So, how does this Yiddish writer contribute, through Murav’s framing and contextualization, to our modern preoccupation with the texture of time, the force of the past and memory, and their sway over being? How does such a temporal inquiry illuminate the specific contemporaneity, intellectual hybridity, and radical evolution of Bergelson’s deeply political, and specifically socialist, thought? And, der iker, how can this Bergelson study be useful for us, and for the study of specifically Soviet Yiddish Studies? In her temporal focus on ‘belatedness’ and ‘futurity’ as the central leitmotif of Bergelson’s oeuvre, Murav not only attempts to make Bergelson whole again by eschewing “overly ideological approaches” and tricky political questions of “what Bergelson believed” (19), but also to trace his intellectual continuities, transformations, and ruptures over the course of forty years. When discussed at all outside the Soviet circle, his life’s work was essentially severed in two: the ‘glorious times’ before his fateful public embrace of the Soviet Union in 1926, and the ‘negligible time’ after it, when he was deemed not only ‘too Soviet’ but in fact responsible for his own execution. Bergelson was among those Yiddish writers who were put to death by Joseph Stalin on August 12th, 1952 for counterrevolutionary activity, bourgeois nationalism, and treason. remembered more for the way died than for the extraordinary body of literature” he produced while alive (317). This long-overdue intervention into scholarship on Bergelson-scholarship that, like Yiddish Studies in general, has suffered historically from myopic anti-Communist partisan approaches-centers on the texts’ evolving approaches to the texture of time and temporality.īefore David Bergelson’s Strange New World, the writer was mainly “. Not a typical biography, it instead offers a study of the writer’s life through careful readings of selected works (including texts heretofore marginalized or entirely ignored), written in Kiev and Moscow (1909–1921), in Berlin (1921–1934), and finally back in Moscow (1934–1952). Timing is everything, they say, and in the case of Harriet Murav it almost feels like she was ahead of ours: her much-anticipated monograph of one of Yiddish literature’s unofficial klasiker, Dovid Bergelson (1884–1952), appeared just as our own ‘pandemic age’ was dawning.

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