Micah Joseph Berdichevsky

Micah Joseph Berdichevsky (born Aug. 19, 1865, Medzhibozh, Podolia, Russian Empire [now Medzhybizh, Ukraine]—died Nov. 18, 1921, Berlin, Ger.) was an author of works in Hebrew, German, and Yiddish. His impassioned writings, perhaps more than those of any other Jewish author, bear poignant witness to the “rent in the heart” of 19th-century Jews torn between tradition and assimilation. He was also the author of enduring reconstructions of Jewish legends and folklore.

Berdichevsky was the son of a Hasidic rabbi. His teenage marriage was broken off when his enraged father-in-law discovered that he was secretly studying works of the Haskala (Enlightenment), a movement advocating that Jews integrate themselves into modern secular society. Berdichevsky studied for a time at the yeshiva at Volozhin (now Valozhyn, Belarus) and then entered the University of Breslau (now Wrocław, Pol.) at the age of 25.

In these years the inner struggle between his upbringing and his desire for spiritual liberation intensified. Over the next several decades, he expressed this conflict in an outpouring of stories, essays, and novels. He spent the last 10 years of his life in Berlin, working as a dentist and re-creating with insight and poetic appreciation portions of the Haggada, Jewish writings dealing with legends and folklore. He published part of them in Hebrew as Me-Otsar ha-agadah (1913–14; “From the Treasures of the Haggada”).

Berdichevsky’s stories, collected in volumes such as Me-Ḥuts li-teḥum (1922–23; “Out of the Pale”) and Ben ha-ḥomot (“Between the Walls”), all deal with the travails of Jewish life. His fiction varies in style and deals either with protagonists striving futilely to escape the weight of Jewish tradition through assimilation or with Jews attempting to survive within the pale of the ghetto.

Berdichevsky’s essays, collected posthumously in nine volumes in 1922, include Bi-sede sefer (“In the Field of Literature”), Ba-derekh (“On the Way”), and Maḥshavot ve-torot (“Reflections and Teachings”). They contain literary criticism, polemics against the dead hand of Jewish tradition, and idealizations of Ḥasidism. Also among his essays are those attacking the “spiritual Zionism” of the eminent author Aḥad Haʿam. Berdichevsky promulgated an idiosyncratic theory of Jewish history, maintaining that there had been no unified spiritual philosophy in Judaism’s past (thus justifying his own departure from tradition). His essays titled Ḥorev (1910 or 1911; a biblical name for Mount Sinai) interpret sympathetically some of the beautiful and humane ideas to be found in Haggadic writings. In the opinion of some authorities, Berdichevsky’s most enduring contribution to literature is his retelling of the Haggadic stories.