David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism. Proceedings of the 6th Mendel Friedman Conference

Among the finest prose stylists in Yiddish literature, David Bergelson (1884-1952) was swept up in many of the twentieth century's most defining events. A pioneer of modernist prose in tsarist Russia, he welcomed the Revolution, but the ensuing Civil War drove him to emigration in Berlin. Shocked by the Wall Street Crash of 1929, disheartened by the world-wide decline of Yiddish culture, and inspired by Soviet promises to create an autonomous Jewish republic, Bergelson became a Communist sympathizer. Returning from Weimar Germany to the Soviet Union after Hitler's rise to power, Bergelson at first flourished, his work widely read both in Yiddish and in Russian translation. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he became a prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), writing as passionately as Soviet censorship permitted about the repressed subject of the Holocaust. In the paranoia of the Cold War years, Stalin's regime accused him of anti-Soviet activities and, after a secret military trial, he was executed on 12 August 1952, his 68th birthday.