In the face of hostile questioning from the presiding judge, most could not avoid debasing themselves in a desperate attempt to save their lives, Bergelson included. Nevertheless, his testimony proved that, whether or not he was dedicated to the ideology of Communism, he was certainly dedicated to fostering Jewish national identity through the medium of Yiddish.

Jews of Bergelson’s generation had been defined from childhood by a multitude of religious observances that he was now required to condemn. Forced to confess that these constituted “nationalism,” he exposed the impossibility of simultaneously being an identifying Jew and an ideologically conforming Communist: “I was raised and educated in a spirit of strict nationalism [ … ] There is a day that falls in August when the Temple of Solomon was burned [Tisha B’Av, the Ninth of Av]. On this day all Jews fast for twenty-four hours, even the children. They go to the cemetery for an entire day and pray there ‘together with the dead.’ I was so immersed in the atmosphere of that temple being burned—people talked about it a great deal in the community—that when I was six or seven years old it seemed to me that I could smell the fumes and the fire.”21

In the act of seemingly denouncing a boy’s indoctrination in “Jewish nationalism,” Bergelson actually defines a bond with the very traditions he supposedly abjures. Why elaborate on the atmosphere of Tisha B’Av to a hostile Gentile judge ignorant of Jewish law and custom? Why not denigrate the Passover Seder instead, or the twenty-fourhour liturgy of Yom Kippur, or the blessing of Levantine fruits and leaves on Sukkot? Why specifically name a fast that commemorates the Destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of the Jewish people? Jewish national mourning on this day is as much an expression of political as of religious loss. Given the extent to which Yiddish writers in the USSR, like their Russian-language counterparts, had been increasingly compelled to deploy Aesopian language to escape the censors, it is possible to read Bergelson’s testimony both as an encoded equation of Bolshevik with Roman repression, and as an encoded assertion of national pride that, at one point, was explicit in Bergelson’s response to the overt Jew hatred that increasingly emerged during the hearing. Taken as a whole, Bergelson’s testimony could be said to exemplify, in bitter reality, the same kind of affrmation in denial that he had fictionally dramatized in some of his “Berlin” stories twenty years earlier.22

He admitted to the “crime” of promoting Yiddish culture, speaking feelingly of the concern he and his colleagues had felt at the closure of Yiddish schools, and at the growing refusal of Jewish parents to place their children in the few remaining schools. Pointing—consciously or not—to the success of the state’s policy of forced assimilation, he highlighted his fear for the future of Soviet Yiddish culture, and admitted—because previously sanctioned conduct had now become a felony—that the Yiddish Section of the Soviet Writers’ Union had repeatedly sent its members to various cities to promote Yiddish culture. The presumed encouragement of Yiddish culture by the Bolshevik regime was what had drawn him back to the USSR; that regime’s malevolence in now destroying those who had taken its promises at face value was repeatedly exposed in his testimony, and that of others, in defending the work of the JAFC. To fulfill the task with which the state had charged it, the Committee had no alternative but to disseminate material specifically highlighting Soviet Jewish activities, because American Jewish institutions would publish nothing else. Similarly, the Committee had only been doing its duty by playing up the role of Jews who distinguished themselves at the front and behind the lines in reports for Eynikayt, since the newspaper had been specifically established to boost the morale of Yiddish-speaking Soviet Jews. How could it now be just to regard such activities as “essentially nationalistic propaganda”? Above all, Bergelson defended his right to be a Jew and to feel kinship with the Jewish people worldwide. “The anti-fascist Jews of the Soviet Union,” he said, “were appealing to Jews of all countries during the war. [ … ] This was a time when people with nationalistic feelings were included in the struggle. There are many such expressions [like ‘I am a child of the Jewish people’] which were permitted at the time and were appropriate then, whereas now they would be considered highly nationalistic. There was an expression ‘Brother Jews.’ I don’t see anything wrong with this expression. [ … ] There cannot be anything criminal in the phrase ‘I am a Jew.’ If I approach someone and say, ‘I am a Jew,’ what could be bad about that?”23

The most ironic moment in Bergelson’s testimony came when, accused by the presiding judge of “slanderously” suggesting that anti-Semitism was still rife in Ukraine, he was told that during his interrogation he had said that he wanted to leave for the Jewish autonomous district, where, as he put it, he “could die in peace.” To this Bergelson replied quite simply, “The last sentence is true. I talked about wanting to move to Birobidzhan and settle there.” All he now hoped for was to be allowed to die as a Jew in a Jewish place. By this time, Bergelson, like all his colleagues, must have known that he had served a lie, but in his final appeal to the court, he tried to save his life by repeating his pride in it: “I ask the court to take note of the fact that not one of the Yiddish writers of my age has entered the ranks of Soviet literature [ … ] I am the only one of that entire generation of writers who accepted the ideas of Comrades Lenin and Stalin and devoted the last thirty years to Soviet themes. I was headed toward attaining the level of a real Soviet man, but did not quite reach it, and of that I am guilty.”24

The indictment, and Fefer’s testimony on which it was founded, were so often exposed as fabrications by the defendants, in particular by Solomon Lozovsky—a former member of the Central Committee and deputy chairman of the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo)—that the authority of the security services was undermined. As Lozovsky incisively noted in one of his own interventions, “What is on trial here is the Yiddish language.” To cover this judicial sham—and to protect himself—the presiding judge halted the proceedings for almost a week, appealing for further investigation. Georgii Malenkov, at that time the second man in the government, personally instructed the wavering judge to “carry out the Politburo’s resolution.” He did so, and prearranged death sentences were handed down on 18 July. On 12 August 1952, his sixty-eighth birthday, Bergelson was one of thirteen defendants, including two women, to be shot.25 At the time of his arrest, the NKVD confiscated three sacks of manuscripts that, his widow believed, contained work that he had written with an increasing concern that it would never be published.

For some fifty years, the tensions of the Cold War, coupled with Shmuel Niger’s critical strictures, made it easy to dismiss most of Bergelson’s post-Revolution work as Stalinist propaganda. This prejudice has been deep and lasting; there are many readers, even today, unwilling to admit that some work produced under the constraints of “socialist realism” has artistic worth. Most readers of Yiddish prose associate Bergelson exclusively with the oblique and allusive style he perfected in his earliest writing, of which The End of Everything is the supreme example. Anything else he produced, to which the label “impressionist” cannot be attached, has been neglected, thus limiting perception of the extent of his versatility and the ways in which, throughout a long creative career, he continually reinvented himself as a writer. His political reorientation linked genuinely held socialist principles to the conviction that Yiddish culture, trapped between the assimilation demanded in the West, and the antagonism toward Yiddish in Jewish Palestine, could grow only in the Soviet Union. Yet, significantly, Bergelson returned to live in Moscow only when no other options were open to him. Whether driven by what he accepted as the irresistible forces of history, or by the yearning to live among Yiddish-speaking Jews, after thirteen years of emigration abroad, he rejected the West and returned home.