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SLOTN ICK / BERGELSON AND TRAD IT ION
131
nine teenth-century Yiddish writers. Such novels as Y.Y.
Linetski’s
Dos poylishe yingl
(The Polish lad, 1867-69),
Abramovitsh’s
Dos kleyne mentshele
(The little man, 1864, 1879)
and
Dos vintshfingerl
(The wishing-ring, 1865, 1888) all use the
process o f the protagonist’s growth and education for a critical
assessment o f small-town Jewish life. But there is a major d iffe r
ence between the attitude and suggested solutions o f these
writers, and those o f Bergelson. The maskilim held up the image
o f the shtetl as the symbol o f provincial Jewish ignorance and
superstition; they ridiculed what they considered to be the old-
fashioned, unen ligh tened and abho rren t ways o f the shtetl inhab
itants. T he correct path, according to these writers, was tha t o f
education, modernization and Westernization through an adop
tion o f the manners, fashions and culture o f the “en ligh tened”
Western European Jews. Bergelson’s social criticism, on the o the r
hand , is along class lines: one segment o f society (the exploiters) is
responsible for oppressing the rest, and the solution will come,
not from any external forces, but from within, when the down
trodd en classes will arise and demand the ir rights.
Penek,
more than any o f Bergelson’s previous novels, is a direct
challenge to cultural attitudes and literary conventions tha t came
before it. As an autobiographical novel, it sets out to delineate the
growth o f the artist, in the light o f the au tho r ’s literary maturity
and cu rren t ideological stance. By choosing as protagonist the
youngest son o f the wealthiest family in town, who is rejected by
his parents and eventually finds his way to acceptance into the
poor sector o f society and the ranks o f his proletariat peers, the
au tho r is not chronicling the events o f his own early life; he is
transform ing his past recollections th rough his present political
beliefs, and creating a fictional account o f the development o f a
child into an artist, an artist who is a produc t o f his environment
and, at the same time, possesses the vigor and clarity which will
eventually enable him to change that environment. In
Penek,
Bergelson attempts a synthesis o f literature and social analysis
that is, on the face o f it, reminiscent o f the earliest o f nineteenth-
century Yiddish fiction. As in his o the r novels, this appa ren t simi
larity serves as the crux o f his radical challenge to literary and cul
tural traditions.
A central trait o f Bergelson’s very m odern writing is its particu
lar combination o f originality and relationship to tradition. With
varying degrees o f directness, according to the artistic demands