Stories of David Bergelson: Yiddish Short Fiction from Russia

by David Bergelson

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.

192 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1996

Reviews

[Josh Horowitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is not served well by its translation and translator. The stories are interesting and in many cases beautifully atmospheric, but the text is hindered at all times by strange translation choices; the names are inconsistently anglicized, the use of Jewish religious terminology is elided through utterly alienating constructs like “the Pentecost holiday” instead of “Shavuos.”

The translator, in her own translator’s note in the beginning of the book, leads the reader into pessimism by treating Bergelson’s political commitments like the behavior of a child, and then by discounting the value and quality of her own translation compared to Bergelson’s Yiddish originals. If Werman doesn’t take her own output seriously, how can the reader be expected to?

[Hallie Cantor · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a sort of dreary book, which screams alienation with every page. The characters, atomized refugees from Russia post-Revolution, now reside in Weimar Berlin, apparently a magnet for the rootless. Little wonder the decadent night life flourished. I can barely even remember the plots, so empty were the lives. Memories of the shtetl, which was abandoned in pursuit of secular enlightenment, linger, but these characters traded in one depressing place for a cultural morass. Ironically, the author himself, an ardent Communist, would perish later at the hands of Stalin.

I would recommend this book for anyone wanting a taste of the 1920s mentality, when modernism was unleashed following World War One. It would lead, in a few short years, to the horrors of Hitler's Germany and the final failure of European assimilation.