Although he found Denmark congenial, that country had no Yiddish-speaking community and its Jews had no interest in Yiddish belles lettres. Although his wife was reluctant to return to the Soviet Union, their son needed the acceptance of boys of his own age, and only the Soviet Union could guarantee him a university place. Consequently, at the beginning of 1934 Bergelson returned to the USSR, first visiting Birobidzhan, where a house had been built especially for him. Always an urban rather than a rural writer, however, he preferred to live in the capital.

In Moscow, Bergelson enjoyed fame and prosperity for close to fifteen years. His books, protected like those of his Russian colleagues by the state-supported Writers’ Union, were printed in standard runs of thousands of copies, for which he received handsome royalties. In the spring of 1934, expectations that the Soviet Union would permit greater expansion of Yiddish culture were heightened when, on 7 May, the same day as the official opening of the important Kiev Yiddish Language Conference, the government upgraded the status of Birobidzhan from Jewish National District to Jewish Autonomous Region, a change widely seen as another step toward the creation of a Jewish Autonomous Republic. Later that year Bergelson was chosen as one of the representatives of Moscow Yiddish literature at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, a propaganda parade of unity between men of letters and the party leadership, over the course of which Bergelson was several times openly praised. Behind its gala façade, however, this Congress was convened to enforce Stalin’s literary doctrine of “socialist realism,” which aimed to render the discourse of Soviet literature in all languages inseparable from the discourse of the regime. As only one of four Yiddish writers permitted formally to address the Congress, Bergelson in his speech welcomed Stalin’s directive that writers should become “engineers of human souls.” He had no choice now but to write according to party rules.

Turning boilerplate party rhetoric into literary form, Bergelson now published a collection of stories titled Birebidzhaner (People of Birobidzhan), purportedly based on the glowing impressions he had gained during his visits there. This volume, unlike anything he had published before, startled Western readers. Its language, replete with Yiddishized acronyms for collective state enterprises, relied heavily on colloquialisms while the schematized plots and pasteboard personages of its tales predictably pitted progressive Soviet heroes against reactionary bourgeois villains. More than anything else, the collection’s uncritical exaggeration made it clear that it had been written to order. Bergelson then revised a number of his earlier stories to bring them into line with acceptable party doctrine, and these “adjustments” were reissued together with a few new stories in such later volumes as Trot nokh trot (Step by Step, 1938).

A more complex problem beset Bergelson’s last major work, his ambitious, quasi-autobiographical novel On the Dnieper, of which only two of a planned five volumes finally appeared: the first, titled by the name of its chief character as Penek (1932), and the second, titled Yunge yorn (Years of Youth, 1940). On one hand, the novel at its best showed Bergelson at the height of his powers, re-creating the prerevolutionary period he understood perfectly; on the other, the actions and reactions of his characters were now predetermined by ideological imperatives. The plot sought to demonstrate how the rejected youngest son of a wealthy merchant could instinctually grow up fully equipped to assimilate into proletarian society. Although it went through five Yiddish and four Russian editions and was included in the Soviet literary canon, this novel was clearly the work of a writer divided against himself. In an essay published in 1937, Bergelson argued that Yiddish writers who so skillfully used folk idioms and oral constructions to depict traditional modes of Jewish life were regrettably at a loss when their characters left the shtetl. While this essay was intended to encourage Yiddish writers to present party-approved stereotypes in party-approved clichés, it unconsciously highlighted the catastrophic effect of ideological repression on literary art in general and on Yiddish writing in particular. Jewish writers, using an exclusively Jewish vernacular, were being asked to divorce themselves from the cultural world from which they derived both their language and their inspiration in order to write about life and events that—in accordance with party ideology—had no nationalcultural distinctiveness and therefore required only an impersonal, universal monotone. Bergelson had honed his remarkable gifts for the precise purpose of depicting the upper-middle classes of the decaying shtetl. Prevented by ideology from concerning himself with this “dead” world, he was left at a loss, not least because he excelled at irony and satire, and socialist realism was hostile to both. Though tightening repression did not initially affect Bergelson directly, the price he was forced to pay—like all the best of his Soviet contemporaries, whether they wrote in Yiddish or in Russian—was his artistic integrity.

In 1937, the year in which Stalin set in motion the bloodbath known as the Great Terror, many prominent voices in Soviet Yiddish letters were silenced in a wave of arrests and judicial murders. Like many who feared for their lives, Bergelson found it necessary to endorse the purge trials, and from Birobidzhan he sent to Moscow a strident denunciation of the arraigned defendants. In the bitterest of ironies, among the earliest to be purged was the fanatically doctrinaire Moyshe Litvakov, absurdly accused of belonging to the same anti-Soviet terror group in Minsk as his bitterest ideological opponents, while other writers, notably those from Kiev—like Bergelson—who had been criticized for years as petit-bourgeois nationalists, were left unharmed for another decade because the strategy pursued at this period required some token preservation of national cultures. All the same, repression was everywhere. Foreign travel and emigration was forbidden; Yiddish education was significantly reduced. This negative trend was partially reversed after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in September 1939, when first eastern Poland, and then the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina, fell under Soviet rule, swelling the Jewish population of the USSR from three to more than five million. For its own propaganda purposes, the regime then made use of Yiddish education and media in those areas with deep-rooted Jewish life. Though sporadic arrests of Yiddish activists continued, Soviet Yiddish literature as a whole was granted a reprieve in the years leading up to and including World War II.15

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 Bergelson was among many other Yiddish intellectuals, writers, and artists—including the whole of GOSET, the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre—evacuated to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where they remained until October 1943.16 There he was appointed one of the editors of Eynikayt (Unity), a new Yiddish periodical created to rally the world’s Yiddish speakers to the cause of what Soviet terminology called “the Great Patriotic War.” He also served as a member of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAFC), a body set up by Stalin in April 1942 under the chairmanship of the GOSET’s director Solomon Mikhoels to foster international Jewish support for the USSR. As reports of Nazi extermination atrocities began pouring in, Bergelson, under pressure from Mikhoels, returned to writing plays expressing solidarity with the war effort in general and with the national identity of the Jewish people in particular.