In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • A Little World in Transition: Jewish Culture and the Russian Revolution:Review Essay
  • Amelia Glaser (bio)
The End of Everything, by David Bergelson, translation and introduction by Joseph Sherman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 312 pp. $18.00.
Jewish Public Culture in the Late Tsarist Empire, by Jeffrey Veidlinger. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 382 pp. $24.95.
Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, by Kenneth B. Moss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. 408 pp. $39.95.

Russia, 1917. The storming of the Winter Palace. Tsar Nicholas II abdicates the throne and a provisional government replaces him. The poet Alexander Blok, who had hinted at his generation's mounting frustration in 1912 when he wrote "All remain just like this, there is no exit" [vse budet tak, iskhoda net], writes his famous poems The Twelve in 1918, setting it in a Petersburg suburb where Red army soldier shouts to a flag-waving Jesus, "Get out of the way, we're going to shoot" [vykhodi, streliat nachnem]. Also in 1918 the artist Natan Altman drapes a banner across Petersburg's Palace Square: "He who was naught shall be all."1 [End Page 137]

At this deeply uncertain moment, skepticism about the Bolshevik party aside, many Russian intellectuals were, as Katerina Clark puts it, "attracted by the possibility the Revolution offered to try out their particular agendas for cultural regeneration."2 By all accounts, a world was coming to an end. Russian culture was redefining itself to match a changing regime, and the eye of the storm was St. Petersburg.

Jewish culture was also redefining itself. For Yiddish literature the eye of the storm was not Petersburg, but somewhere in the vicinity of David Bergelson's Kiev apartment. Bergelson (1884-1952) was one of many Yiddish and Hebrew writers who had seen the profound implications of Russia's Revolution on his own little world. Jewishness, whether in Revolutionary Russia, in Europe, North America, or Palestine, meant something different in the twentieth century than for past generations. Bergelson personified this changing Jewish world in his 1913 Nokh Alemen [The End of Everything], a novel about a young woman, Mirel, who feels she has been lost between the worldview of a past generation and a new set of social values that have not yet fully taken shape. "The thought that someone else has lived through my springtime grows more and more obvious to me from day to day: Even before I was born, someone else had lived out my springtime" (End, 264).

Two excellent new studies compel us to reexamine the changes in Jewish culture in Revolutionary Russia, lifting the veil of nostalgia to expose a rapidly changing public sphere. Mirel's generation—the generation of the failed 1905 Revolution—is at the center of Jeffrey Veidlinger's Jewish Public Culture in the Late Tsarist Empire. Bergelson's own generation is the focus of Kenneth Moss's Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution. These important contributions to Russian Jewish history have coincided with the publication of a new translation of Bergelson's The End of Everything, rendered beautifully from the Yiddish by the late Joseph Sherman.

Set at the turn of the twentieth century in a shtetl that Bergelson's characters call "dispirited," "desolate," and "godforsaken," The End of Everything depicts a generation that has lost its youth. The main character, Mirel, whose name is a Yiddish diminutive of "mir," the Russian word for "world," is indeed an allegory for the "little world" of Russian Jewry, caught between traditions of the past and dim prospects for the future. The book has long been called feminist, and, according to its translator, it was "the novel through which Bergelson hoped to bring Yiddish literature into the mainstream of European letters" [End Page 138] (End, x). Bergelson's haunting Yiddish impressionism, once appreciated by precious few English-language readers, has become more familiar thanks to Joseph Sherman who, in 2007, together with Gennady Estraikh edited a critical anthology on Bergelson's life and work.3 A decade ago Sherman edited and translated Bergelson's Descent [opgang] and reissued the Yiddish original.4 Sherman's translation of The End of Everything, like his translation of Descent...

pdf