David Bergelson, the famous Yiddish novelist, was put under arrest here, together with fifteen members of his audience, while he was giving a reading from his works in the Communist “Wintchewsky Club” here. After Leputy Dubin, the leader of the Jewish Orthodox Party, Agudath Israel, in Latvia, had made representations to the authorities, Bergelson and 14 others were released, one of the prisoners being retained in custody.
Bergelson left Soviet Russia in 1921, because of his opposition to the Jewish Communists, and made his home in Berlin, where he continues to live permanently. In 1926, however, he published a letter in the Moscow Yiddish Communist paper, the “Emess”, in which he said that he had failed while he was in Russia to understand the difficulties with which the Jewish Communists had to contend at the time he opposed them, and that now he was heart and soul with them in the great Jewish work they were doing. The same year he visited Russia, and was well received there, and on his return to Berlin he said that he had been greatly impressed by the growth of Jewish cultural activity in Russia during the five years that he had been away.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
