© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 EJJS 4.1 Also available online – brill.nl/ejjs DOI: 10.1163/187247110X521227 MELANCHOLY AND MODERNITY: DOVID BERGELSON’S NOKH ALEMEN Luisa Banki Universität Konstanz Abstract This article provides an analysis of the modernist qualities inherent in Dovid Bergelson’s first novel, Nokh alemen, which is read as an account of the dif ficult transition from tradition to modernity. This transition is described as painful, promising and impossible. The objective will be the investigation of this inability to enter into modernity, an inability that shall be viewed as a manifestation of a deeper structural inhibition that can be understood and analysed by reference to melancholia. Enlisting psychoanalytic as well as literary theoretical concepts, mel- ancholia shall be read less as a phase that the protagonist is somehow going through and more as a fundamental psychic condition, permeating the novel as a whole. Taking into account the pervasive phenomenon of the struggle of tradition and modernity, Bergelson’s creative production, voicing and commenting on a “historic melancholia,” is not only about melancholia in its mimetic representations but also in its intellectual and historical Sitz im Leben. Keywords Yiddish: literature, modernism, psychoanalysis, melancholia, Dovid Bergelson Dovid Bergelson’s first novel, Nokh alemen (1913), has been hailed as the first modernist work of fiction in Yiddish. It functioned and was recognised as a revitalisation of the novel in Yiddish at a time when the genre was in a sort of limbo with the older generation continu- ing in the style of the nineteenth century and the younger one concentrating on shorter genres of prose and poetry. The reasons for the impasse that the Yiddish novel found itself in at the time lay in the fading relevance of the artistic principles that had governed artistic prose production in the nineteenth century. In its beginnings, Yiddish literature presented an indirect reflection of a supposedly objective reality of the traditional community as depicted through characters with well defined and fixed relationships vis-à-vis that community. The klasikers’ artistic aim was thus a literary realism, based initially on the mimetic value of the Yiddish language, presup- posing a stable referential framework in terms of language, style and