Homo Anthologicus Micha Joseph Berdyczewski and the Anthological Genre

Abstract No figure in modern Hebrew literature has been more closely identified with the anthological enterprise than Micha Joseph Berdyczewski, later known as Bin-Gorion (1865-1921). In the course of his life, Berdyczewski, in addition to being a writer of fiction, a folklorist, essayist, critic, and scholar, compiled five multivolume anthologies and seems to have discovered in the anthological form a fitting embodiment of what he considered the nature of modem Jewish existence. Indeed, so central and fundamental a role did the compilation of anthologies play in his life that it would be no exaggeration to call Berdyczewski homo anthologicus. Micha Joseph Berdyczewski was born on July 27, 1865, in the village of Medzibezh in Podolia, a district in the Ukraine (Little Russia). Most of his childhood and youth were spent in Dubova, where his father served as the community’s rabbi. His mother died when he was eleven, and this traumatic experience shadowed Berdyczewski all his life, serving as the subject of several of his stories. In 1882, at the age of seventeen, the young ‘iluy (prodigy) married a rich man’s daughter, but after he was discovered reading maskilic texts, his father-in-law forced him to divorce his wife (whom Berdyczewski had grown to love). The trauma of this episode walater given poignant esthetic expression in his story “Me’ever lanahar” (Across the River, 1899).