Dovid Bergelson (1884–1952)
Author of The End of Everything
About the Author
One of the masters of modern Yiddish prose, David Bergelson was born in Okhrimova, Ukraine, in 1884. His works deal with the decline of the small-town Ukrainian Jewish shtetl before and during the Russian Revolution. Bergelson left Soviet Russia for Western Europe in 1921, returning there in 1934. show more On August 12, 1952, along with 23 other notable Soviet Jewish personalities, Bergelson was executed in Moscow. Although some of his shorter works have appeared in anthologies of Yiddish fiction in English translation, only one of his longer novels has been translated. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Portrait of David Bergelson from the book «David Bergelson. Selected Works» (in Russian, translated from Yiddish). Moscow, 1957, Soviet Writer Publishing House
Series
Works by Dovid Bergelson
Bam dnjeper = Bam dnyeper 2 copies
Dwie bestie : i inne opowiadania 2 copies
פּרינץ ראובני 1 copy
נאָװעלן 1 copy
נאוועלן 1 copy
כתבי דוד ברגלסון 1 copy
געקליבענע ווערק 1 copy
Prints Reuveni 1 copy
אין שטורעמדיקע טעג. 1 copy
Mayśe-bikhl 1 copy
אױסגעװײלטע װערק 1 copy
Associated Works
The Jewish caravan : great stories of twenty-five centuries (1935) — Contributor, some editions — 129 copies
Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories: An Anthology (2003) — Contributor — 57 copies
Have I Got a Story for You: More Than a Century of Fiction from the Forward (2016) — Contributor — 31 copies
Fiction, Volume 2, Number 3 — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Bergelson, David
- Legal name
- Бергельсон, Давид Рафаилович
- Other names
- BERGELSON, David
- Birthdate
- 1884-08-12
- Date of death
- 1952-08-12
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Russian Empire
- Birthplace
- Okhrimovo, Ukraine
- Place of death
- Lubyanka Prison, Moscow, USSR
- Places of residence
- Moscow, Soviet Union
Kiev, Ukraine - Occupations
- novelist
playwright
literary editor - Organizations
- Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
- Short biography
- Dovid Bergelson was born in Okhrimovo, Ukraine, to a well-to-do Hasidic Jewish family. He received a traditional Jewish education and also a general education from private tutors. His parents died when he was a teenager and he was raised by his older brothers. In 1903, he went to live in Kiev, which became an important center of modern Yiddish culture. He began writing in Hebrew, but these early writings were never published; he switched to Yiddish around 1907. His first novella, Arum vokzal (At the Depot; English translation, A Shtetl) was published in 1909 to favorable reviews. His novel Nokh alemen (When All Is Said and Done, 1913) was his most important contribution to the creation of the modern Yiddish novel. In 1917, he founded the avant garde Jidishe Kultur Lige (Yiddish Culture League). He also served as an editor of the literary miscellany Eygns, in which he published two of his own works, including Yoysef Shur (English translation Ashes out of Hope). The dangers of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia drove Bergelson into exile as part of an emigrant wave that included many other important writers and artists. In 1921, he settled in Berlin, where in 1922 he published the first edition of his collected works, in six volumes. He began contributing stories and journalistic reports to the Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) in New York. In 1926, Bergelson came to believe that only the Soviet Union offered the possibility for a wider development of Yiddish literature and culture. He began writing for the Communist Yiddish press in both New York and Moscow and moved to the USSR in 1933. He wrote more novel and plays and participated in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II. However, like many Jewish writers, he later became a target of Stalin's anti-Semitism. In 1949, he was arrested and tried secretly before being executed by a firing squad in the event known as the Night of the Murdered Poets, August 12–13, 1952. After Stalin's death, he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955, and his complete works were published in the Soviet Union in 1961.
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Statistics
- Works
- 33
- Also by
- 13
- Members
- 168
- Popularity
- #126,679
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 1
- ISBNs
- 29
- Languages
- 9
- Favorited
- 1