Micha Josef Berdyczewski was born in 1865 in the town of Medzhibozh (today
Medzhybizh) in
Podolia Governorate, to a family of
Hasidic Rabbis. His father was the town Rabbi. In his youth he began to read works from the
Jewish Enlightenment, and their influence is noticeable in his works. Berdyczewski was forced to divorce his first wife following her family's objection to his involvement with
secular literature. He then moved to the
Volozhin Yeshiva, but there too, his pursuit of unconventional literature stirred anger and objection. One of his earliest publications was about this period of his life—an article titled "Hetzitz V'nifga" (הציץ ונפגע in Hebrew—literally "peeked and got hurt", meaning "gone to heresy"), published in 1888 in the newspaper
Ha-Melitz. Most of his works from this period were polemic, and his emotional style became his trademark throughout his writing career. In 1890 he went to
Germany and
Switzerland, studied at the universities of
Berlin,
Breslau and
Bern, and completed his
Doctor of Philosophy degree. In this period Berdyczewski studied the works of the great German
philosophers Nietzsche and
Hegel, and was deeply influenced by them. In the ten years until his return to
Ukraine, he published many articles and stories in Hebrew journals. Up to 1900, the year in which he married Rahel Ramberg, Berdyczewski had published ten books. Upon his return to Ukraine, Berdyczewski encountered the harsh reality of Jewish life in the
Pale of Settlement, and subsequently the subject of many of his stories is the deterioration of the traditional way of life. His father, who had served for many years as rabbi in the village of Dubova in the
Uman area, was murdered during the
Petliura Pogroms in 1919. After a short stay in
Warsaw, Berdyczewski returned to Germany in 1911, where he lived until his death in 1921. He is buried in the Jewish Cemetery in
Weißensee, Berlin. ==Literary career==