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spiritual and sexual castration, the brutish existence of sheep that graze, are milked, are sheared and killed, whereas those who choose death are choosing a kind of magnificent union with the eternal principles, with the stars in their courses, with chaos for those who long for chaos, with God for those who fell to earth as demigods. This is why the choice confronting B’s [sic] heroes is both difficult and subtly deceptive, and at times the author hints to us - somewhat inconsistently -that in fact everything is predetermined and even the choice is merely a game, a ritual, whose outcome was decided long ago. Hence also Berdyczewski’s grandiloquent language, that is not afraid of monumental words, of raising its voice, of shouting, of archaisms and anachronisms that are occasionally rather crude. Berdyczewski’s language has no time for nuance, for the subtle interplay of light and shade, but there is another kind of precision in his writing, which manifests itself not particularly in the sensitive choice of adjectives and adverbs but rather in a certain gnarled ruggedness such as you find in the bark of an old olive tree.
    Or again, the impatience in his writing. Many of his stories  read like first drafts, with the force of rough, half-chiselled stone.
    And Berdyczewski has a passionate, adolescent openness to all the great intellectual currents of his day. He was fascinated by romanticism, but he also liked anti-romanticism. He was fascinated by Nietzsche, by the Scandinavian writers of the turn of the century, by symbolism, by expressionism, by the revival of pagan myths. He wrestled with all these movements like an earnest Talmud student grappling with a text.
    Take the young man called Michael in the story called ‘Mahanaim’ (apparently one of the more patiently written stories). This Michael is digging with all his might to reach something that is hidden under the surface of civilisation. Civilisation does not satisfy him. He is searching for some kind of molten lava that he can plunge into. He wants to be swept up in primeval forces. Michael considers himself‘maddened by what he has seen’; he calls himself an ‘accursed Hebrew’ - a typically Berdyczewskian expression: not a ‘passionate Greek’, as Joseph Klausner called Tschemichowsky, not a ‘cursed man’, like the ‘cursed’ fin-de-siecle poets, but an ‘accursed Hebrew’.
    Berdyczewski was bom and brought up in the shtetl: he was bom in Miedzyborz (Medzibezh, Medzhibozh) in Podolia, he grew up in Dubova in Ukraine, and married in Taflik in Podolia; it was here that he came under the influence of the Hebrew Enlightenment (Haskalah) movement, his marriage broke up, and he returned to Dubova, before going on to study in the yeshiva of Volozhin; then he moved to Varshad, where he remarried, but he was restless, and published articles and stories until he divorced again and went to Odessa, and finally, at the age of about twenty-five, he left Russia and went to study in Germany, where he lived for the rest of his life. In other words, he hailed from the heart of hearts of that Eastern-European Jewish ‘shadow state’ which led a shadowy half-existence without government, flag, army or stamps, but with eight or nine million inhabitants from the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea in the south, from the depths of Ukraine in the east to the gates of Berlin, Prague, and Vienna in the west. But although it lacked the trappings of a state, it was splendidly civilised, with a religion, law and order, systems of education and welfare, a language, civilised manners, lullabies and fairy-stories, music, justice, literature, economics, politics, power struggles, and intellectual movements: everything you could find in more prosperous civilisations also existed in that Eastern-European Jewish shadow state. It was in no way inferior to ‘normal’ nation states, and in some respects it was far superior to them and indeed to the present-day State of Israel.