At Night

Dovid Bergelson was born to a wealthy and nominally Hasidic family in the Kiev (Kyiv) region of the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine) and given both a traditional and modern education. He later emerged as Yiddish literature’s great master of modernist fiction in his twenties and thirties, in Kiev and then Berlin. 

In his first period of creativity in Kiev, between 1909 and 1920, Bergelson created a body of fiction—most notably the 1909 novella Arum vokzal (Around the Train Station), the 1913 novel Nokh alemen (Too Late, or When All is Said and Done, in English as The End of Everything) and the 1919 novel Opgang (Decline or Descent)—that linked a Flaubertian vision of shallowness, lack of direction, and alienation in modern East European Jewish life to Proustian and Bergsonian themes of temporality, perception, and the nature, loss, and possible renewal of real experience. 

Between 1917 and 1919, Bergelson’s work as an editor and guide to younger Yiddishist writers, and as a co-creator of the Yiddishist Kultur-Lige organization, helped transform the city of Kiev (Kyiv) into a vibrant center of Yiddish secular culture, ideological Yiddishism, and Yiddish literary experimentation. Leaving newly Sovietized Kiev out of economic necessity and disgust with the intellectual and cultural pressures to which Jewish Communists were subjecting Yiddish culture, Bergelson spent the 1920s in Berlin along with many other Russian Jewish expatriates. His fiction from this period includes concise, subtle, and dark treatments of expatriate life in Berlin in the shadow of the monstrous violence that had befallen the Jews of Ukraine in 1918–1920. 

In the mid-1920s, Bergelson concluded that there was no future for Yiddish culture outside of the Soviet Union, where the revolutionary state funded and institutionalized secular Yiddish culture for Jews even as it regimented and censored Jewish cultural expression. By the late 1920s, he was reorienting his writing to grapple with—and justify—the ruthless futurity of the revolution, as reflected in his fourth novel, Mides ha-din (Stern Judgment), and his turn to the realist historical novel Baym Dnyeper (By the Dnieper). 

Bergelson settled in the Soviet Union in 1934 and became a central figure in the rapidly narrowing world of Soviet Yiddish letters. With the exception of his wartime verse drama Prince Reuveni, the work Bergelson produced in his last two decades was deeply shaped by the dictates of Stalin-era socialist realism, with its insistence on proper socialist heroes, a clear class line, and distortive selective representation of present circumstances to show “the bright future” ostensibly taking shape. A leading member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee created to mobilize Jewish energies for the desperate war effort against Nazi Germany, Bergelson was a victim of the postwar repression of Soviet Yiddish culture and was murdered by the Soviet regime alongside other members of the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia on August 12, 1952.