“Rabbi Zadok was a failure, and contrary to grownups, all little children usually side with people who fail,” muses Bergelson. He builds his stories around an assortment of eclectic washouts in a fascinating, indeed childlike manner and, at the same time, peppers their perturbations with exquisite dark humor that must be at least 4,000 years old. A suicidal Jewish terrorist, a guilt-ridden tzadik, a disenchanted housewife stalking an invalid, a no-name shtetl poet roaming the dark streets of a foreign metropolis: such is the world of the “Shadows of Berlin,” a gem of a short story collection by Dovid Bergelson, a major Soviet Yiddishist. There is much that is dear and recognizable in these stories as well as eerie metaphors of everyday existential traumas, reminiscent of Kafka; noir anti-climactic narrative devolutions à la Bernard Malamud; tender shtetl memories mixed with unabashed sexuality, not unlike the work of I.B. Singer. At the same time, thematically, these stories focus on a unique moment and populace, dealing largely with the Russian Jewish emigrés of 1928’s Berlin, their isolation and exile, the complexities and side-effects of the shocks of the preceding Great War and the heavy pogroms.
One of the most powerful aspects of the collection is its historical context. “Berlin,” says Bergelson’s character “was like Nineveh in the days of the prophet Jonah.” He would have liked to hope so: after all, the inhabitants of Nineveh repented, and preserved themselves and their city. Berlin, at that point, was less than two decades away from World War II. The author, of course, did not know this. However luckless Bergelson’s characters may be, there is a tinge of hope pulsing everywhere in the book. The author could not know of the impending Shoah, and neither could he know about his return to the Soviet Union in the early 50’s and death in Stalin’s camps. These doomed hopes leave today’s reader intoxicated with sadness, and yet, somehow, laughing at the fabulous mishap characters, so awkward, so vintage shtetl and at the same time so exquisitely modern: “Uncle Fritz was too simple of a man to grasp the mind of a poet, who, when plunging his feet into someone else’s galoshes, was merely returning, for a moment, to his early, childhood memories.”
Jake Marmer is a poet, performer, and educator. He is the author of three poetry collections: Cosmic Diaspora (Station Hill Press, 2020), as well as The Neighbor Out of Sound (2018) and Jazz Talmud (2012), both from The Sheep Meadow Press. He also released two klez-jazz-poetry records: Purple Tentacles of Thought and Desire (2020, with Cosmic Diaspora Trio), and Hermeneutic Stomp (Blue Fringe Music, 2013). Jake is the poetry critic for Tablet Magazine. Born in the provincial steppes of Ukraine, in a city that was renamed four times in the past 100 years, Jake lives in the Bay Area.
