Bergelson was born on August 12, 1884, in the shtetl of Okhrimovo (also known as Okhrymovka, and also as Sarny near Uman[1]) in Kiev province. His early years were characterized by pogroms throughout the Pale of Settlement, catalyzed by the assassination of Czar Alexander II by a group of five young revolutionaries that included one Jew among them.[2]
Bergelson grew up in a wealthy, religious, and Yiddish-speaking family. His father was a grain and timber merchant who spoke no Russian, maintaining his business entirely within the Jewish community. His mother came from a richer cultural background of writing and books. A maskil, a scholar in the Jewish Enlightenment movement, tutored him in Hebrew, Russian, and his parents' Yiddish. The extent of this tutoring was insufficient to allow Bergelson to enter a higher educational institution in later life.[2]
Bergelson 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…",[3] 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 Yidishe 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.[4] According to J. Hoberman, he was "the best-known (and certainly the best-paid) Russian Yiddish writer of the 1920s".[5] 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.
Bergelson's only child, Lev Bergelson [ru], was an eminent Soviet biochemist who also served as a Soviet Army captain during World War II. Prof. Lev Bergelson emigrated to Israel in 1991 with his wife Naomi, where both he and his wife died in 2014.
When All Is Said and Done, translated, and introduced by Bernard Martin. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977. ISBN0-8214-0360-5.
The End of Everything, translated and edited by Joseph Sherman. New Haven: Yale University, 2010. ISBN9780300110678.
The Stories of David Bergelson: Yiddish Short Fiction from Russia (two short stories and the novella Departing), translated and introduced by Golda Werman, foreword by Aharon Appelfeld. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. ISBN0-8156-2712-2.
Descent (aka Departing as noted above), translated and introduced by Joseph Sherman. Modern Language Association of America: New York, 1999. ISBN0-87352-788-7.
Shadows of Berlin: the Berlin stories of Dovid Bergelson (seven short stories and a satirical sketch from The Forward), translated by Joachim Neugroschel. City Lights Books: San Francisco, June 2005. ISBN0-87286-444-8.
Judgment: A Novel, translated and introduced by Harriet Murav and Sasha Senderovich. Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 2017. ISBN978-0-8101-3592-5.
Gessen, Masha (2016). Where the Jews aren't : the sad and absurd story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish autonomous region (First ed.). New York. ISBN9780805242461.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Rosenwald, Larry, review of The Stories of David Bergelson, The Mendele Review: Yiddish Language and LiteratureArchived 2007-09-27 at the Wayback Machine, Vol. 01.001, April 13, 1997. Includes a passage from his writing, with multiple translations for comparison, and discusses questions about translating Bergelson.
Rubenstein, Joshua The Night of the Murdered Poets, originally published in The New Republic, August 25, 1997, later republished as the introduction to Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, May 2001, Yale University Press.
