The Twilight Zone

Yiddish literature can be seen as a three-legged stool: hard, homey and supported by its three "grandfathers." There is the corrosive anticlerical satirist who called himself Mendele Mokher Sforim (Mendele the Book Seller); the self-invented, deceptively artless and universally beloved folk author Sholem Aleichem; and the Warsaw writer of Hasidic allegories I.L. Peretz. But there was once a fourth, or rather the promise of a fourth: Dovid Bergelson (1884-1952).

Unlike the grandfathers, Bergelson did not write for a popular audience so much as a cultivated Yiddish-speaking elite--at least at first. And, no less than his readers, Bergelson was a complex amalgam of the provincial and the cosmopolitan. Born to a prosperous Hasidic family in a Ukrainian shtetl, he attended a traditional religious school but received a secular European education from a tutor. His parents died when he was a boy. From the age of 14 he was raised in the households of elder brothers who had left their small town for the booming, increasingly Jewish cities of Kiev, Odessa and Warsaw.

Bergelson emerged as an artist in the aftermath of the failed 1905 revolution in Russia, and although his early work is not overtly political, it is characterized by a crepuscular melancholy. Like more than one Jewish author of his generation, he wrote first in Hebrew and Russian before switching to Yiddish, his native tongue, to address the twilight of the Yiddish world. Readers accustomed to Sholem Aleichem's sturdy village archetypes or Isaac Bashevis Singer's studied supernaturalism may be surprised by Bergelson's decomposing milieu. His setting was the shtetl, well into its decline by the early twentieth century; his characters are largely secular, frustrated young people who struggle with their sense of futility and dream of escape.

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