ABSTRACT
David Bergelson's Jewish readers know that like the Soviet hero Shoykhet, all Soviet Jews have a little bit of Moyshe-Leyb in them. During the war, Bergelson was called on to become more than a novelist; he was asked to become a public Jewish cultural figure and a leader of Soviet Jewry. Soviet Jews were themselves drawn into the process of universalizing the Holocaust, in film, photography, and print in both Russian and Yiddish. Roman Karmen's film mentioned Jews only in passing; and the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya zvezda identified Soviet prisoners of war as a victim group targeted as viciously as Jews. Bergelson, however, though acknowledging the need for vengeance, also warns his Jewish readership against its tendency to turn revenge and memorialization into parochialism and nationalism. Bergelson wrote about Kiev again after the city's liberation in November 1943, and painted an almost messianic vision of its reconstruction.
