David Bergelson in Hebrew: Translation as Literary Memorialization

Abstract:In the years following World War II, representations of the Holocaust in Hebrew literature appeared primarily in memoirs, documentary texts, and memorial tomes, not in high literary works. Drawing on Alan Mintz's analysis of S. Y. Agnon's Buczacz stories, this article examines Hebrew translations from Yiddish literature in the 1940s and 1950s as a form of literary memorialization. Focusing on translations of David Bergelson's Yiddish stories, it traces how editors and translators carefully chose Yiddish literary texts to commemorate European Jewish life rather than recount Nazi atrocities. This literary mode of memorialization was quickly extended beyond the Holocaust to other catastrophes; namely, Stalin's crackdown on Soviet Jewish culture in the late 1940s.