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he defended the claims of individual freedom and creativity
against the stultifying demands of such abstractions as tradition,
religion, public consensus and will, history, and ideology.
Here and in other articles, Berdyczewski attacked the limited
scope of much of Hebrew literature, the inadequacies of Haskalah,
Aḥad Ha-Amism, and Ḥibbat Zion. After two years of
studies in Berne, Berdyczewski returned to spend four years
(1896–1900) in Berlin, one of the most productive periods in
his life. Stimulated by his opposition to both *Aḥad Ha-Am
and *Herzl, and encouraged by his friends and other Hebrew
writers there, Berdyczewski published in many of the leading
Hebrew journals, vigorously attacking all accepted ideological
positions and calling for a “transvaluation” – in the Nietzschean
sense – of Judaism and Jewish history, and the expansion
of the canons of Hebrew literary taste. His impulsive
tone won him the admiration of the young and the scorn of
the older, more conservative readers, mostly the admirers of
Aḥad Ha-Am. The famous Aḥad Ha-Am versus Berdyczewski
debate appeared in Ha-Shilo’aḥ (1897). In 1900 Berdyczewski
firmly established himself in the history of Hebrew literature
with the publication of nine volumes of articles and stories.
The year 1900 was also significant in Berdyczewski’s
personal life; he married Rachel Romberg, a dentist. During
the next 20 years she assisted him in his literary and scholarly
work and together with their son Immanuel Bin-Gorion
continued to edit his writings after his death. With his bride
he returned home for a brief visit to the Russian Pale of Settlement
for the first time in ten years. The renewed confrontation
with the harsh realities of Jewish life in the Pale both
modified his stridency and rekindled his interest in the narrative
possibilities afforded by this rapidly disintegrating organic
community.
After a short stay in Warsaw, he returned to Germany
and Breslau (1901–11) and, in self-imposed isolation from colleagues
and current affairs, devoted himself to intense literary
work which he carried out through many periods of poverty
and infirmity until his death. In Breslau, where some of his
finest works were written between 1906 and 1909, he continued
to write in Hebrew, but embarked upon several new ventures
– he wrote articles and stories in Yiddish; systematically
collected rabbinic legends; studied the origins of Judaism with
particular emphasis upon the Samaritan tradition; and began a
still unpublished diary in German. His collected Yiddish writings
were published in 1912. After moving to Berlin in 1911, he
edited anthologies of legends, reworked his previous writings
for the Stybel edition (1921–25), and studied Jewish history of
the biblical and Christian period. The years after 1914 were
particularly difficult: his health failed; his travel was restricted
since he was a Russian citizen; and after the war he was deeply
shocked at the news of the pogrom in Doubovo and his father’s
murder. Nevertheless, Berdyczewski wrote some of his major
stories after the war, notably his short novel Miryam, which
he completed shortly before his death.
Though Berdyczewski’s writings are commonly divided
into four groups: essay, fiction, folklore anthologies, and schol-
berdyczewski, micha josef
arship, the borders between them are often quite arbitrary.
Written over a period of 35 years and edited by the author for
the Stybel edition, Berdyczewski’s literary output is rich but
its ambivalent attitudes are the mark of an uprooted, marginal
man capable of simultaneously embracing logically
contradictory positions and emotions. Many of Berdyczewski’s
paradoxes can be understood in terms of the dialectical
stages of his development, each a reflection of fin de siècle
European moods.
In his literary criticism, Berdyczewski derided exhibitionistic
mannerism and the submission of a writer’s artistic
individuality to the demands of ideology. He showed little
appreciation for the outstanding literary figures of his day,
*Mendele Mokher Seforim, Aḥad Ha-Am, Ḥ.N. *Bialik, and
J. *Klausner, but supported younger writers like J.H. *Brenner
and M.Z. *Feuerberg and others devoted to their art. He held
literature to be one of the vital forces in human experience and
reacted to it impressionistically in often fragmentary critical
essays, replete with intemperate outbursts and bitter irony;
hence his critical point of view is far from consistent.
Berdyczewski wrote more than 150 Hebrew stories, many
in Yiddish, and several in German. These stories deal with two
central subjects: life in the Jewish towns of Eastern Europe in
the last decades of the 19th century and the life of the Eastern
European Jewish students in the cities of Central and Western
Europe. Heavily autobiographical, many of his pre-1900
stories are often impressionistic, emotional monologues with
essayistic digressions.
The shtetl (“Jewish town”) served as the background for
dramatic situations embodying Berdyczewski’s philosophical
outlook. He was obsessed with exceptional, individualistic
types – lonely, rebellious, and ostracized, and the inevitable
clash between them and the intolerant community. The
archetypal topography of the town with its Jewish and gentile
quarters separated by a river is symbolic of the psychological
and social tensions in dozens of stories. Often there is
an implied protest against pre-arranged marriages and other
forms of coercion within the Jewish community which cause
misery, particularly for the women. Life is often depicted as
a struggle between light and darkness, beauty and ugliness,
refinement and crudeness, and in this struggle the good and
beautiful are vanquished. The stories after 1900 consciously
strive to erect a literary monument to a fading society or to
comprehend human existence in literary terms. Increasingly,
the shtetl is comprehended as a society in the grip of a blind,
cruel force.
In his fiction one can discern basic patterns and archetypal
figures which appear in various forms: the gracious
woman who is callously given to a commonplace or vulgar
husband; the uprooted student; the undistinguished, almost
impotent male; the virile, ruddy man. Berdyczewski attempted
to discover the basic psychological features of his protagonists
as they function in plausible, realistic situations and thus
added a new dimension to the Hebrew short story. The recurring
typology, however, and the use of key epithets and motifs
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