The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (2 page)

With this withering of his work, a despondent Bergelson joined other Yiddish writers in seeking better opportunities in Moscow, officially proclaimed the Soviet capital in March 1920. From 1918 on, Yiddish literary activity had gone forward in Moscow under the umbrella of the specially created “Jewish Commissariat,” which published the Yiddish daily
Der emes
(The Truth) and the journal
Di komunistishe velt
(The Communist World). In the earliest post-Revolution days, political differences had been widely tolerated, since both Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik Yiddish activists shared the common dream of synthesizing universal with Jewish-Yiddish culture. In 1920, however, just as significant numbers of writers had relocated from Kiev, the Jewish Commissariat was replaced by the
Yevsekstia
, the Jewish Section of the Communist Party, which on 7 November 1920 relaunched
Der emes
as its central organ, introducing with it the politicized new Soviet orthographical code for Yiddish, which aimed to make the language an instrument through which the Soviet Jewish nation could develop a particularistic Soviet Jewish culture.
⁵
The
Yevsektsia
employed Bergelson as an editor of Yiddish and Russian literature, but since it was staffed by seasoned party functionaries, it demanded a considerable degree of political conformity to the dogmas of Bolshevism.

Soviet Yiddish literature consequently split into two ideologically opposed camps. The first followed the ideals of the Kiev Group, supporting the Revolution while encouraging an autonomous and polyphonic literature. In opposition, a group of “proletarian” writers strove to create what they defined as “a poster-like literature, militant in character, affirmative in tone, and accessible to simple readers,” written with a high degree of “realism.” Leading this faction were the doctrinaire journalist Moyshe Litvakov (1875–1937), and the poets Itsik Fefer (1900–1952) and Izzi Kharik (1898–1937).

The individualistic and essentially skeptical Bergelson evidently rejected the yoking of Yiddish creative endeavor to a fixed ideological agenda. In early 1921 he left the starving capital to take up the invitation of the publisher Zev-Wolf Latzky-Bertholdi (1881–1940) to join him, Der Nister (1884–1950), and Leyb Kvitko (1890–1952) in Berlin, then a hive of émigré cultural activity. His first major publication there was the appearance of his
Gezamlte verk
(
Collected Work
) in six volumes under the imprint of the firm Wostock (East). For this edition, Bergelson completed and published, in its final form, the novella
Yoysef Shor
, which emerged from the material of the aborted novel I
n fartunklte tsaytn
(
In Darkened Times
), on which Bergelson had been working on and off for nearly ten years. Though Bergelson was impressed by the sophistication of Berlin, he found the city impersonal and rootless. In a series of stories set there,
⁶
he presented the city as driven by capitalist self-interest and postwar decadence in which its émigrés suffer the dislocating effects of exile.

In his early days in Weimar Berlin, Bergelson earned well from his contributions to New York’s Yiddish socialist but anti-Communist daily
Forverts
, although his family still relied on his wife’s earnings as a typist. He continued to publish in unaffiliated journals like Warsaw’s
Moment
, which in 1921 carried his subtle story “Yordim” (The Déclassés),
⁷
but kept his options open by writing for Soviet publications: in 1922 he contributed to the Moscow journal
Shtrom
(Stream) his Civil War story “Botchko: fragment fun a roman” (Botchko: A Fragment of a Novel).
⁸
That same year Bergelson and Der Nister co-edited the first issue of
Milgroym
(Pomegranate), a highbrow illustrated periodical with a Hebrew counterpart titled
Rimon
. To the first issue of the Yiddish edition Bergelson contributed a literary-critical essay paying tribute to the young Russian-Yiddish poets and expressing regret that non-Soviet critics ignored their work, as well as a brief but powerful sketch depicting the terror of the anti-Jewish massacres of 1919–1921.
⁹
In October 1923, however, Litvakov savagely denounced
Milgroym
as “petit-bourgeois,” and both Bergelson and Der Nister resigned from its editorial board, announcing through a joint open letter in the third issue of
Shtrom
that they had done so to show solidarity with their Soviet colleagues.

By 1925 Bergelson had grown enthusiastic about the Soviet regime’s officially announced decision to settle, by the end of 1926, about half a million Jews in a still-to-be-determined region of the USSR that, it was hoped, would in time be declared an autonomous Jewish republic. Despite Zionist opposition, this plan was enthusiastically accepted by many Soviet and Western Yiddish intellectuals dazzled by the prospect of a region where Yiddish would be the official language of government, education, press, and literature. On 2 March 1926 Bergelson published in
Der emes
a letter in which he openly expressed the desire to become a committed Soviet writer. Despite having only just published two fine stories in
Forverts
, “Altvarg” (Obsolescence) in March, and “Tsvey rotskhim” (Two Murderers)
¹⁰
in April, he now switched his allegiance to New York’s pro-Communist Yiddish daily,
Frayhayt
. One of his earliest pieces there, published on 29 May 1926, was a propaganda effort entitled “Vi azoy vet oyszen dos yidishe lebn in Rusland shpeter mit etlekhe yor” (How life in Russia will look in a few years’ time). The very next day he followed this with an openly pro-Bolshevik story called “Hersh [later Hershl] Toker,”
¹¹
which was simultaneously serialized in
Der emes
with a note explaining his ideological reasons for breaking with
Forverts
. Even more significantly, he worked hard to establish the pro-Soviet journal
In shpan
(In Harness).

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.