ABSTRACT

In March 1922, short fiction by David Bergelson began to appear with some regularity in the American Yiddish daily, Forverts. This chapter considers the nature of Bergelson's association with Forverts, his infelicitous professional relationship with its powerful editor Abraham Cahan, and the implications for Bergelson's life and art of Cahan's disinclination to sustain his livelihood. Cahan spent most of the summer of 1921 in Berlin, making the acquaintance of Yiddish writers who had relocated there from various places in post-war Eastern Europe. Literary historians have tended to regard Bergelson's four-year stint at Forverts as a brief interlude during which he managed to support himself as he struggled to decide the direction he would take in his life and later career. Cahan's correspondence with Yakov Lestschinsky shows that throughout Bergelson's tenure at Forverts and even subsequently, Lestschinsky functioned as a go-between.