Dovid Bergelson
| David Bergelson | |
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David Bergelson with his son Lev
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| Born | 12 August 1884 |
| Died | 12 August 1952 (aged 68) |
| Known for | Yiddish Writer |
David (or Dovid) Bergelson (דוד בערגעלסאָן) (12 August 1884 – 12 August 1952) was a Yiddish language writer. Ukrainian-born, he lived for a time in Berlin, Germany. He moved back to the Soviet Union when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. He was ultimately executed during an antisemitic campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans".
Born in the Ukrainian shtetl of Okhrimovo (also known as Okhrimovka, and now as Sarny near Uman), he first became known as a writer in the wake of the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. From a Hasidic background, but having received both religious and secular education, much of his writing is reminiscent of Anton Chekhov: stories of "largely secular, frustrated young people…, ineffectual intellectuals…", frustrated by the provincial shtetl life. Writing at first in Hebrew and Russian, he only met success when he turned to his native Yiddish; his first successful book was Arum Vokzal (At the Depot) a novella, published at his own expense in 1909 in Warsaw.
In 1917, he founded the avant garde Jidishe Kultur Lige (Yiddish Culture League) in Kiev. In spring 1921 he moved to Berlin, which would be his base throughout the years of the Weimar Republic, although he traveled extensively through Europe and also visited the United States in 1929-30, to cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York (as documented by video link.) According to J. Hoberman, he was "the best-known (and certainly the best-paid) Russian Yiddish writer of the 1920s". Until the mid-1920s he wrote for the New York City-based Yiddish-language newspaper The Forward.
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