The former demanded linguistic acculturation to their countries of adoption; the latter insisted on the revival of Hebrew as a precondition for fulfilling Jewish national-political aspirations that Bergelson regarded as pipe dreams. In response to this social turmoil, many Jewish intellectuals, Bergelson among them, came to believe that the Yiddish language could be made the central component of a secular, modern culture. This conception, known as “Yiddishism,” perceived the Jewish people as a world nation whose essential distinguishing characteristic was its extraterritoriality. This emerging conception of modern Yiddish culture was given a chance to bloom after the Pale of Settlement had been abolished in February 1917 and a group of nationalists, declaring Ukraine independent, set up the moderate socialist Central Rada, which survived until April 1918.

In Odessa in 1917 Bergelson met and married Tsiporah (Tsipe) Kutzenogaya, a recent graduate of the Odessa high school for girls. A year later, on 8 August 1918, just as pogroms began raging across Ukraine, the Bergelsons’ only child, their son Lev, was born in Heisin, near Vinnitsa, a town on the Bug River that was Tsipe Bergelson’s birthplace, and Bergelson sought and found employment in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, where he and his family lived in 1919–1920. For Yiddish writers in the period, Kiev was a welcoming place despite the surrounding sociopolitical turmoil. The Rada gave emerging Yiddish culture its best chance by adopting a policy of national autonomy. All four of the competing Jewish political parties that functioned in Kiev after the Revolution joined forces to serve a pan-Yiddishist ideal and nominated representatives, Bergelson among them, to the central committee of the Kultur-lige (League of Culture), created in January 1918 as a suprapolitical Yiddishist body that sought to cover all areas of cultural activity in the former tsarist empire. Many who worked with the Kultur-lige shared little beyond being socialist, non-Zionist, and Yiddishist, but they cooperated with zeal in organizing a school system, a teachers’ training college, and two publishing houses, the Kiever farlag and the Folksfarlag, which produced politically engagé journals like Oyfgang (Sunrise) and Baginen (Dawn), both published during 1919, as well as the modernist miscellany Eygns (Our Own, Kiev 1918, 1920). Bergelson’s story “In eynem a zumer” (During a Certain Summer) appeared in Oyfgang, and he wrote a story for children, entitled “Mayse-bikhl” (Little Story Book), for the educational wing of the Kultur-lige.

The most substantial of the works Bergelson published at this time was his novella Opgang (Descent), begun in his annus mirabilis of 1913 but abandoned at the beginning of the war. A variation on some of the themes of The End of Everything, but with a dead and failed revolutionary as its central character, this novella first appeared in the second issue of the journal Eygns (1920).3 War and revolution demanded a wholly new intellectual and artistic synthesis from Bergelson if he was to develop as a writer, however. The world he had known had been swept away and he was now obliged to come to terms with what had replaced it.

Although all the writers associated with the Kultur-lige—who in time became known as the “Kiev Group”—were sympathetic to the aims of socialism, most were reluctant to subordinate their work to the dictates of the Bolshevik Party.4 Instead they belonged to that cluster of intellectuals labeled “fellow-travelers,” supporters of the Revolution who were neither members of the party nor of proletarian origin but who hoped to enjoy the kind of literary freedom familiar in the West. Euphoria soon gave way to pessimism, however, as these young modernists confronted the realities of escalating political instability and the absence of discerning readers among the “masses” with whom the Revolution demanded they engage. The Civil War of 1919–1920, accompanied by brutal pogroms, dispelled many of their utopian illusions. By the beginning of 1921 the Red Army had decisively recaptured Kiev, and the Bolshevik government took over the Kultur-lige, severely curtailing its educational and cultural activities.

With this withering of his work, a despondent Bergelson joined other Yiddish writers in seeking better opportunities in Moscow, officially proclaimed the Soviet capital in March 1920. From 1918 on, Yiddish literary activity had gone forward in Moscow under the umbrella of the specially created “Jewish Commissariat,” which published the Yiddish daily Der emes (The Truth) and the journal Di komunistishe velt (The Communist World). In the earliest post-Revolution days, political differences had been widely tolerated, since both Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik Yiddish activists shared the common dream of synthesizing universal with Jewish-Yiddish culture. In 1920, however, just as significant numbers of writers had relocated from Kiev, the Jewish Commissariat was replaced by the Yevsekstia, the Jewish Section of the Communist Party, which on 7 November 1920 relaunched Der emes as its central organ, introducing with it the politicized new Soviet orthographical code for Yiddish, which aimed to make the language an instrument through which the Soviet Jewish nation could develop a particularistic Soviet Jewish culture.5 The Yevsektsia employed Bergelson as an editor of Yiddish and Russian literature, but since it was staffed by seasoned party functionaries, it demanded a considerable degree of political conformity to the dogmas of Bolshevism.

Soviet Yiddish literature consequently split into two ideologically opposed camps. The first followed the ideals of the Kiev Group, supporting the Revolution while encouraging an autonomous and polyphonic literature. In opposition, a group of “proletarian” writers strove to create what they defined as “a poster-like literature, militant in character, affirmative in tone, and accessible to simple readers,” written with a high degree of “realism.” Leading this faction were the doctrinaire journalist Moyshe Litvakov (1875–1937), and the poets Itsik Fefer (1900–1952) and Izzi Kharik (1898–1937).

The individualistic and essentially skeptical Bergelson evidently rejected the yoking of Yiddish creative endeavor to a fixed ideological agenda. In early 1921 he left the starving capital to take up the invitation of the publisher Zev-Wolf Latzky-Bertholdi (1881–1940) to join him, Der Nister (1884–1950), and Leyb Kvitko (1890–1952) in Berlin, then a hive of émigré cultural activity. His first major publication there was the appearance of his Gezamlte verk (Collected Work) in six volumes under the imprint of the firm Wostock (East). For this edition, Bergelson completed and published, in its final form, the novella Yoysef Shor, which emerged from the material of the aborted novel In fartunklte tsaytn (In Darkened Times), on which Bergelson had been working on and off for nearly ten years. Though Bergelson was impressed by the sophistication of Berlin, he found the city impersonal and rootless. In a series of stories set there,6 he presented the city as driven by capitalist self-interest and postwar decadence in which its émigrés suffer the dislocating effects of exile.

In his early days in Weimar Berlin, Bergelson earned well from his contributions to New York’s Yiddish socialist but anti-Communist daily Forverts, although his family still relied on his wife’s earnings as a typist. He continued to publish in unaffiliated journals like Warsaw’s Moment, which in 1921 carried his subtle story “Yordim” (The Déclassés),7 but kept his options open by writing for Soviet publications: in 1922 he contributed to the Moscow journal Shtrom (Stream) his Civil War story “Botchko: fragment fun a roman” (Botchko: A Fragment of a Novel).8 That same year Bergelson and Der Nister co-edited the first issue of Milgroym (Pomegranate), a highbrow illustrated periodical with a Hebrew counterpart titled Rimon. To the first issue of the Yiddish edition Bergelson contributed a literary-critical essay paying tribute to the young Russian-Yiddish poets and expressing regret that non-Soviet critics ignored their work, as well as a brief but powerful sketch depicting the terror of the anti-Jewish massacres of 1919–1921.9 In October 1923, however, Litvakov savagely denounced Milgroym as “petit-bourgeois,” and both Bergelson and Der Nister resigned from its editorial board, announcing through a joint open letter in the third issue of Shtrom that they had done so to show solidarity with their Soviet colleagues.

By 1925 Bergelson had grown enthusiastic about the Soviet regime’s officially announced decision to settle, by the end of 1926, about half a million Jews in a still-to-be-determined region of the USSR that, it was hoped, would in time be declared an autonomous Jewish republic. Despite Zionist opposition, this plan was enthusiastically accepted by many Soviet and Western Yiddish intellectuals dazzled by the prospect of a region where Yiddish would be the official language of government, education, press, and literature. On 2 March 1926 Bergelson published in Der emes a letter in which he openly expressed the desire to become a committed Soviet writer. Despite having only just published two fine stories in Forverts, “Altvarg” (Obsolescence) in March, and “Tsvey rotskhim” (Two Murderers)10 in April, he now switched his allegiance to New York’s pro-Communist Yiddish daily, Frayhayt.