Judgment
A Novel
by David Bergelson; Sasha Senderovich; Harriet Murav
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Sep 15 2017 | Archive Date Nov 27 2017
Description
Originally published in 1929 and set in 1920 during the Russian civil war, Judgment traces the death of the shtetl and the birth of the “new, harsher world” created by the 1917 revolution. Jews and non-Jews smuggle people, goods, and anti-Bolshevik literature back and forth across the new political border. Filipov acts as the arbiter of "judgment" to prisoners in a Bolshevik outpost, who include Spivak, a counterrevolutionary; Lemberger, a pious and wealthy Jew; a seductive woman referred to as "the blonde"; and a memorable cast of smugglers and criminals.
Ordinary people, depicted in a grotesque and modernist style—comparable to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry—confront the overwhelming forces of history, whose ultimate outcome remains unknown.
Advance Praise
"A brilliant, nightmarish look at a world without boundaries set alight by madmen. David Bergelson's Judgment belongs on the shelf with the very best literature of the early Soviet period." —Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure: A Memoir and The Russian Debutante's Handbook
"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, author of Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century
"Thanks to Harriet Murav and Sasha Senderovich for this vivid, meticulous translation of Bergelson’s novel about provincial Jews caught up in the Russian civil war. For readers now, burdened with hindsight, this immersion into the violence, idealism, pragmatism, and confusion of the moment is a bracing historical corrective.”
—Alice Nakhimovsky, author of Russian Jewish Literature and Identity and coauthor (with Rebecca Newman) of Dear Mendel, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780810135918 |
| PRICE | $18.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 264 |
Readers who liked this book also liked:
