Cùng số báo,  TLS May 2 2008

có bài viết về nhà văn Yiddish David Bergelson.

"How can I die? I am a witness!"
"Làm sao tôi có thể chết? Tôi là một chứng nhân!"

LITERARY CRITICISM 

ANTONY POLONSKY

Language of suffering

Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh, editors

DAVID BERGELSON: From Modernism to Socialist Realism 363pp. Legenda: Studies in Yiddish. £49.99

(US $69).

Today the name of the Yiddish writer David Bergelson, who was executed in 1952 along with most of the leading Yiddish writers of the Soviet Union, is almost unknown. He deserves to be better known, not only because of his tragic fate but also because of his major literary achievements. Born in Ukraine in 1884, he had already' established his reputation before 1914 as the chronicler of the "superfluous" younger generation in the shtetl. In his meticulously crafted novellas and short stories he described a group of men and women who were uncomfortable with the world of their parents but incapable of making an effective transition to modern life. One of them, the heroine of his novel Nokh alemen (When All Is Said and Done, 1913), is assessed by another character as follows: "From Mirel ... nothing will ever come any more. As far as we're concerned she is nothing more than a transition point".
In the aftermath of the February Revolution, Bergelson moved to Kiev, where he was one of the founders of the Kulturlige and a prominent member of the Eygns group of Yiddish writers, who wished to produce in Yiddish a literature that would reflect the achievements of European Modernism. He was deeply shocked by the violence of the Revolution and the Civil War. He wrote little during this period, and his ambivalent attitude to the Revolution is captured in his story "Der lokh durkh velkher eyn hot farloyrn" ("The Hole through which Life Slips"). The main protagonist of the story, Jana Grigorievich, "graduate engineer and practising publicist (his caustic lampoons had made him a radical Marxist in the eyes of the Tsarist regime)", is a typically indecisive Bergelson hero. His wife has left him to join the Bolsheviks in Petrograd. He is immobile, stuck in Kiev, first under Ukrainian nationalist and then under Bolshevik rule, unable to commit himself to the new socialist order.
By March 1920, Bergelson was sufficiently disillusioned with Bolshevism to leave Russia and move, first, to Kaunas in Lithuania, where he worked with some colleagues from Kiev, including the critic BallMakhshoves, and then in, 1921, to Berlin, a major centre of the Russian and Russian Jewish emigration. He gradually became disenchanted with life in the West and signaled his new sympathy for Communism both in his fiction and in his decision in 1925 to become a correspondent of the Moscow Yidddish daily, Emes. In May 1926, he abandoned the New York Forverts for the Communist daily Morgn Frayhayt.
Bergelson's fiction from this period, which was mostly published in the late 1920s, reflects his inner conflict and is infused with his horror at the traumatic events of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. In his story "Two Murderers", a leader of a Cossack band which had plundered and massacred Jews throughout the Ukrainian shtetls finds lodgings in Berlin with a woman whose jealous dog has killed a child she was fostering. The dog spent several days at the police pound, but was released because it was decided that it wasn't mad, to the distress of the landlady because "no trial had taken place". The story affects the Ukrainian, who reflects that he has witnessed many massacres both of adults and of children. Ironically, the landlady misunderstands his reaction, taking him for a victim of violence, not a perpetrator. "'What about a trial?' she asked Zarembo with great interest. 'Was there a trial?' 'No,' Zarembo shook his head, 'No trial.'''
In the story "Hershl Toker", Bergelson attempts to depict the obligatory Communist hero, and his commitment to the Soviets is even more evident in his novel Midas hadin (The Letter of the Law). In its final form, it describes the Bolshevik takeover in the small town of Golikhovke in Ukraine. The hero, Filipov, a non-Jewish Communist, suppresses his humanitarian impulses in order to crush opposition to the new order. In this he is supported by a young Jewish Communist and a local Jewish informer. Filipov dies in battle defeating the counter-revolutionaries, and the story concludes with his followers collecting red flags to bury him with Communist pomp.
This novel is clearly inferior to David Bergelson's earlier work, and its glorification of the role of the informer has been noted by Ruth Wisse, Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University, who has commented, "The legal severity invoked by the [Hebrew] title applies to the required imposition of Bolshevik rule on Golikhovke, a largely Jewwish town. Its use is noteworthy because the entire corpus of modem Yiddish and Hebrew literature as I know it contains no such positive portrayal of any hard-liner on issues of Jewish law".
Bergelson remained abroad until 1933 and finally settled in the Soviet Union only in 1936. By now he was convinced that Yiddish had no future in the United States, and that only the Soviet Union could effectively resist the fascism he could see developing in Germany. In 1934, he spent two months in the Jewish autonomous region which he describes in euphoric terms in Birobidjan, published that year. Socialist-realist aesthetics were also in evidence in his unfinished autobiographical trilogy Baym Dnieper (On the Dnieper), the first volume of which was published in 1932 and the second in 1940. During the Second World War, Bergelson was an active member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He became one of the editors of its newspaper, Aynikhkeit, and in 1941 wrote a propaganda play, We Want To Live, which was performed in the United States, Argentina, Romania, and in a Hebrew version in Tel Aviv. His principal work during this period was the play Prints Reuveni (Prince Reuveni), which he completed in 1946. It is the story of a sixteenth-century messianic pretender, David Reuveni, who seeks to defend the Jews not by prayer but by armed resistance. His last words to his friend Shabsi the clown are, "Don't worry about me. I taught the people how to fight".
Bergelson was arrested early in 1949 and executed in August 1952. His work has largely fallen into oblivion, partly because his earlier more interesting writings have been overshadowed by what he produced under the influence of Socialist Realism. There is thus all the more reason to welcome this collection of essays, edited by two of the principal scholars of his work, Joseph Sherman, who has also done much through his translations to make Bergelson' s work better known, and Gennady Estraikh. David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism includes a biographical study by Sherman and essays by various people on different aspects of Bergelson's fiction, among them a fascinating account of his conflicts with Abe Cahan, editor of Forverts. It also provides a valuable bibliography of Bergelson's works in Yiddish and English and a memoir by Bergelson's son.
In one of his last stories, "The Witness", published abroad posthumously, Bergelson describes how an old Jew, believing himself to be the only Jewish survivor of his shtetl, returns to be a witness. There he encounters the only other Jewish survivor, a young girl to whom he recounts the fate of the Jews. He speaks in Yiddish and she records his words in Russian. When she asks him if her translation is accurate, he retorts, "You ask my opinion? What can I tell you? ... the suffering was in Yiddish". At one point he faints and seems near death, but when he recovers, he observes "How can I die? I am a witness!". Like the old man, David Bergelson was himself a witness to the terrible events of the twentieth century, whose complexities he attempted, not always wholly successfully, to describe.