David Bergelson's Strange New World

Harriet Murav

Description

David Bergelson (1884–1952) emerged as a major literary figure who wrote in Yiddish before WWI. He was one of the founders of the Kiev Kultur-Lige and his work was at the center of the Yiddish-speaking world of the time. He was well known for creating characters who often felt the painful after-effects of the past and the clumsiness of bodies stumbling through the actions of daily life as their familiar worlds crumbled around them. In this contemporary assessment of Bergelson and his fiction, Harriet Murav focuses on untimeliness, anachronism, and warped temporality as an emotional, sensory, existential, and historical background to Bergleson's work and world. Murav grapples with the great modern theorists of time and memory, especially Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin, to present Bergelson as an integral part of the philosophical and artistic experiments, political and technological changes, and cultural context of Russian and Yiddish modernism that marked his age. As a comparative and interdisciplinary study of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture, this work adds a new, ethnic dimension to understandings of the turbulent birth of modernism.

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction

Part I: Postscripts and Departures

Chapter 1: Congealed Time

Chapter 2: The Aftereffect

Chapter 3: Taking Leave

Part II: Bodies, Things, and Machines

Chapter 4: The Glitch

Chapter 5: Delay, Desire, and Visuality

Part III: A Strange New World

Chapter 6: Judgment Deferred

Chapter 7: The Execution of Judgment

Part IV: Time Cannot Be Mistaken

Chapter 8: Socialism's Frozen Time

Chapter 9: The Gift of Time

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• 20th Century
• Jewish Studies
• Modern
• criticism
• Holocaust
• HISTORY
• The Holocaust
• Modern history
• Eastern Europe
• Yiddish language
• Soviet Union
• Revolution
• Russia
• Modernism
• Yiddish
• Eastern
• Révolution (homonymie)
• European
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Henri Bergson
• Holocauste
• Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253036940
• Langue: English

Extrait

DAVID BERGELSON S STRANGE NEW WORLD
JEWS IN EASTERN EUROPE
Jeffrey Veidlinger
Mikhail Krutikov
Genevi ve Zubrzycki
Editors
DAVID
BERGELSON S
STRANGE
NEW WORLD
Untimeliness and Futurity
Harriet Murav
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Harriet Murav
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-03690-2 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-03691-9 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-03692-6 (web PDF)
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
For Sam, David, Penelope, and Sissela
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Translation
Introduction
Part 1 Postscripts and Departures
1 Congealed Time
2 The Aftereffect
3 Taking Leave
Part 2 Bodies, Things, and Machines
4 The Glitch
5 Delay, Desire, and Visuality
Part 3 A Strange New World
6 Judgment Deferred
7 The Execution of Judgment
Part 4 Time Cannot Be Mistaken
8 Socialism s Frozen Time
9 The Gift of Time
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
C OLLEAGUES AND GRADUATE STUDENTS IN SLAVIC, HISTORY, JEWISH Studies, REEEC, and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provided a warm but also intellectually challenging environment for the exchange of ideas, and I have benefitted from their company. I am grateful to the Center for Advanced Study for awarding me a semester of teaching leave, and to the Research Board for funding research travel to Moscow and New York. The Slavic Reference Service, headed by Joe Lenkart, not only answered numerous questions, opening doors for new approaches, but also acquired new materials for me in lightning-quick time. Nadja Berkovitch and LeiAnna Hamel provided invaluable research assistance. I was privileged to be an external faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2012-2013, which made many delightful and productive conversations possible, including those with Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, Grisha Freidin, Monika Greenleaf, Gabriella Safran, and Zachary Baker. Dr. Marina Bergelson Raskina gave generously of her time to speak with me about her grandfather and provided wise insights about his art. Dr. Arkady Zel tser kindly shared Yad Vashem s extensive archival holdings, which revealed new perspectives on Bergelson in his later years. Martin Kavka helped me better understand what I was trying to say about Bergelson and Gershom Scholem. The experience of translating Bergelson together with Sasha Senderovich, with the mentoring of Susan Bernofsky, made possible by a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowship, brought me closer to Bergelson. Gennady Estraikh and Misha Krutikov heard many parts of this study in various conference settings, and I am very grateful for their enthusiastic and helpful interest along the way. I also feel privileged to be part of the new series Jews in Eastern Europe and thank the editors for including me.
Bruce Rosenstock and I happened to be working on vitalism at the same time, and strangely, or perhaps appropriately for a book on time and memory, I can t remember who started talking about Henri Bergson first-probably Bruce. I owe him more than I can say for his extraordinary erudition, stunning clarity of thought, and endless patience with my repeated Does this make sense? What if I said . . .?
Part of chapter 8 and the introductory material to part 3 were previously published in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism , edited by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (Legenda, 2007), Children and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity , edited by Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge, and Mikhail Krutikov (Legenda, 2016), and Three Cities of Yiddish: St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow , edited by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Legenda, 2017). I am grateful to the publisher for permission to reprint them. A section of chapter 9 originally appeared in Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolutionary Russia (2011) and is reprinted with the permission of Stanford University Press. An earlier version of the conclusion was published in East European Jewish Affairs in 2018, and I thank the editors and publisher for permission to use some of the same material.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION
I N TRANSLITERATING RUSSIAN, I HAVE FOLLOWED THE LIBRARY of Congress System, except for words and names commonly appearing in English. For Yiddish, I followed the YIVO guidelines, with the same exception. The transliteration of Hebrew words that have entered Yiddish reflects their pronunciation in Yiddish, and not modern Hebrew.
DAVID BERGELSON S STRANGE NEW WORLD
INTRODUCTION
There are in our lives moments of eternity. My life is an example.
It consists only of such moments.
David Bergelson, Letter to Yosl Kiper, 1924. 1
W HILE WILLIAM BLAKE WISHED TO EXPERIENCE ETERNITY IN an hour, the Yiddish author David Bergelson needed only a moment to expand time beyond all limits. Not given to direct autobiographical statements, Bergelson chose to characterize his life in terms of temporality-significantly, the radical contraction and dilation of the time of his life. Bergelson was forty years old when he wrote about his moments that were eternities. He was residing temporarily in Berlin, having left Moscow in 1921. Born in Okhrimovo, a shtetl in Kiev province in the Pale of Settlement in 1884, Bergelson had begun writing in Kiev, traveling to Odessa, Vilnius, and Warsaw as a young man. He lived through World War I and the Russian revolution and civil war. Lacking formal secular schooling, he had read the Russian and European classics, as well as the Yiddish and Hebrew works of the most important authors of his time. He had risen from obscurity to the top of his profession, having transformed himself from an unknown (who had to pay for the publication of his first literary work) into an acknowledged master of Yiddish prose. Bergelson would remain in Berlin for another nine years, until Hitler came to power. He lived in Copenhagen in 1933 before returning to the Soviet Union in 1934, and he spent almost another twenty years writing and publishing in Yiddish before his execution in 1952.
Yiddish and shtetl may suggest to some readers a self-enclosed community of pious Jews, celebrating their rituals in an unchanging annual cycle. In Bergelson s world, however, time is out of joint. Anachronism, belatedness, and untimeliness, both joyful and tragic, unfold as an emotional, sensory, and existential condition in the world his fiction creates and the world in which he lived. For Bergelson, Yiddish is the vehicle for untimeliness and futurity, the realm of memory and the strange new world created by the Russian revolution. 2
Bergelson used Yiddish to draw attention to the materiality of language and to experiment with the acoustic properties of words and the graphical features of writing. He explored what the literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky called the tactile perception of literature by using rhythm, repetition, and sound play. Bergelson introduced Hebrew, Russian, French, Latin, and German into his Yiddish texts. He remarked that his language was strange because he was, so to speak, translating into Yiddish conversations that the younger generation of Jews would have had in Russian. 3 In addition to the device of translation, he used deafness, stuttering, blindness, and other disabilities as artistic devices that impede the transmission of meaning and thus heighten readers attention to the sensory qualities of his language and the strangeness of the world that it describes. I take the title of this book from Bergelson s 1929 novel Judgment ( Mides-hadin ), in which the Russian revolution gives rise to a strange new world. The strange new world begins for Bergelson before the revolution, and it is not only strange, but also rich with possibility.
In this study of Bergelson, I focus on time, and in addition to analyzing time as the central theme of Bergelson s writing, I place Bergelson in his time, a period of overwhelming cataclysmic events and enormous innovation, discovery, and creativity. 4 The scientific, technological, and artistic innovation; social transformation; political upheaval; and violence of this period seemed to its observers to break time apart. Osip Mandelshtam remarked, The concept of a unit of time has began to falter and it is no accident that contemporary mathematics has advanced the principle of relativity. 5 Shklovsky similarly observed that every day social reality . . . is multitemporal. 6 Mandelshtam, Shklovsky, and Bergelson shared a common milieu whose multiple temporalities coexisted and collided: subjective, emotional time, the mechanized production schedule of the factory, the natural cycle of the seasons, the annual round of Jewish religious holidays (observed and observed in the breach), end-time of the collapse of empires, the new time of revolution, and the forward-looking linear time of building socialism. <