With little of his fiction available in English translation, David Bergelson is revealed in this book to new readers seeking a more complete picture of worldwide Yiddish literature. The collection includes two short stories and a novella, which offer a taste of Bergelson's elegiac prose style.

Shadows of Berlin is, in part, a bleak chronicle of life in Europe growing ever more hostile at the edge of World War II, part mythic parable. Bergelson's stories--passionate, honest, dark and often hilarious--hint at the possibility of redemption even as they suggest a horror just around the corner.

"David Bergelson's Berlin stories reveal a moment of incredible possibility in Jewish culture--a time when some of the greatest Yiddish writers of the day saw the German capital as a beacon for progressive, modernist creative artists. In the course of one brief...