On a Soviet Sabbath

David Bergelson was a pioneering Yiddish novelist and dramatist. Born in Ukraine in 1884, he established a model for modernist aesthetics and literary impressionism in Yiddish from early in his career. An influential member of the Kiev grupe and Kultur-lige before and during the Russian Revolution, Bergelson spent much of the 1920s in Berlin, solidifying that city’s reputation as a nexus of Yiddish culture in the interwar period. Much to the shock of the Yiddish reading public, Bergelson expressed strong support for the Soviet Union as the only place with a secure future for Yiddish letters in his widely read 1926 essay “Dray tsenters.” Although Bergelson’s writing took on an increasingly ideological bent after he moved to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, his novels were still well regarded by critics and readers alike. A leading member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Bergelson was a victim of the postwar repression of Soviet Yiddish culture and was murdered by the state alongside other members of the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia on August 12, 1952.