In willfully blinding himself to the dangers that lurked there, he was one of thousands caught in a tragic lie. During the agonizing years he and his fellow writers spent in prison, and again through the shocking weeks of the rigged “trial,” the extent of this lie would have certainly become clear to them. Their aims—to promote Yiddish language and culture by exercising their considerable talents as writers and poets—had been noble; how far they were to blame for trying to survive in a despotic system that grew increasingly more murderous and from which they could not escape is a question readers must answer for themselves.

In 1961, nine years after his death, a volume of Bergelson’s selected work was published in Moscow during the Khrushchev “thaw.”26 This book, one of only six in Yiddish allowed into print between 1959 and 1961, is significant because it marked Bergelson’s official Soviet “rehabilitation” and identified those of his works that were acceptable to the party line of the 1960s. Among them, interestingly, was The End of Everything, which was republished in its entirety. The appreciation of a masterpiece, it would seem, can survive even the most brutal vicissitudes of ideology.

2.

Set in and around the unnamed but easily identifiable city of Kiev, with its action shifting between metropolis and shtetl during a period of intense capitalist growth between 1905 and 1914, When All Is Said and Done views the coterminous decay of tsarist rule and traditional Eastern European Jewish life through the tangled emotions of its depressive chief character, Mirel Hurvits. She is briefly jolted out of her neartotal self-absorption by the decline in fortunes of her father, Reb Gedalye, a refined and learned Jew whose old-fashioned business methods cannot compete with those of aggressive nouveaux riches like Avrom-Moyshe Burnes27 and Yankev-Yosl Zaydenovski. In a society dominated by material values, Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s bankruptcy becomes an embarrassment that renders him dead even while he is still alive: at his funeral his bier is rushed off to the cemetery “like something that ought to be hidden from sight as quickly as possible” (4.1).

Though the outward pattern of Jewish life in both shtetl and city continues to follow the rhythm of the liturgical year, and the externals of festivals are carefully observed, religious observance has essentially been reduced to a means of acquiring or retaining social status. Thus only in prosperous middle age does the unlearned Avrom-Moyshe Burnes feel the necessity to start attending prayers regularly (1.1), while the crafty Yankev-Yosl Zaydenovski leads prayers in the synagogue chiefly to indulge the same vanity (2.9) that makes him entertain lavishly on Sabbaths and festivals (3.3). Even Reb Gedalye’s Judaism is more intellectual than spiritual: he reads such works of medieval Jewish philosophy as the Kuzari by the poet and thinker Judah Halevi, but he fails to bring up his daughter with any sense of religion (3.11). Avreml, the shtetl rabbi, is a figure of limited influence, reductively designated only by the diminutive of his personal name and daily undermined by his marriage to a commonplace social climber with a malicious streak.

Mirel, a beautiful, hypersensitive young woman around whom every action in the novel turns, is continually in search of some undefined alternative to the tedium of bourgeois life both in the shtetl and in the metropolis.28 Her hopeless search for some meaning—the “central, overriding concern” she repeatedly mentions—and her failure to find a place for herself in a vacuous world certainly embodies the demoralization of an entire generation of young Russian Jews on the eve of revolution, yet her personal choices limit her life even further. She is not part of the intelligentsia, since she is scantily educated, has no desire to pursue further study, reads in a superficial and desultory manner, and remains rooted in a privileged class. At the age of seventeen, as Mirel herself recounts (2.3), she is betrothed to Velvl Burnes, an engagement that drags on for four years before it is broken off, making her twentyone when the novel opens. Since its events play out over a carefully marked period of two years, she is only twenty-four when she finally disappears without a trace. In so far as she rejects what she does not want without defining any clear alternative for herself to pursue, she justifies Herz’s dismissal of her as “a provincial tragedy” (2.11).

Created in the shadow of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Mirel might seem at first glance to be a proto-feminist avant la lettre. On the surface she does many things radical for her sex, time, and class. Her closest friend in the shtetl is the fiercely independent midwife Schatz; she pursues at least one extramarital affair that is sexual, and scandalously undergoes an abortion to rid herself of an unwanted child; one of the books she reads suggests some intellectual interest in the position of women in society. Yet unlike her only female friend, who is a dedicated midwife, Mirel is totally self-centered and does nothing to establish an independent life for herself. She agrees to accept as her husband Shmulik Zaydenovski, a rich young man from the metropolis who is besotted with her, in a momentary access of pity for her ruined and desperately ill father, yet she can hardly be said to sacrifice herself for him, since she seeks to cancel her betrothal almost immediately after she has agreed to it. As soon as Shmulik tearfully resists, she submits (2.13) even as she absurdly attempts to preserve her liberty by demanding the right to a celibate marriage, from which she insists she must be free to leave whenever she chooses. She subsequently permits her husband to have conjugal relations with her for the same reason she marries him—indifference rather than choice. The narrative repeatedly stresses the extent to which, as an only child, she is both spoiled and selfish; she lacks any defining moral values and is wholly unable to empathize with others. Yet her conduct does not exclusively derive from caprice: a depressive personality, she is genuinely in a state of what the twentieth century called “existential angst.”

Mirel’s relationships with men are always paralyzed by her image of life after marriage, which presents itself to her as a vision of endless boredom, isolation, and hopelessness, nowhere more vividly than at the party held to celebrate her betrothal to Shmulik Zaydenovski:

The conversation flowed from sixty eating and drinking mouths simultaneously, but none of this prevented Mirel from feeling as isolated as she’d felt before when she thought of the great provincial capital where she’d live with Shmulik in three or four rooms, and imagined the streets she’d once visited there as a child with Reb Gedalye.

—There one summer evening they’d stroll out somewhere as a couple, would walk slowly and have nothing to say to each other, would return home and again have nothing to speak about there. [2.9]

All Mirel seems to require of men is wealth and good looks, requirements ironically emphasized by her choice of the crippled medical student Lipkis as an interim companion. Lipkis is poor and unattractive as well as crippled, and Mirel clearly uses him to spite the rest of the shtetl. She finds the blond Shmulik physically acceptable because he looks “like a European” (2.5), but she has a sexual affair with the swarthy but handsome idler Nosn Heler, who looks “like a Romanian” (2.8). When Heler starts to bore her, she breaks o. with him, realizing that a sexual liaison is not what she is looking for. Yet she rejects two other alternatives available to women of her time: the conventional role of wife and mother personified by the former revolutionary Miriam Lyubashits, and the promiscuous existence of a “free spirit” lived by her rich and dissolute cousin Ida Shpolianski. She seems always to be living between a break with one man and awakening affection for another.29 While still engaged to Velvl she has an affair with Heler; she then separates from Velvl to take up with Lipkis, and drops Lipkis in favor of the jaded but good-looking Hebrew poet Herz. For a time she seems to long for serious love, yet reminds herself that although “other people were living fully.