Yazar: Joseph Sherman

A Russian Yiddish novelist and a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, David Bergelson (1884–1952) was one of the thirteen defendants at the infamous trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee held in Moscow in May 1952. He was not shot with the other defendants because he suffered a nervous collapse in prison, where he died in January 1953. Many scholars believe that Bergelson is the most significant modernist writer in Yiddish prose fiction, including I. B. Singer, but his works have not been well or widely translated and he is little known outside of scholarly circles. Bergelson focused on the upwardly mobile, self-aware, nouveaux riche Jews from Russia”s great metropolises. He is a modernist writer whose skepticism and distress about culture and society underlay a quest for Jewish identity in a collapsing world. The translator, Joseph Sherman, has been the Corob Fellow in Yiddish Studies at Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford University. He is the author of The Jewish Pope: Myth, Diaspora and Yiddish Literature (Oxford, 2003) and translator of Isaac Singer”s Shadows on the Hudson (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1987).