Berdyczewski (Bin-Gorion), Micha Josef

(1865–1921)

   Russian writer in Hebrew and Yiddish. Berdyczewski came from a family of chassidic rabbis in the Ukraine, and studied at the universities of Berlin, Berne and Breslau, where he settled. He wrote novels, short stories in Hebrew and Yiddish, polemical essays and collected anthologies of chassidic legends. In his personal life and his works, he was the Jew in transition, rejecting but never free of the cramped life of the Russian shtetl, while never becoming part of Western culture. He maintained the right of the individual artist to rebel against conformity, whether that of religious tradition, or the organized community, or the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-Am, with whom he conducted a famous debate in the pages of a Hebrew journal. He had a strong influence on some of the younger Hebrew writers, especially Chaim BRENNER. His collected works were published in twenty volumes (1921–5).