ABSTRACT
The critic, editor and publisher Nakhman Mayzel, who was one of the founders of the Kiev Group and later in his lifetime became a visible figure in Yiddishist circles of Warsaw and New York, never stopped chronicling and analysing the literary careers of his early friends. Biographical parallelism did not make Der Nister's and Bergelson's writings and worldviews similar. In Mayzel's words, it was 'hard to imagine more different people than Bergelson and Der Nister'. By the time of Der Nister's entry into the already crowded, overwhelmingly masculine field of Yiddish literature, authors such as Sholem Asch, Avrom Reyzen and Hersh Dovid Nomberg, who were close to him in age, lived off literature and journalism. In the end, Der Nister and his fellow writer Leyb Kvitko, six years his younger, could not make a living in Berlin and found nothing better than work at the Soviet trade mission in Hamburg.
