Known for Yiddish Writer Role Writer | Name David Bergelson | |
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Born August 12, 1884 ( 1884-08-12 ) Died August 12, 1952, Moscow, Russia Books The End of Everything: A Novel, When all is said and done | ||
David bergelson
David (or Dovid) Bergelson (דוד בערגעלסאָן) (August 12, 1884 – August 12, 1952) was a Yiddish language writer. Ukrainian-born, he lived for a time in Berlin, Germany. He moved back to the Soviet Union when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. He was ultimately executed during an antisemitic campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans".
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Belatedness memory and time in the work of david bergelson prof harriet murav
Biography
Born in the Ukrainian shtetl of Okhrimovo (also known as Okhrimovka, and now as Sarny near Uman), he first became known as a writer in the wake of the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. From a Hasidic background, but having received both religious and secular education, much of his writing is reminiscent of Anton Chekhov: stories of "largely secular, frustrated young people…, ineffectual intellectuals…",[1] frustrated by the provincial shtetl life. Writing at first in Hebrew and Russian, he only met success when he turned to his native Yiddish; his first successful book was Arum Vokzal (At the Depot) a novella, published at his own expense in 1909 in Warsaw.
In 1917, he founded the avant garde Jidishe Kultur Lige (Yiddish Culture League) in Kiev. In spring 1921 he moved to Berlin, which would be his base throughout the years of the Weimar Republic, although he traveled extensively through Europe and also visited the United States in 1929-30, to cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York (as documented by video link.) According to J. Hoberman, he was "the best-known (and certainly the best-paid) Russian Yiddish writer of the 1920s"[2]. Until the mid-1920s he wrote for the New York City-based Yiddish-language newspaper The Forward.
His 1926 essay "Three Centers" expressed a belief that the Soviet Union (where Yiddish language and literature were then receiving official patronage) had eclipsed the assimilationist United States and backwards Poland as the great future locus of Yiddish literature. He began writing for the Communist Yiddish press in both New York (Morgen Freiheit) and Moscow (Emes), and moved to the Soviet Union in 1933, around the time the Nazis came to power in Germany.
He was positively impressed with the Jewish Autonomous Republic of Birobidzhan, and participated in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II. However, like many Jewish writers, he became a target of the antisemitic campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans". Arrested in January 1949, he was tried secretly and executed by a firing squad in the event known as the Night of the Murdered Poets on August 12–13, 1952. After Stalin's death, he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955, and his complete works were published in the Soviet Union in 1961.
Bergelson's only child, Lev, was an eminent Soviet biochemist who also served as a Soviet Army captain during WWII. Lev and his family emigrated to Israel in the 1980s, where both he and his wife died in 2014. Lev's daughter, David's only grandchild, is Dr. Marina Bergelson Raskin, a Purdue University professor of English literature.
Works
The following is a partial list of Bergelson's works.