They hate scholars, ridicule of scholars would give them pleasure, it was sure to be a success - the tragic dream-world of Der Nister

A month or two ago, I had not heard of David Bergelson. No, I had, because I had read about him as a victim of Stalin's final attempt to destroy Soviet Yiddish culture. But as a writer, his name meant nothing to me.

It was while reading around in Joachim Neugroschel's anthology of Yiddish fiction, No Star Too Beautiful that Bergelson's stories caught my attention - Bergelson stood out. So I started looking around, and one book followed another. He wasn't the only one, although most of the writers I liked best were predictable - I. B. Singer and so on.

A writer who I don't exactly like but who definitely stood out - who is in his own category - is Der Nister, The Hidden One. The Neugroschel book includes the story "Beheaded" (1920), which I will try to summarize:

Adam taps his head. It opens, and his Comedian emerges. Another Comedian comes along, with Adam's double. Adam drives them all away - he has to wait for the Master. The Master arrives, and leads Adam and his disciples to the giant ladder with rungs made of heads and skulls. Everyone has his head chopped off, so it can be added to the ladder. The headless Master then tells the story of the living bridge, which served faithfully but succumbed to despair in its old age. An angel came to the bridge, and told it the story of the Universal Bridge, and how it was tempted by Satan, and how later bridges suffer for the weakness of the Universal Bridge. The End.

I don't have the story handy, and have probably made some mistakes. It's hard to remember how it goes, because it makes no sense. I mean, it's completely crazy. It's not an allegory, with an X=Y correspondence, but rather an attempt to create a new and original symbolic structure. Der Nister's visions have links to the Kabbalah and Hasidic mysticism, but they're not derivative. What, then, is a reader supposed to do with something so strange and private?

I've read only one other story by Der Nister, "Under a Fence: A Revue" (1929), from the Ashes Out of Hope collection. It's one of the saddest things I've ever read, Der Nister's farewell to his art. Like David Bergelson, Der Nister willingly returned to the Soviet Union to be a writer, to serve the state. That he thought his esoteric work would be welcome seems so naïve, but this was just before Socialist Realism became doctrine.

In "Under a Fence" - well, I won't try to summarize it, quite. There is a scholar who is in love with a circus rider. In a dream-like sequence, the "dustman" appears to the scholar, and drags him and his straw-daughter around town and to the circus, where the scholar becomes a performer himself, staging mock trials of his pupils and former teacher:

"'And,' the dustman said, 'the clowns would have plenty of opportunity for humor and ridicule. The theme was current, and the people would love it. They hate scholars, ridicule of scholars would give them pleasure, it was sure to be a success.'"

In the end, though, the scholar himself is on trial, and the dream-world is replaced by the real-world, I guess, the scholar broken, his life emptied of meaning.

This was published in a Soviet Yiddish periodical! The amazing thing is that Der Nister survived until 1950 (he died in a prison hospital). Der Nister apparently abandoned his symbolist work after this story, and turned to approved forms of realism. I've read good things about his later novel, The Family Mashber, which does not sound especially realistic. Maybe he pulled one over on the Soviets. Or maybe he really did work his way to a new artistic voice.

I'm not going to pursue the issue, though, not now. I have read all but two of the Yiddish books that I had originally planned to read way back in January, yet somehow my list of interesting Yiddish books is just as long as ever. So I have to start drawing some lines, retreating back to the 19th century a bit. So this may be it for Der Nister, and who else - the Singers, I. I. Trunk, Itzik Manger, and many others. If anyone wants to do a Yiddish Modernism project, I beg you, let me know. I'm avidly interested, even if, as with Der Nister, I barely understand it.

With great sadness, with longing - the Berlin stories of David Bergelson

The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (2005) is an attractive little City Lights collection of eight stories. The indefatigable Joachim Neugroschel is the translator and anthologizer. It's a tiny book - 116 petite pages - and a fine collection of Bergelson, with a bit more variety of mood then some of the other sources of Bergelson stories.

"The Boarding House of the Three Sisters" is, for example, a wry comedy. Three young women run a Berlin boarding house. Two have husbands who are, um, elsewhere. All three are, frankly, hotties. Dang fool men pay excessive rent because, because, you know, what if -. One boarder even confides to another that it's all a trick, that the husbands are here in Berlin.

"By now it is late. The two boarders separate and go to bed very sadly, but with latent hopes that perhaps... yes... perhaps... perhaps they are wrong. The two men draw up their accounts of how much the boarding house can cost them so far, and both of them muse about who will do something either now or later on..."

Mostly, I criticize writers for vagueness, but here it is psychologically acute. Those poor fools.

"For 12,000 Bucks He Fasts Forty Days: Scenes of Berlin" is a response or recasting, or, really, a Judaizing, of Kafka's "The Hunger Artist" (1922). It's all in good humor, too, except for the part about the destruction of Europe. Weird thing, this is the second Yiddish relative of "The Hunger Artist" I've read recently. I'll save the other for tomorrow.

The catastrophe of World War I and the Russian Revolution is in the background of every story in the collection. That's why Bergelson's characters (and Bergelson) are in Berlin. They're mostly refugees. These stories are the Jewish cousins of Nabokov's Berlin stories, set amongst the exiled Russians, except that Bergelson is not such a happy fellow.

"Two Murderers," for example. One murderer is a landlady's dog, one is a Cossack leader. They have both done horrible things. At the end of the story, they reach an understanding:

"Now the two of them were alone in the kitchen - Zarembo and Tell. One sat on a chair at the table, the other lay on the small throw rug, resting his head on his extended front paws. There was silence all around them. Both of them were peering into each other's eyes with great sadness, with longing."

Maybe that doesn't seem like much on its own. Knowing what the murderers have done, though - it's chilling.

The longest, and perhaps best, story is "Among Refugees." A young man discovers that the Russian officer who killed his grandfather, and many others, is living in the same boarding house, across the hall from him. He appeals to other Berlin Jews to help him acquire a gun, so he can assassinate the officer. They refuse, but because they lack will, not out of principle. This is a common problem in Bergelson stories - even when people do the right thing, it's for the wrong reason. So this story goes in the "bleak" pile.

The Shadows of Berlin is, I think, the best place to get to know this difficult, rewarding writer.

That's the story of the doctor's violin - the indirect art of David Bergelson

Some David Bergelson stories:

"Remnants": An ugly woman is finally married, to a self-conscious weirdo who won't talk to her. One day, she makes him a stewed pumpkin, which, it turns out, is his favorite dish. "A delicious dish, a wonderful pumpkin," he says. Then he dies.

"A Deaf Man": A deaf man is injured in a mill accident. Something terrible also happens to his daughter. He tries to avenge her, and fails.

"The Hole Through Which Life Slips": A writer's wife leaves him, and he gets writer's block, or vice versa. The Bolsheviks take Kiev. The writer either concludes, or doubts, that his life was wasted.

Bergelson works in small touches. I've seen critics call him "impressionistic," which can mean anything, but I think I know what is meant here. Bergelson does not try to fill in the whole picture. He'll give us an outline and a detail or two, enough to recognize what we're seeing. Sometimes, perhaps, not enough. So there are always ambiguities.

The novella Departing (1920) is, at 130 pages, the longest piece of Bergelson's that I've read. It's a good place to see how he works. A young man in a small town, a pharmacist, has died, possibly a suicide. His friend comes to town to settle his estate. Bergelson wafts from one character to another, all involved in some way with the dead man.

Bergelson takes his time revealing which characters are central and which are peripheral. He introduces new characters just when I thought the cast was complete. He gives two women similar names (Channeke Loyber amd Chava Poyzner). The point of view darts around, from one person's thoughts to another, then back to an outside observer. As a result, we visit a lot of people and see a lot of the town. Departing sometimes reminded me a bit of Delta Wedding, or To the Lighthouse. It can be a little confusing. I read slowly, and occasionally backtracked. Modernism!

Here's an example of the drifting point of view, where a doctor and student are discussing politics:

"Doctor Grabay is happy to be drinking lemonade in the shade near Azriel Poyzner's department store and is in no hurry to leave. [A bit about his sick daughter, who plays with his old violin] When he first came to Rakitne he used to play long passages from Mendelssohn's violin concerto so beautifully that passersby would stand under the window to listen. They said that it sounded professional. Now all that is left on the violin is a single limp string that hardly makes a sound when it is plucked. That's the story of the doctor's violin.

Anshl Zudik feels uncomfortable with the doctor's arm around his shoulder and smiles awkwardly. What a quiet worm, he thinks - this courteous doctor who's always talking about charitable foundations is really only interested in making money. They say that he has thirty thousand stacked away in a bank in another town." (Ch. XIV)

These two would be surprised to know what the other is thinking; we get to eavesdrop. They are both minor characters - this is how Bergelson fills out the world of his story.

I read the Golda Werman translation of Departing in The Stories of David Bergelson (1996, Syracuse University Press), but it has also been published on its own, but titled Descent. It's easily worth reading, and, in David Bergelson terms, not even particularly bleak.

He would never again experience any joy in life - the not exactly cheery world of David Bergelson

When I was first compiling my list of the early, modern Yiddish writers, I missed at least one pretty big one, David (or Dovid) Bergelson. A lot of his best work is from the 1920s, so that's my excuse.

Bergelson was a little younger than the generation of Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz. I can't detect a drop of Sholem Aleichem in Bergelson, and only traces of Peretz. Bergelson was a real Modernist - his touchstones were Knut Hamsun and Anton Chekhov. He's sounds quite Russian to me. For example, from the 1913 story "In a Backwoods Town":

"She would read to Burman some new book, paper-bound and extremely boring. She read very badly, in a quavering voice, and kept thinking, even as she read in her bashful and dull way, that Burman had at one time been her tutor and might now marry her. Her voice quavered as he listened and corrected her mistakes; her voice quavered when Burman, letting his head drop on his chest, dozed off with a hazy awareness that the autumn which prevailed in his rabbinical soul was now coming into being out of doors, and that somewhere beyond the godforsaken little border town there must surely be great bustling cities where men were active and alive. But now it was all the same to him: he would never again experience any joy in life. He dozed on."

Burman is all of thirty years old, so that ending is hilarious. Note the little shift from the perspective of the fiancée to that of Rabbi Superfluous Man. "Never again experience any joy" - ha ha ha! We're right in the mainstream of Russian fiction here, right, going back from Chekhov to Turgenev to Pushkin and Lermontov.

Bergelson's world is, frankly, depressing. He's writing after the 1905 pogroms, and then after the World War I pogroms and the Russian Revolution, and his stories are often set against a background of atrocity. But I don't want to explain Bergelson this way. It's not his times, but his temperament, the way he sees things. A number of his characters are depressives. One seems to actually have some sort of seasonal affective disorder ("Impoverished," 1910?). The sort of reader bothered by this should stay far, far away. Bergelson is a real artist, though. His world is bleak, but complete, real.

Did I mention that Bergelson, in 1934, idealistically returned to the Soviet Union, where he wrote propaganda for eighteen years before being murdered by Stalin in 1952 for, in Golda Werman's words, "the crime of writing in Yiddish"?

Wow, that is depressing. More David Bergelson tomorrow, at least. I'll try to write about the artist, not the martyr.

The Bergelson bibliography is a little complicated. "In a Backwoods Town" can be found in the Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg Treasury of Yiddish Literature. These two editors put three more Bergelson stories in Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet-Yiddish Writers. I've read two little collections as well: The Stories of David Bergelson, tr. Golda Werman (three stories) and The Shadows of Berlin, tr. Joachim Neugroschel (eight stories). So I've read fifteen David Bergelson stories, a couple of novella length. There's a little more in English, but not much - one novel (When All Is Said and Done) and one story ("At the Depot"), as far as I can tell.

I pinched the picture from a more formal review of a book about Bergelson at Three Percent.