The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (6 page)

The capacity of the novel’s allusive, indirect discourse to create a polyphony of voices that make it difficult if not impossible to determine not only who is speaking but what is being said—and the implications of what is supposedly said—is well illustrated in the ambiguity of Reb Gedalye’s dying words. These are not directly heard but are reported by a third party:

Holding his glass of whiskey, the rabbi spoke to those assembled about Reb Gedalye of blessed memory:

—This is what happened … Right at the end, this is what happened: he said to me, Avreml, he said to me, why are you weeping? … Foolish fellow: if I felt I were leaving anyone behind me, I’d make the journey there as readily as going to a dance.

All those who stood round heard and were silent. Only one man, an emaciated, timid sycophant who was unemployed, edged unobtrusively closer to someone at the back and smiled foolishly in consequence of the liquor he’d drunk. Wanting to make some allusion to the many young men whom Mirel had always dragged around with her as she wandered over the shtetl and to the fact that she’d not come down to the shtetl here after her father’s death, he remarked snidely:

—Evidently Reb Gedalye knew his own daughter, eh? Evidently he knew very well what she was. [4.2]

This remark is puzzling, because its meaning is not straightforward. Strictly speaking, Reb Gedalye does “leave someone behind”: his daughter Mirel, who should be his heir. But Mirel is both unwilling and unable to inherit anything, whether material or spiritual, from her father. Her estrangement from her parents is clear even before her marriage, and intensifies after it. Does Reb Gedalye recognize on his deathbed that his daughter is as brutally unfeeling as the nasty bystander suggests to the rabbi’s listeners? Is Reb Gedalye mourning because his name will never be perpetuated through a male heir? Are these in truth Reb Gedalye’s last words, or are they a pious fabrication retailed by the rabbi? The fact that his purported remark fits any or all of these possibilities is part of the purpose of the narrative discourse, which subtly transforms ambiguous individual remarks into thematic statements. To accept only one of these possible meanings would restrict the implication of what has been said, and would make obvious and one-sided what the narrative insists is complex, indirect, and diffuse. Reb Gedalye’s ambivalent remark moves the particular to the general and the personal to the communal. The house he lives in becomes a metaphor for the society of which he was once a leading representative; it has no heir to take it over but remains deserted and desolate because the world it inhabits is dead. The polyphonic narrative discourse thus transforms the purported dying words of one individual into a metaphorical sigh of regret for the death of an entire world and way of life. The vision of a “dead city” expressed through the voice of the poet Herz can be read as a lament for the sociopolitical stagnancy that appeared to have taken permanent hold in Russia after the failure of the 1905 revolution. It may also be said to define the essential pessimism of Bergelson’s oeuvre. The characters crowding his fiction remain as perplexing to themselves as to others. Their speech and actions are never unambiguous: speech is often an intrusion upon more eloquent silence; actions are generally reactions to circumstances over which they have no control. In Bergelson’s early work, no particular actions are privileged above others; the events of his fiction, sometimes banal, sometimes violent, are presented with equal emphasis.

To articulate this elusiveness, Bergelson developed a style characterized by the choric repetition of set phrases and sentences and the general subordination of direct to reported speech, a mode resembling the use of the free indirect discourse devised by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) for
Madame Bovary
, which appeared in Russian translation in 1858, one year after it was first published in French.
³²
What is said by an individual character and what is observed by the third-person narrative voice frequently become indistinguishable, a process that Bergelson advances by his repeated use of the passive voice to cloud the possibility of ascribing judgments exclusively to the character from whom they ostensibly emanate.

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 T
he 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, 1978, 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.