SOURCE: "The Stories of David Bergelson," in the New York Times Book Review, March 9, 1997, p. 19.

In the following essay, a review of an English translation of Bergelson's stories, Stoll treats the tales as images of a long-vanished world and culture.

In his brief foreword to this collection of stories, [The stories of David Bergelson: Yiddish Short Fiction From Russia] Aharon Appelfeld calls David Bergelson "the most important Yiddish writer, following the three classical authors who established modern Yiddish literature: Mendele Mocher Sforim, I. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem." Born in 1884 to a Hasidic family in Ukraine, Bergelson worked assiduously for the cause of Communism; nevertheless, he was arrested under Stalin and sent to a prison camp, where he died in 1952. This new volume contains two short stories and one novella from his early period when, according to the fine introduction by Golda Werman, the book's translator, Bergelson still...