BERGELSON and the IRONY of MILGROYM, BERLIN 1922 Joseph
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
BERGELSON AND THE IRONY OF MILGROYM, BERLIN 1922 Joseph Sherman University of Oxford Uncomfortable with the ideological rigidity of Moscow Yiddish activists, and disappointed in his hope of launching a new literary journal, in early 1921 David Bergelson (1884–1952) left the starving Bolshevik capital to take up an invitation from Zev-Wolf Latzki-Bertoldi (1881–1939),1 from whom he had received an advance for work still to be written, to join him, Der Nister (1884–1950) and Leyb Kvitko (1890–1952) in Berlin. Travelling on a Lithuanian passport issued by Jurgis Baltrusaitis,2 Bergelson left Moscow in a freight car as part of a group of forty people and eight horses.3 Those travelling were drawn to Weimar Berlin by its promise of improved living condi- tions, and by the city’s publishing opportunities that combined low prices, high quality and lax censorship. In 1922, the year in which the Soviet Union was officially estab- lished, three committed Marxists from Kiev, Yekhezkl Dobrushin (1883–1953), Nokhem Oyslender (1893–1962) and Arn Kushnirov (1890–1949), founded the journal Shtrom, through which they aimed to support the Revolution while maintaining their artistic autonomy and attracting contributions from progressive Yiddish talents world- wide. This internationalist objective was bitterly opposed by Soviet ‘proletarian’ writers, who demanded that ‘petty bourgeois’ aesthetics— including ‘negative’ writing like ‘Veyland’ (Country of Woe), an elegy for the victims of the pogroms during the Civil War by Peretz 1 Latzki-Bertholdi, one of the co-owners of the Folksfarlag, was an activist in the Poalei Zion political movement and later headed the Emigdirekt organization that assisted Eastern European Jews to emigrate. 2 Jurgis Baltrusaitis (1873–1944), a highly cultivated man, spent the years of World War I and the Revolution in Russia and assisted many writers. Between 1920 and 1939, he served as Lithuania’s ambassador to Moscow. 3 A description of this departure is given in A. Ben-Adir [Abraham Rosin], ‘Ribak der mentsh’, in E. Tsherikover, ed., Yisokher-Ber Ribak: zayn lebn un shafn (Paris 1937) 78. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 ZUTOT 5.1 Also available online – www.brill.nl 80 joseph sherman Markish (1895–1852), which had been published in the new jour- nal’s first issue—be replaced by unqualified celebration of the bright future awaiting dedicated Soviet workers,4 praise for the cleansing destructiveness of revolution, the effacement of Jewish religious tra- ditions, and the creation of sloganeering propaganda readily acces- sible to the unsophisticated. Not directly involved in this ideological warfare Bergelson, moti- vated not only by personal scepticism but also by the need to earn a living, published wherever he could, including in such unaffiliated journals as Warsaw’s Moment and, from March 1922, in the social- ist but fiercely anti-communist New York daily, Forverts. Although he took every opportunity to defend what he regarded as the true con- cerns of Yiddish modernism, he was well aware that avant-garde lit- erature in Yiddish reached only an acculturated, polyglot minority. Having lost the cultured middle-class readers whom he had initially addressed, he now sought a new ‘mass’ readership, and consequently took care to keep abreast of developments in Moscow by contributing also to Shtrom 3 (1922). However, his most controversial—and most interesting—literary participation during 1922 was in the inaugural issue of Milgroym (Pomegranate). This was a highbrow, lavishly illustrated Yiddish peri- odical, with a Hebrew counterpart entitled Rimon, which aimed to heal the breach opened by divisive Yiddish-Hebrew language poli- tics while drawing Jews towards an appreciation of Western high culture. Bergelson and Der Nister joined the journal’s founder, scholar and Yiddishist Mark Wischnitzer (1882–1955), as its literary editors. The owner-publisher’s wife Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein (1885–1989), a pioneer of Jewish art history, designed the journal’s covers specifically to illustrate ways in which traditional medieval Jewish manuscript motifs could be reinvented for modern decorative purposes.5 To its first Yiddish issue, inside a full-colour cover representing a pome- granate in naïve folk style, Bergelson contributed two pieces. One was a review essay entitled ‘Der gesheener oyfbrokh’ (The Awakening [into the Modern] Has Occurred), in which he paid tribute to the 4 D. Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture (Cambridge 2004) 146, 166. 5 See D. Bechtel, ‘Milgroym’, in S. Gilman and J. Zipes, eds, The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996 (New Haven, CT 1997) 420–426..