‘Man is the sum total of all the sin and fire pent up in his bones’

Summary

I can talk about Berdyczewski the way one talks about a distant relation, ‘distant’ in the sense of an uncle whom I never met because he died eighteen years before I was born. I read his stories with curiosity, respect and awe, and as I read a kind of ‘genetic’ pulse within me bears witness to the distant relationship. (Incidentally, ‘distant relation’ is Berdyczewski's own expression: he employed it to sign many of his essays.)

Berdyczewski as a writer was distant, apparently at least, from the mainstream of Hebrew literature in his day. He did not follow the beaten track. He even lived a long way from the centres, the ‘capital cities’ of Hebrew letters in his generation. He did not live in Odessa or Warsaw, he did not even come to Palestine, he drifted to Berlin and Breslau, where Hebrew writing was an even more solitary business than elsewhere. He communicated with other writers, with editors and publishers, mainly by letter. His letters are often bitter and anguished.

But Berdyczewski was not a solitary writer in the geographical sense alone. All over Europe the great novelists were busy exposing the depths of the human psyche. All the various schools of Hebrew writers too were discovering the complexities of psychology, of the individuals, types, societies. Berdyczewski did not think much of psychology. This was considered by many to be an unpardonable sin: how can there be such a thing as a writer who does not take the trouble to endow his characters with ‘depth’ and ‘complexity’? What about their childhoods? Where are the complexes, the repressions, and so on? Is that how you portray a character, just a couple of…