http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2010/1/21/on-books/1/the-end-of-everything
I read the blurb while sitting in the amazing HUC Klau Library, so I just had to walk a few steps to find a brand new copy of this very translation on the shelf.
Like the few other Russian novels I've read, this one had plenty of depression and general misery to go around. In an essay Lionel Trilling once wrote, "every situation in Dostoevsky, no matter how spiritual, starts with a point of social pride and a certain number of rubles..." and that is exactly how Bergelson's novel begins, too. Mirel, the daughter of Reb Gedalye, goes through a series of successive engagements to different men. She continually feels pressure to get engaged because 1) what else is there to do and 2) it would really help her father out financially. But each time she gets engaged - and there is never really any real passion or feeling on her part toward any of the men, just a sort of resignation - she almost immediately begins to work on how to break the engagement.
Here are some of my favorite quotes that I think are pretty representative of the book:
"For some time now she'd feld the slow, painful demise of her vapid, commonplace, self-absorbed life."
"With cold, vaguely formed resolution she neared her father's house, and with the same icily unemotional determinaton she went inside...she lingered at the door, and it occured to her that she didn't live as other people lived but wandered all alone along the periphery of life, that from childhood on shed been stumbling about there in a long restless dream that had no beginning and no end: Now, it seemed, she'd come to some decision and would take some action, yet perhaps she'd come to no decision and would take no action. All alone she'd merely continue to stumble about as in an eternal dream of chaos and would never arrive at any destionation..."
"While she was lying here alone on the margins of life, other people were living fully. From a distance she saw the way they lived..."
You can probably get the gist of Mirel's character from those. There are other female characters in the book who go to university, and I don't know if Bergelson intended for his readers to want to yell at Mirel to follow their example, or something, at least. The back cover of the book describes it as the "Yiddish Emma Bovary." I didn't go back and check a copy of M. Bovary, but this section from Bergelson's book struck me as similar to what I remember of Flaubert:
"...his remark still echoed in her ears: 'A provincial tragedy.' She couldn't tell where the barb of this insult, and the resentment she felt at it, really lay: whether in the fact that Herz couldn't be bothered to remember her name or in the phrase itself that he'd coined about her: 'A provincial tragedy.'"
That Herz character is interesting. He's a poet who writes Hebrew poetry. In another scene, some of the characters name-drop about "Ahad Ha'am" in order to show their political/cultural affiliations. Either Joseph Sherman, the translator, or the New Yiddish Library publishers, did a nice job with lots of historical and cultural footnotes throughout the book. Bergelson probably has more than a few characters who represent people from his own circle:
"A little farther on, in the middle of the large room, stood the master's youngest brother, Sholem Zaydenovsky, a perpetually discontented young man with the appearance of an overgrown yeshiva student...after the death of his fanatically observant parents not long before, he'd found himself to be nothing more than a partially agnostic, venemous freethinker...toward money he now felt a deep antipathy coupled with a shopkeeper's pathological love for it that was his genetic inheritance, believed that no one was as capable of making it as he was, and for this reason held an uncommonly negative opinion of Jewish youth: - our people are quite incapable of producing any healthy types."
Lest I sounded like I was being too hard on Mirel earlier, I do understand that she had limiting social conditions. I think Bergelson also makes sure his readers are aware of that point in describing a startling dream that Mirel has:
"She found herself walking alone across an open field somewhere, toward a church where a great many yelling people had congregated, demanding to know: Is a woman a human being or not?"
Here are some of my favorite quotes that I think are pretty representative of the book:
"For some time now she'd feld the slow, painful demise of her vapid, commonplace, self-absorbed life."
"With cold, vaguely formed resolution she neared her father's house, and with the same icily unemotional determinaton she went inside...she lingered at the door, and it occured to her that she didn't live as other people lived but wandered all alone along the periphery of life, that from childhood on shed been stumbling about there in a long restless dream that had no beginning and no end: Now, it seemed, she'd come to some decision and would take some action, yet perhaps she'd come to no decision and would take no action. All alone she'd merely continue to stumble about as in an eternal dream of chaos and would never arrive at any destionation..."
"While she was lying here alone on the margins of life, other people were living fully. From a distance she saw the way they lived..."
You can probably get the gist of Mirel's character from those. There are other female characters in the book who go to university, and I don't know if Bergelson intended for his readers to want to yell at Mirel to follow their example, or something, at least. The back cover of the book describes it as the "Yiddish Emma Bovary." I didn't go back and check a copy of M. Bovary, but this section from Bergelson's book struck me as similar to what I remember of Flaubert:
"...his remark still echoed in her ears: 'A provincial tragedy.' She couldn't tell where the barb of this insult, and the resentment she felt at it, really lay: whether in the fact that Herz couldn't be bothered to remember her name or in the phrase itself that he'd coined about her: 'A provincial tragedy.'"
That Herz character is interesting. He's a poet who writes Hebrew poetry. In another scene, some of the characters name-drop about "Ahad Ha'am" in order to show their political/cultural affiliations. Either Joseph Sherman, the translator, or the New Yiddish Library publishers, did a nice job with lots of historical and cultural footnotes throughout the book. Bergelson probably has more than a few characters who represent people from his own circle:
"A little farther on, in the middle of the large room, stood the master's youngest brother, Sholem Zaydenovsky, a perpetually discontented young man with the appearance of an overgrown yeshiva student...after the death of his fanatically observant parents not long before, he'd found himself to be nothing more than a partially agnostic, venemous freethinker...toward money he now felt a deep antipathy coupled with a shopkeeper's pathological love for it that was his genetic inheritance, believed that no one was as capable of making it as he was, and for this reason held an uncommonly negative opinion of Jewish youth: - our people are quite incapable of producing any healthy types."
Lest I sounded like I was being too hard on Mirel earlier, I do understand that she had limiting social conditions. I think Bergelson also makes sure his readers are aware of that point in describing a startling dream that Mirel has:
"She found herself walking alone across an open field somewhere, toward a church where a great many yelling people had congregated, demanding to know: Is a woman a human being or not?"
I suppose Bergelson is also presenting Mirel as a metaphor for all Jews in modernity. If so, then the question from Mirel's dream echoes Shylock's speech from The Merchant of Venice: "Hath not a Jew eyes..." and so on - showing that not much had changed on that front. But then one would also wonder whether, like Mirel, Bergelson really saw all other modern Jews as provincial tragedies. I don't know what Bergelson thought of Zionism, and it doesn't seem to appear in his novel at all.
So, yes, a slightly depressing read - but artful and interesting. A relevant quote from different book I've started reading:
"Rather than appealing to 'socialism' of some not-yet-existing kind to calm the fever of the despairing intellectual, Dos Passos is simply despairing and for this he earned [Lionel] Trilling's admiration. 'I can think of no more useful political job for the literary man today,' Trilling wrote in praise of Dos Passos, 'than, by representation of despair, to cauterize the exposed soft-tissue of too easy hope.'
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