The Stories of David Bergelson: Yiddish Short Fiction from Russia

by David Bergelson, Golda Werman (Translator), Aharon Appelfeld (Foreword by)

Overview

The writings of David Bergelson--virtually unknown to readers in the United States--are now available in this exciting collection. Composed of two short stories and a novella, this volume brings to life Bergelson's rich, elegiac prose. Golda Werman's highly literate translation perfectly captures his elusive literary style.

Bergelson's writings evoke the declining world of small-town Eastern European Jews. His world captures the dreariness of the uncommitted life. His characters are cast adrift in a society whose traditions are coming unhinged by powerful modernist forces. In her Introduction Werman offers readers an engaging and tragic portrait of Bergelson, who was arrested on orders from Stalin and died in a prison camp in 1952.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815604020
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	12/28/1996
Series:	Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music and Art Series
Pages:	157
Product dimensions:	5.57(w) x 8.49(h) x 0.63(d)
Lexile:	990L (what's this?)

About the Author

David Bergelson was born in the Ukraine in 1884, the youngest child in a Hasidic family. While his earliest writings were in Hebrew and Russian, by 1907 he used Yiddish exclusively. He later became convinced that communism was the main hope for mankind and worked actively for that party the rest of his life.

Golda Werman is the author of Milton and Midrash and translator of several books including The Dybbuk and Other Writings by S. Ansky.

Editorial Reviews

Innovative Yiddish stylist Bergelson, not widely known to English-language readers, writes of the declining world of small-town Eastern European Jews, capturing the dreariness of the uncommitted life. His characters suffer from despair and depression as a result of the loosening ties of the shtetl (small village) and religion. In "Remnants," for instance, Beyla Henya does not speak. Poor, pockmarked, and ugly, she is trapped in a loveless marriage, yet she does not let the harsh circumstances destroy her. Instead, she extricates herself from her situation and finally is able to marry a respectable man as silent as she. In "Impoverished," the gentle silence of the former story is now oppressive and harsh as two sister act cruelly to their blind father. Werman's subtle translation brings a fine storyteller to light. Recommended for libraries with international and Jewish studies collection.Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.

Library Journal

Bergelson (18841952) was a Russian Jewish writer whose hopeful embrace of Communism persuaded him briefly to write according to the dictates of Socialist Realism, and whose subsequent disillusionment stimulated his passionate commitment to the dissemination and survival of Yiddish culture, leading to his arrest and murder in a Stalinist prison camp. His fiction—stark and pessimistic in the extreme—has heretofore appeared only piecemeal, in various story anthologies. The three works collected here, all written early in Bergelson's career, bring a grave and elegiac tone (very nicely translated) and a keen understanding of the psychology of alienation and despair to memorable portrayals of a homely woman's determined pursuit of her right to happiness ("Remnants"), a father and his adult daughters who seem to mourn themselves and one another even as they live ("Impoverished"), and a suicide that produces surprising changes in the lives of those left behind (the novella "Departing"). Intense and uncompromising fiction from one of the great, neglected Yiddish storytellers.

Kirkus Reviews