In 1943 he produced Ikh’l lebn (I Will Live), a play set in contemporary Soviet times asserting an indomitable Jewish determination to survive, while in 1946 he completed Prints Ruveni (Prince Reuveni), first published, by virtue of the wartime alliance with the West, in the New York left-wing journal Yidishe kultur and reissued shortly thereafter in book form.17 While Ikh’l lebn was never performed in the USSR, Prints Ruveni, a historical drama based on the life of a sixteenth-century messianic figure who urged the Jewish people to self-redemption through force of arms, was in its final stage of rehearsal when Mikhoels was summoned to Minsk, where he was murdered on 13 January 1948 in an elaborately faked motor accident on direct orders from Stalin. Though Bergelson was no dramatist, and his plays were uniformly unsuccessful, the pain of contemporary events moved him to pen powerful expressions of Jewish national consciousness in the face of genocide.

Bergelson had embraced the Soviet Union and its ideology because he believed it offered the best chance for both the survival and the promotion of Yiddish culture through which he believed Jewish national identity in the modern world could be defined. In the aftermath of Hitler’s genocide, he found a way through the iron carapace of Stalinist ideology to assert a pride in Jewish identity. The stories Bergelson wrote in response to the Holocaust, first published in Eynikayt and thus subject to censorship, were partially assembled and published in book form under the title Geven iz nakht un gevorn iz tog (Night Fell and Day Followed) in Moscow in 1943; a further volume appeared in Moscow four years later under the title Naye dertseylungen (New Stories). To get this work past the censors, Bergelson carefully deployed his gifts for understatement and literary allusiveness. He offered no blatant depictions of violence; instead he used individual experiences as metonyms for mass murders. The party-pleasing, antireligious contempt for Judaism’s observances he had expressed in On the Dnieper—for which many of his readers never forgave him—were here replaced by a warm respect for Jewish pain, subtly highlighted in the context of generalized Soviet suffering at the hands of a common enemy. In several tales Bergelson consciously employs phrases from Judaism’s mourning tradition, citing from its Hebrew liturgy; in other stories he drew on the teachings of Hasidic rabbis, on Jewish legend and folklore in skillful allusions evident only to fellow Jews.18

After the war, in company with all other members of the JAFC, Bergelson was awarded the state medal “For Valiant Labor During the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945.” Such public acknowledgment of the work of the JAFC—and of how far the JAFC and its members openly identified themselves as Jews—exacted a heavy price. Both during and after the war, Soviet government policy was strict denial that the Nazis had singled out the Jews for special persecution; all citizens of the Soviet Union, it was claimed, had suffered equally in Hitler’s war of aggression. Yet by virtue of its official responsibilities, the JAFC had access to more information about the fate of Europe’s Jews than was made public in the USSR. It was impossible for them not to be overwhelmed by a sense of national catastrophe, but equally impossible to show such feelings openly. Only in secret, among trusted friends, could such prohibited emotions be shared. To the general Jewish public, the Soviet Union’s vote in favor of the partition of Palestine at the United Nations on 29 November 1947 suggested a change in official Jewish policy, but in reality by early 1948 Stalin had decided to eradicate Jewish culture from the USSR. Pretexts were created to place the JAFC under suspicion as a subversive organization working with American and British spies; the very agencies in the West with which it had been specifically charged to deal during the war years were now used to incriminate it. Steps were progressively taken to restrict the activities of the JAFC. In August 1946 it was placed under the control of the Central Committee Foreign Policy Division; in November its praise for the role of Jews in Soviet and world history was labeled a “chauvinistic-Jewish deviation.” Its closure was recommended because it had taken on a “nationalist and Zionist character.” During the second half of 1947, increasingly vehement anti-Zionist attacks on Jewish nationalism were launched, and Mikhoels was murdered the following January. Despite official attempts to present his death as an accident and the lavish state funeral he was accorded, it was clear to all, Bergelson included, that there would be no renewed acceptance of Jewish national identity. On 20 November 1948, the JAFC and its organ Eynikayt were shut down together with three other Yiddish periodicals in Moscow, Kiev, and Birobidzhan; Der emes, the sole Yiddish publishing house, was disbanded; and Yiddish publications in Ukraine and Byelorussia were banned. With the abolition of most other Jewish cultural institutions, mass arrests of principal Yiddish cultural figures began in September 1948 and continued until June 1949.

Bergelson was seized on the night of 23 January 1949, a week to the day after the first anniversary of Mikhoels’s state funeral. Together with his fellow accused, he lingered in prison for over three years, until his trial in May 1952. Fifteen defendants, including the poets Peretz Markish, David Hofshteyn, Itsik Fefer, and Leyb Kvitko, were charged with capital offenses, ranging from treason and espionage to “bourgeois nationalism.”

At their secret trial, the principal charge brought against the leaders of the JAFC was rooted in the “Crimea question.” To solve the problems of dispossession and anti-Jewish hostility in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Mikhoels and others had proposed making the Crimea, where Jews had established some small agricultural colonies in the 1920s, a Soviet Jewish republic. This proposal had been strongly supported, according to a report from the security services, by Bergelson, who had argued that a Jewish republic in the Crimea would be welcomed both by the Jewish population of the Soviet Union as a whole, and by other Soviet nationalities who were reluctant to see Jews “using their talents to take over choice regions in other parts of the USSR.”19 At first the regime pretended to treat this proposal seriously, but Lazar Kaganovich, the only Jew in Stalin’s Politburo, expressed its true attitude when he told Mikhoels that “only actors and poets” could dream up something so absurd.20 With the start of the Cold War, Stalin chose to believe that this proposal originated with the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), in his view a front organization for American imperialism, which aimed to establish a Jewish homeland in the Crimea as a “bridgehead” from which to implement a long-term strategy of dismembering the Soviet Union. This plan, it was now alleged, had been devised with the JDC by Fefer and Mikhoels during their official visit to New York in 1943, and had been developed during the approved postwar visits to the USSR of the left-wing Americans Peysekh (Paul) Novick, the editor of New York’s Morgn-frayhayt, and Sholem Aleichem’s son-in-law, the Yiddish journalist Benzion Goldberg. Anxious to assess the prospects for Jewish reconstruction after the war, these two journalists had naturally spent most of their time with Yiddish-speaking colleagues at the JAFC. Now security investigators perverted their visit into an accusation that they had been American espionage agents collecting secret economic and political information from Zionist traitors.

Most of the defendants in this mock trial were brutally treated. Only Fefer, who had been the executive secretary of the JAFC and an informer for the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) since at least 1943, cooperated with the investigation immediately, detailing a multitude of baseless allegations used to frame the indictment. Right to the end, Fefer was led to believe that, if he continued to cooperate, his life would be spared. Although the original intention was to conduct an open “show trial” like those of the Great Terror in 1937–1938, more urgent matters intervened and individual defendants, held in isolation for over three years, began to retract their testimony. When they were finally brought before a military tribunal in May 1952, they were required to speak in turn to “confessions” extorted under duress. Those who during the war had been explicitly entrusted with rousing international Jewish support for the Soviet war effort were now accused of replacing “proletarian internationalism” with “cosmopolitanism.” The fact that four of the five writers charged had lived abroad during the 1920s—Markish in Poland and France; Hofshteyn in Palestine; Kvitko and Bergelson in Germany—was adduced as proof of their long-standing treachery.