THE STORIES OF DAVID BERGELSON

Bergelson (18841952) was a Russian Jewish writer whose hopeful embrace of Communism persuaded him briefly to write according to the dictates of Socialist Realism, and whose subsequent disillusionment stimulated his passionate commitment to the dissemination and survival of Yiddish culture, leading to his arrest and murder in a Stalinist prison camp. His fiction—stark and pessimistic in the extreme—has heretofore appeared only piecemeal, in various story anthologies. The three works collected here, all written early in Bergelson's career, bring a grave and elegiac tone (very nicely translated) and a keen understanding of the psychology of alienation and despair to memorable portrayals of a homely woman's determined pursuit of her right to happiness (``Remnants''), a father and his adult daughters who seem to mourn themselves and one another even as they live (``Impoverished''), and a suicide that produces surprising changes in the lives of those left behind (the novella ``Departing''). Intense and uncompromising fiction from one of the great, neglected Yiddish storytellers.