The Anxiety of Tradition: Unrealized Weddings in Berdichevsky’s Yiddish Stories

The trilingual author Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky (1865–1921) is widely known as a literary modernist and a rebel against Jewish socio-religious conventions. Yet he also developed an original dialectical way of thinking about Jewish tradition. Berdichevsky’s theory of tradition is partly elaborated in his undeservedly obscure Yiddish stories. In order to reconstruct this theory, we undertake a typology and thematic analysis of their signature literary trope: the unrealized wedding.