The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (3 page)

In Moscow, Bergelson enjoyed fame and prosperity for close to fifteen years. His books, protected like those of his Russian colleagues by the state-supported Writers’ Union, were printed in standard runs of thousands of copies, for which he received handsome royalties. In the spring of 1934, expectations that the Soviet Union would permit greater expansion of Yiddish culture were heightened when, on 7 May, the same day as the official opening of the important Kiev Yiddish Language Conference, the government upgraded the status of Birobidzhan from Jewish National District to Jewish Autonomous Region, a change widely seen as another step toward the creation of a Jewish Autonomous Republic. Later that year Bergelson was chosen as one of the representatives of Moscow Yiddish literature at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, a propaganda parade of unity between men of letters and the party leadership, over the course of which Bergelson was several times openly praised. Behind its gala façade, however, this Congress was convened to enforce Stalin’s literary doctrine of “socialist realism,” which aimed to render the discourse of Soviet literature in all languages inseparable from the discourse of the regime. As only one of four Yiddish writers permitted formally to address the Congress, Bergelson in his speech welcomed Stalin’s directive that writers should become “engineers of human souls.” He had no choice now but to write according to party rules.

Turning boilerplate party rhetoric into literary form, Bergelson now published a collection of stories titled
Birebidzhaner
(
People of Birobidzhan
), purportedly based on the glowing impressions he had gained during his visits there. This volume, unlike anything he had published before, startled Western readers. Its language, replete with Yiddishized acronyms for collective state enterprises, relied heavily on colloquialisms while the schematized plots and pasteboard personages of its tales predictably pitted progressive Soviet heroes against reactionary bourgeois villains. More than anything else, the collection’s uncritical exaggeration made it clear that it had been written to order. Bergelson then revised a number of his earlier stories to bring them into line with acceptable party doctrine, and these “adjustments” were reissued together with a few new stories in such later volumes as
Trot nokh trot
(
Step by Step
, 1938).

A more complex problem beset Bergelson’s last major work, his ambitious, quasi-autobiographical novel
On the Dnieper
, of which only two of a planned five volumes finally appeared: the first, titled by the name of its chief character as
Penek
(1932), and the second, titled
Yunge yorn
(
Years of Youth
, 1940). On one hand, the novel at its best showed Bergelson at the height of his powers, re-creating the prerevolutionary period he understood perfectly; on the other, the actions and reactions of his characters were now predetermined by ideological imperatives. The plot sought to demonstrate how the rejected youngest son of a wealthy merchant could instinctually grow up fully equipped to assimilate into proletarian society. Although it went through five Yiddish and four Russian editions and was included in the Soviet literary canon, this novel was clearly the work of a writer divided against himself. In an essay published in 1937, Bergelson argued that Yiddish writers who so skillfully used folk idioms and oral constructions to depict traditional modes of Jewish life were regrettably at a loss when their characters left the shtetl. While this essay was intended to encourage Yiddish writers to present party-approved stereotypes in party-approved clichés, it unconsciously highlighted the catastrophic effect of ideological repression on literary art in general and on Yiddish writing in particular. Jewish writers, using an exclusively Jewish vernacular, were being asked to divorce themselves from the cultural world from which they derived both their language and their inspiration in order to write about life and events that—in accordance with party ideology—had no nationalcultural distinctiveness and therefore required only an impersonal, universal monotone. Bergelson had honed his remarkable gifts for the precise purpose of depicting the upper-middle classes of the decaying shtetl. Prevented by ideology from concerning himself with this “dead” world, he was left at a loss, not least because he excelled at irony and satire, and socialist realism was hostile to both. Though tightening repression did not initially affect Bergelson directly, the price he was forced to pay—like all the best of his Soviet contemporaries, whether they wrote in Yiddish or in Russian—was his artistic integrity.

In 1937, the year in which Stalin set in motion the bloodbath known as the Great Terror, many prominent voices in Soviet Yiddish letters were silenced in a wave of arrests and judicial murders. Like many who feared for their lives, Bergelson found it necessary to endorse the purge trials, and from Birobidzhan he sent to Moscow a strident denunciation of the arraigned defendants. In the bitterest of ironies, among the earliest to be purged was the fanatically doctrinaire Moyshe Litvakov, absurdly accused of belonging to the same anti-Soviet terror group in Minsk as his bitterest ideological opponents, while other writers, notably those from Kiev—like Bergelson—who had been criticized for years as petit-bourgeois nationalists, were left unharmed for another decade because the strategy pursued at this period required some token preservation of national cultures. All the same, repression was everywhere. Foreign travel and emigration was forbidden; Yiddish education was significantly reduced. This negative trend was partially reversed after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in September 1939, when first eastern Poland, and then the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina, fell under Soviet rule, swelling the Jewish population of the USSR from three to more than five million. For its own propaganda purposes, the regime then made use of Yiddish education and media in those areas with deep-rooted Jewish life. Though sporadic arrests of Yiddish activists continued, Soviet Yiddish literature as a whole was granted a reprieve in the years leading up to and including World War II.
¹⁵

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 Bergelson was among many other Yiddish intellectuals, writers, and artists—including the whole of GOSET, the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre—evacuated to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where they remained until October 1943.
¹⁶
There he was appointed one of the editors of
Eynikayt
(Unity), a new Yiddish periodical created to rally the world’s Yiddish speakers to the cause of what Soviet terminology called “the Great Patriotic War.” He also served as a member of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAFC), a body set up by Stalin in April 1942 under the chairmanship of the GOSET’s director Solomon Mikhoels to foster international Jewish support for the USSR. As reports of Nazi extermination atrocities began pouring in, Bergelson, under pressure from Mikhoels, returned to writing plays expressing solidarity with the war effort in general and with the national identity of the Jewish people in particular. In 1943 he produced
Ikh’l lebn
(
I Will Live
), a play set in contemporary Soviet times asserting an indomitable Jewish determination to survive, while in 1946 he completed
Prints Ruveni
(
Prince Reuveni
), first published, by virtue of the wartime alliance with the West, in the New York left-wing journal
Yidishe kultur
and reissued shortly thereafter in book form.
¹⁷
While
Ikh’l lebn
was never performed in the USSR,
Prints Ruveni
, a historical drama based on the life of a sixteenth-century messianic figure who urged the Jewish people to self-redemption through force of arms, was in its final stage of rehearsal when Mikhoels was summoned to Minsk, where he was murdered on 13 January 1948 in an elaborately faked motor accident on direct orders from Stalin. Though Bergelson was no dramatist, and his plays were uniformly unsuccessful, the pain of contemporary events moved him to pen powerful expressions of Jewish national consciousness in the face of genocide.

Bergelson had embraced the Soviet Union and its ideology because he believed it offered the best chance for both the survival and the promotion of Yiddish culture through which he believed Jewish national identity in the modern world could be defined. In the aftermath of Hitler’s genocide, he found a way through the iron carapace of Stalinist ideology to assert a pride in Jewish identity. The stories Bergelson wrote in response to the Holocaust, first published in
Eynikayt
and thus subject to censorship, were partially assembled and published in book form under the title
Geven iz nakht un gevorn iz tog
(
Night Fell and Day Followed
) in Moscow in 1943; a further volume appeared in Moscow four years later under the title
Naye dertseylungen
(
New Stories
). To get this work past the censors, Bergelson carefully deployed his gifts for understatement and literary allusiveness. He offered no blatant depictions of violence; instead he used individual experiences as metonyms for mass murders. The party-pleasing, antireligious contempt for Judaism’s observances he had expressed in
On the Dnieper
—for which many of his readers never forgave him—were here replaced by a warm respect for Jewish pain, subtly highlighted in the context of generalized Soviet suffering at the hands of a common enemy. In several tales Bergelson consciously employs phrases from Judaism’s mourning tradition, citing from its Hebrew liturgy; in other stories he drew on the teachings of Hasidic rabbis, on Jewish legend and folklore in skillful allusions evident only to fellow Jews.
¹⁸

After the war, in company with all other members of the JAFC, Bergelson was awarded the state medal “For Valiant Labor During the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945.” Such public acknowledgment of the work of the JAFC—and of how far the JAFC and its members openly identified themselves as Jews—exacted a heavy price. Both during and after the war, Soviet government policy was strict denial that the Nazis had singled out the Jews for special persecution; all citizens of the Soviet Union, it was claimed, had suffered equally in Hitler’s war of aggression. Yet by virtue of its official responsibilities, the JAFC had access to more information about the fate of Europe’s Jews than was made public in the USSR. It was impossible for them not to be overwhelmed by a sense of national catastrophe, but equally impossible to show such feelings openly. Only in secret, among trusted friends, could such prohibited emotions be shared. To the general Jewish public, the Soviet Union’s vote in favor of the partition of Palestine at the United Nations on 29 November 1947 suggested a change in official Jewish policy, but in reality by early 1948 Stalin had decided to eradicate Jewish culture from the USSR. Pretexts were created to place the JAFC under suspicion as a subversive organization working with American and British spies; the very agencies in the West with which it had been specifically charged to deal during the war years were now used to incriminate it. Steps were progressively taken to restrict the activities of the JAFC. In August 1946 it was placed under the control of the Central Committee Foreign Policy Division; in November its praise for the role of Jews in Soviet and world history was labeled a “chauvinistic-Jewish deviation.” Its closure was recommended because it had taken on a “nationalist and Zionist character.” During the second half of 1947, increasingly vehement anti-Zionist attacks on Jewish nationalism were launched, and Mikhoels was murdered the following January. Despite official attempts to present his death as an accident and the lavish state funeral he was accorded, it was clear to all, Bergelson included, that there would be no renewed acceptance of Jewish national identity. On 20 November 1948, the JAFC and its organ Eynikayt were shut down together with three other Yiddish periodicals in Moscow, Kiev, and Birobidzhan;
Der emes
, the sole Yiddish publishing house, was disbanded; and Yiddish publications in Ukraine and Byelorussia were banned. With the abolition of most other Jewish cultural institutions, mass arrests of principal Yiddish cultural figures began in September 1948 and continued until June 1949.

Bergelson was seized on the night of 23 January 1949, a week to the day after the first anniversary of Mikhoels’s state funeral. Together with his fellow accused, he lingered in prison for over three years, until his trial in May 1952. Fifteen defendants, including the poets Peretz Markish, David Hofshteyn, Itsik Fefer, and Leyb Kvitko, were charged with capital offenses, ranging from treason and espionage to “bourgeois nationalism.”

At their secret trial, the principal charge brought against the leaders of the JAFC was rooted in the “Crimea question.” To solve the problems of dispossession and anti-Jewish hostility in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Mikhoels and others had proposed making the Crimea, where Jews had established some small agricultural colonies in the 1920s, a Soviet Jewish republic. This proposal had been strongly supported, according to a report from the security services, by Bergelson, who had argued that a Jewish republic in the Crimea would be welcomed both by the Jewish population of the Soviet Union as a whole, and by other Soviet nationalities who were reluctant to see Jews “using their talents to take over choice regions in other parts of the USSR.”
¹⁹
At first the regime pretended to treat this proposal seriously, but Lazar Kaganovich, the only Jew in Stalin’s Politburo, expressed its true attitude when he told Mikhoels that “only actors and poets” could dream up something so absurd.
²⁰
With the start of the Cold War, Stalin chose to believe that this proposal originated with the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), in his view a front organization for American imperialism, which aimed to establish a Jewish homeland in the Crimea as a “bridgehead” from which to implement a long-term strategy of dismembering the Soviet Union. This plan, it was now alleged, had been devised with the JDC by Fefer and Mikhoels during their official visit to New York in 1943, and had been developed during the approved postwar visits to the USSR of the left-wing Americans Peysekh (Paul) Novick, the editor of New York’s
Morgn-frayhayt
, and Sholem Aleichem’s son-in-law, the Yiddish journalist Benzion Goldberg. Anxious to assess the prospects for Jewish reconstruction after the war, these two journalists had naturally spent most of their time with Yiddish-speaking colleagues at the JAFC. Now security investigators perverted their visit into an accusation that they had been American espionage agents collecting secret economic and political information from Zionist traitors.