Judgment

David Bergelson (1884–1952), a Jewish novelist, short-story writer, and literary editor, was born in Ukraine. He moved to Berlin in 1921 and lived there, traveling throughout Europe and the United States, until Hitler came to power in Germany. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1934, where he was eventually executed under Stalin’s orders. The author of The End of Everything and Descent, Bergelson was one of the most widely read Yiddish-language writers of the twentieth century.  Harriet Murav is a professor of Russian literature, comparative literature, and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia and Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique.  Sasha Senderovich is an assistant professor of Russian and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has published on Soviet Jewish culture and literature, including on Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak’s novel The Zelmenyaners, as well as on contemporary fiction by émigré Russian Jewish writers in America.

"Judgment is a tour de force of Yiddish modernism, capturing the radical social transformations of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war registered in the everyday lives of Jews and non-Jews living in the former Pale of Settlement." - Allison Schachter“The novel offers a sensitive, and deeply humanizing, portrayal of the petty criminals arrested for anti-Soviet behaviour … As in Bergelson's earlier novels, the characters in Judgment are imperfect people. They brood, and stumble as they go along … The judgement that lies at the core of Bergelson's novel is in equal parts Soviet, biblical and existential. The translated title cleverly evokes Kafka's blend of bureaucracy and Jewish mysticism … David Bergelson prompts his readers to view humanity with compassion in a rapidly polarizing moment.” - Times Literary Supplement, February 2018