The characters crowding his fiction remain as perplexing to themselves as to others. Their speech and actions are never unambiguous: speech is often an intrusion upon more eloquent silence; actions are generally reactions to circumstances over which they have no control. In Bergelson’s early work, no particular actions are privileged above others; the events of his fiction, sometimes banal, sometimes violent, are presented with equal emphasis.

To articulate this elusiveness, Bergelson developed a style characterized by the choric repetition of set phrases and sentences and the general subordination of direct to reported speech, a mode resembling the use of the free indirect discourse devised by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) for Madame Bovary, which appeared in Russian translation in 1858, one year after it was first published in French.32 What is said by an individual character and what is observed by the third-person narrative voice frequently become indistinguishable, a process that Bergelson advances by his repeated use of the passive voice to cloud the possibility of ascribing judgments exclusively to the character from whom they ostensibly emanate.

Typical of this technique is a moment early in the novel when Mirel’s frustration at the tedium of shtetl existence is generalized in a passage of description that deliberately blurs the source of the feelings described:

Short damp days followed in quick succession, driving the shtetl ever deeper into winter. Neither indoors nor outdoors offered anything to awaken interest, stirring instead the same indifferent discontent toward everything around, so that one might as well stop every overgrown girl who occasionally strolled down the main street in smartly dressed self-importance, vent one’s frustration on her, and rebuke her in the voice of an older, deeply discontented woman:

—Why are you so choosy, you? … Why don’t you get married? Why? [2.2]

Above all, by creating vivid images through unexpected use of language, Bergelson’s style presents the reader with new ways of seeing and feeling. So, for example, the grief that overcomes Mirel when she finally recognizes the futility of all her struggles is perceived as an all-embracing anguish that has a manifest physical presence: “The whole house was dark, silent and forlorn. The night had utterly enveloped it, had everywhere coiled itself around the extinguished shtetl and far beyond, encircling the surrounding fields where the desolation of all those asleep beat quietly on the ground” (4.5). Encouraging a nonlinear reading, the densely layered narrative steadily suggests an ever-widening range of alternatives for comprehending superficially commonplace situations.

The actual phrase nokh alemen, “the end of everything,” is used only three times in the novel, twice near the beginning and once at the end. In Part 1, reluctantly recognizing that he has lost Mirel for good, Velvl muses: “Did this mean that the betrothal was really over, that this was the end of everything?” (1.4). When Mirel makes the irretrievable decision to marry Shmulik, a man she dislikes, she enters her father’s deserted house late in the afternoon of the Fast of Esther and is confronted by a vision of utter desolation: “Mirel could see no one. No one stopped her, no one was made happier by her arrival. Something, it seemed, was too late here, had already ended” (2.8). Finally, in Part 4 the phrase, in stressing the void left by the death of Mirel’s father, anticipates her own ultimate effacement: “the desolation that follows when everything has ended clung to the walls and ceiling, calling again to mind that Reb Gedalye was now dead and that Gitele had now no single place on earth” (4.2).

In seeking to assess what is left after profound change, this phrase, from which the novel draws its title, defines the frustration of almost all the major characters, who realize by the end of all their searching that what they thought would make them happy is, when all is said and done, unattainable. The extent to which each is able to accept that he will never achieve the happiness he seeks is what finally determines his capacity or incapacity to go on living.

NOTES

1. David Bergelson, At the Depot, in A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas, ed. and trans. Ruth Wisse (New York: Behrman House, 1973), 79–139; repr. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986, 79–139.

2. David Bergelson, “The Deaf Man” and “Two Roads,” in No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present, ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 416–18; 424–43.

3. In English as “Departing,” in The Stories of David Bergelson: Yiddish Short Fiction from Russia, trans. Golda Werman (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 25–154; as Descent, trans. Joseph Sherman (New York: Modern Language Association, Texts and Translations Series, 1999).

4. For more about the Kultur-lige, see Hillel Kazovsky, The Artists of the Kultur-lige (English and Russian) (Jerusalem-Moscow: Michael Greenberg, 2003).

5. For more detail, see David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 60–87.

6. Some of these have recently been published in English translation; see Joachim Neugroschel, trans., The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005).

7. There are two English versions of this story: “Impoverished,” in The Stories of David Bergelson, trans. Golda Werman, 14–24; and “The Déclassés,” in The Mendele Review (TMR), trans. Joseph Sherman, Vol. 09.009.

8. A reworked version of this piece appears in English as “Civil War,” in Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet Yiddish Writers, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, trans. Seth Wolitz (New York: Schocken, 1977), 84–123.

9. English translation, under this title, by Joseph Sherman in Midstream 54, no. 4 (July/August 2008): 39–40.

10. “Two Murderers,” translated by Joachim Neugroschel, in The Shadows of Berlin, 1–8; “Old Age,” translated by Joachim Neugroschel, in The Shadows of Berlin, 9–20; “Obsolescence,” translated by Joseph Sherman, Midstream 38, no. 5 (July/August 2002): 37–42.

11. “Hershl Toker,” translated by Joseph Sherman, Midstream 37, no. 8 (December 2001): 24–29.