revolution, the pogroms and civil wars, and bringing the emancipation of the minorities and juridical equality of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, also gave life to the most massive and extraordinary literary production in the Yiddish language of the century and saw a flourish of all the arts without precedence.
Far-reaching projects were conceived in Bergelson’s home, among which the first anthologies of modern Yiddish literature: the miscellaneous Eygns [Ours] (Kiev 1918, 1920) and Oyfgang [Ascent] (Kiev 1919), milestones of Yiddish literary history which marked a moment of passage and intense modernization. Not only did Bergelson draw to him an ever increasing number of intellectuals, for many he was a catalyst of creative energies and a trait d’union between intellectuals, editors and the new world of Yiddish print. Also, one of his admirable abilities was that of discovering and encouraging new literary talents. To him we owe the debut of one of the greatest poets of this language, Kadya Molodowsky, who published her first lyrics in the Eygns collection (Vol 2, Kiev 1920).
One of the rare testimonies left from those reunions, from that laboratory of ideas and literature directed by Bergelson, is an open letter written to Dovid Bergelson in 1940 by the Yiddish writer Der Nister: “First of all, I learned the rapport with literature from you.”

Daniela M. Kromer