Bergelson 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 Yidishe
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. 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. His 1926 essay "Three Centers" expressed a belief that the Soviet Union (where Yiddish language and literature were then receiving official patronage) had eclipsed the
assimilationist United States and backwards
Poland as the great future locus of Yiddish literature. He began writing for the
Communist Yiddish press in both New York (
Morgen Freiheit) and
Moscow (
Emes), and moved to the Soviet Union in 1933, around the time the
Nazis came to power in Germany. He was positively impressed with the
Jewish Autonomous Republic of
Birobidzhan, and participated in the
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during
World War II, co-editing the literary section of the Committee's journal,
Eynikayt (Unity). However, like many Soviet Jewish writers, he became a target of the
antisemitic "
rootless cosmopolitan" campaign. Arrested in January 1949, he was tried secretly and executed by a
firing squad in the event known as the
Night of the Murdered Poets on 12–13 August 1952. After Stalin's death, he was
posthumously rehabilitated in 1955, and his complete works were published in the Soviet Union in 1961. Bergelson's only child, , was an eminent Soviet
biochemist who also served as a Soviet Army captain during World War II. Prof. Lev Bergelson emigrated to
Israel in 1991 with his wife Naomi, where both he and his wife died in 2014. ==Works==