Never before available in English, Judgment is a work of startling power by David Bergelson, the most celebrated Yiddish prose writer of his era. Set in 1920 during the Russian Civil War, Judgment traces the death of the shtetl and the birth of the ""new, harsher world"" created by the 1917 Russian Revolution.

DAVID BERGELSON (1884-1952), a Jewish novelist, short-story writer, and literary editor, was born in Ukraine. He moved to Berlin in 1921 and traveled throughout Europe and the United States until Hitler came to power in Germany. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1934, where he was eventually executed under Stalin's orders. The author of The End of Everything and Descent, Bergelson was one of the most widely read Yiddish-language writers of the twentieth century.

HARRIET MURAV is a professor of Russian and comparative literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia and Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique.

SASHA SENDEROVICH is an assistant professor of Russian and Jewish studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made and has published on Soviet Jewish culture and literature, including on Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak's novel The Zelmenyaners, as well as on contemporary fiction by émigré Russian Jewish writers in America.