The lives of writers cast long shadows over their work. This has certainly been true for David Bergelson, one of the 13 Soviet Jewish writers and activists shot in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison during the Night of the Murdered Poets on August 12, 1952. Like the other victims of Stalin’s purge, Bergelson had been tortured and interrogated during secret trials before he was finally convicted of treason in the form of Jewish nationalism.

As a young writer, Bergelson had aligned himself with the Yiddishist movement, promoting Yiddish as the language through which a modern, secular Jewish culture could be formed. In these years, he drifted from city to city, living in Odessa, Kiev, Moscow, and Berlin, and writing for socialist as well as politically unaffiliated publications. By the mid 1920s, however, his political stance had begun to change. The Soviet government had recently announced its plans to establish a Jewish republic with Yiddish as its official language – plans that would eventually yield the bleak disappointment of Siberian Birobidzhan – and Bergelson, in thrall to the dream of a permanent home for Yiddish culture, enthusiastically dedicated himself to the Soviet cause. In 1926, he published the controversial essay “Three Centers” (“Dray tsentern”), in which he analyzed the Yiddish literary cultures of America, Poland, and the Soviet Union, arguing that the latter had the brightest future of the three.

Today, this essay is a reminder of the great hope and the even greater betrayal that met Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union. In 1937, three years after Bergelson and his family fled Germany for the relative safety of Moscow, Stalin conducted the first of his major purges of Yiddish intellectuals. Bergelson survived the wave of arrests and state-sponsored murders by endorsing the state’s actions. After the Second World War broke out, he joined the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a group founded by Stalin with the aim of courting international Jewish support. Though the Soviet government praised Bergelson and the other Committee members for their wartime efforts, its favor was short-lived. Only a few years later, in yet another vertiginous shift in official policy, the former members were arrested and charged with crimes against the state. After three years in prison, Bergelson was convicted of attempting to undermine the government through his support of Jewish causes. He was shot on the day of his 68th birthday.

Less than a decade after his murder, Bergelson’s work once again received the official endorsement of the Soviet government, reappearing in print in 1961. Among the works that were republished was Bergelson’s first novel, The End of Everything (Nokh alemen), a brooding, impressionistic portrait of shtetl life in the years before the 1917 Russian Revolution. It is now available to English readers in a new translation by Joseph Sherman, the seventh book to appear in the New Yiddish Library series, a joint project of the Yiddish Book Center and the Fund for Translation of Jewish Literature. The novel reveals the ambition and subtlety of Bergelson’s talent before he devoted it to the demands of Soviet propaganda. Sherman, who passed away only months before the translation was published last fall, provides an excellent scholarly introduction and thorough notes on the text, offering readers a wealth of historical and cultural knowledge.

First published in 1913 when Bergelson was only 29 years old, The End of Everything tells the story of Mirel Hurvits and the succession of lovelorn suitors who fail to win her heart. The novel begins with Mirel’s decision to break off her four-year engagement to Velvl Burnes, the softhearted but shallow son of a newly rich businessman in her shtetl. Over the next few years, Velvl watches from a distance as Mirel takes up with one hopelessly besotted suitor after another, only to grow bored with them when she begins to imagine the dreary routine into which her life would fall after marriage. The one suitor she seems to truly love is Nosn Heler, a frivolous young student who, we’re told, has already failed the university’s entrance examinations twice. Nevertheless, this romance goes the way of the others:

But once, in the late twilight of a spring evening, Mirel vividly pictured herself two years after her marriage to Heler, totally alone, having finished her late afternoon tea, lying on a sofa in that ivy-covered cottage near a factory and thinking indifferently and without the slightest desire in her heart:
– He . . . Nosn . . . he’d come home to bed from the factory so often on previous occasions . . . He’d definitely come home tonight as well.
And during that same twilight she searched all over the shtetl for Heler, eventually found him, and told him:
– Nothing would come of this, so Heler . . . Heler could leave the shtetl that very day.

“Nothing would come of this” becomes something of a refrain for Mirel. Dissatisfied with her life and scornful of the traditional bourgeois values of her neighbors and acquaintances, she searches in vain for some greater meaning, the elusive “central, overriding concern” of her life, as she puts it. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Mirel will never find this greater meaning. Chronically depressed and maddeningly self-absorbed, she seeks temporary amusement in her suitors but finds only confirmations of her world-weary despair. She feels oppressed by their desire for marriage and social respectability, but she finds herself trapped by the limitations of her own imagination no less than by those of the society and the time in which she lives. “The overriding concern was that every day she felt something ought to be done, but didn’t know what or how,” she realizes. “Every day she thought she’d know what it was the next day, but the next day she failed again . . .” When her father runs into business difficulties and falls into debt, she sacrifices her tenuous freedom by entering into a second engagement, this time to Shmulik Zaydenovski, a handsome, wealthy young man who resembles her first fiancé both in temperament and in the feelings of disgust he inspires in her.

Their tumultuous engagement and the scandalous events of their marriage are dramatic enough to earn Mirel the censure of her neighbors and acquaintances, but Bergelson denies his readers the cheap thrills of melodrama. Instead of lingering over the juicy details of Mirel’s social transgressions, his focus remains on her inner turmoil, yielding a subtle portrait of her troubled emotional life. Mirel alternates between periods of depression when she refuses to leave the house and days of listless boredom when she wanders aimlessly through the streets of the shtetl or, after moving to Kiev with Shmulik, the thoroughfares of the city. Though she often shares these meandering walks with her admirers, Mirel, absorbed in her private suffering, seems only partially aware of their presence.

During his descriptions of these long walks, Bergelson creates an impressionistic landscape that mirrors Mirel’s quiet desperation. The streets of the shtetl and the “provincial capital,” as Kiev is referred to throughout the novel, seem gray and lifeless. In stark contrast to the sentimental vision of the shtetl home promoted by Fiddler on the Roof and any number of novels and films, the houses Mirel passes in her endless walks all seem shuttered and mute, refusing to yield any vision of comfort or happiness.

The asceticism of Bergelson’s writing – its preference for impressionistic descriptions and repetitive patters over dramatic action – is a reflection of the modernist innovations that were sending shock waves through European literature in 1913. Like the Yiddishists who would found the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research twelve years later, Bergelson hoped to introduce the newest innovations in modern European literature and thought to Yiddish readers. By creating a sophisticated work of modernist fiction in Yiddish, Bergelson, like other Yiddishists, insisted that Yiddish was more than a folksy zhargon (jargon), a language suited only for the home and the marketplace, as its detractors claimed.

Almost 100 years later, it’s impossible to know what these efforts might have yielded in the long term had they not been interrupted by the brutal events of the past century. What we do know, however, is the pioneering influence they had on other writers of the time. From them a rich body of modernist Yiddish fiction and poetry emerged on both sides of the Atlantic, blossoming in the decades before the Second World War.

In this sense, The End of Everything also marks a beginning. In its pages, we hear the early rumblings of these new forms of expression, even as we catch glimpses of the disintegration of shtetl life as tsarist Russia began to crumble, taking with it the barriers that insulated the Jewish Pale of Settlement from the outer world. By the end of the novel, these transformations are echoed in the melancholy voice of Mirel’s first fiancé as he looks at the house where one of her relatives once lived. “Here in the shtetl, the long hot days would soon stretch out endlessly with all the tedium of summer,” he thinks to himself. “The place would be deserted, and there’d be no one left to respect.” To contemporary readers, this vision of an empty shtetl may be a melancholy portent of this world’s impending destruction. As The End of Everything reminds us, however, this sense of loss shouldn’t overshadow the memory of all that was gained in those tumultuous years. It was from this changing world, after all, that the new Yiddish modernism, of which Bergelson was one of the clearest voices, first emerged.