










































Hersh Dovid Nomberg
By a Lonely Grave

Translated from Yiddish by Daniel Kennedy

I met him in the mountains, on my way to an alpine village that 
lies buried in a narrow pass on the edge of a fast stream. I 
wanted to spend the night there and then move on higher the 

next morning. He, on the other hand, had no intention of going 
any further. 

I soon realized that he was not your typical tourist. He knew 
the village well, telling me that it was home to both Catholics 
and Protestants, that there were two churches and two 
graveyards, and that he knew some people there.

He came from the far north, from Norway, and was not overly 
fond of Switzerland.  

“You should really see Norway some day,” he told me. “The 
fjords, the bright nights, the cliffs! You must promise to visit me 
there next summer, to see for yourself.”

I couldn’t figure out what kind of a man he was, what he was 
doing there, or why, catching up with me on his long legs, he 
dove so eagerly into conversation that he was already inviting 
me to visit him in Norway. What was in it for him?

“You’re a Russian, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yes, certainly, a Jew from Russia,” I said
“Of course that’s what I meant. Exactly! Exactly!”
He’d had an acquaintance once; she too had been a Jew 

from Russia…. And I started to understand the intimacy that had 
developed so quickly between us. Incidentally, the man made 
quite a strong, unsettling impression; he was tall and blond, built 
like a giant, but had soft, strangely childlike blue eyes. He spoke 
naively, but his movements were energetic. He was one of 
those people whose simple words contain the echo of long and 
deep torment and yearning, which undermines even their best 
attempts at smiling, and lingers on in our memories of them.

We arrived just as darkness was falling; the surrounding 
snowy peaks still shimmered faintly in a pinkish glow. I was 
tired, and prepared myself for a sleepless, nerve-ridden night. 

Ah, I know those moonlit nights in the mountains! As the air 
cools at night, the sky wraps itself up in a grey fog and it seems 
as if a storm is coming. But then, the slightest wind is enough 
to drive the fog away and the moon breaks through, pouring 
out an intoxicating brightness. If you look out the window, you’ll 
see the snow gleaming in the moonlight. From far and near you 



Daniel Kennedy    85

can hear the music of the Alps ringing out: the bells of livestock 
grazing in the white night on the pastures, wandering around, 
far from human eyes, with their shadows—uphill, downhill, 
ringing, ringing. The stream and waterfalls murmur ceaselessly. 
Nature lives its life and sings its abundant song. Such nights 
are not made for sleeping. On nights like those, if you happen 
to carry some vague hope in your heart or if you have perhaps 
someone close to you, a dear friend, a lover, then you’ll end 
up thinking about them into the wee small hours, until the first 
rays of sunlight appear. Only corpses, or withered young souls, 
should rest there and sleep. I know those moonlit nights in the 
mountains.

I lay there like a prisoner, in my room filled with moonlight, 
for a long time, my eyes open, breathing in the sharp, cool 
mountain air, which intoxicates just like the brightness, just like 
the far-off bells which ring from the valley below. I got out of 
bed. It was already well past midnight. I went over to the window 
and saw the long shadow of a man. I looked carefully and 
recognized the outline of my new acquaintance, the Norwegian, 
striding off into the white night, apparently without aim, lost in 
his own thoughts, distracted.

“If I’m not disturbing you,” I called out to him, “I’ll get dressed 
and come down. Who can sleep during a night like this?”

“Good,” he answered curtly, a moment later shouting back to 
me, “but I’d advise you to bring your cape and a scarf, there’s a 
cold wind blowing from the mountains.”

I did as he advised and was soon standing next to him. He 
was silent now; his demeanor had grown less childish and more 
serious. I thought to myself that this man was not out of place 
on a night like this; he had some sort of connection to it. You 
could almost hear something buzzing in his heart without let-up; 
like a mountain stream, there was something alive within him, 
singing in him, and he couldn’t control it, couldn’t get over it. It 
wouldn’t let him free.

He’d been in love with a Jewish girl, a dead girl, who lay 
buried here in this village, in her own separate corner of the 
Protestant graveyard. He confided his sad story to me, telling 
it with all the naivety and trust of a child. He was sure that the 
tragic destiny of that girl would be a subject as close to my heart 
as it was to his. Like all Gentiles, he had a strong belief in the 
solidarity and brotherhood of all Jews. His lover, in a way, was 
connected to me, like family, like a sister.



86    Hersh Dovid Nomberg

It had happened about six years before; he’d been studying 
in Zurich and fell in love with the Jewish girl. What sort of a 
woman was she that she could capture and dominate a stranger 
from the distant north?  He described her: pale, with brown 
hair and big, black eyes; she was quiet and attentive, with an 
unusual, melodic voice.

She was exactly—so he told me—like a locked harp: taut, 
shivering strings which hummed silently to themselves. She 
wasn’t everyone’s type—she was no great beauty—she was 
only for him that had the key, who could touch the strings. But 
what a temperament, what inner life revealed itself then! She 
was normally silent, contemplative, prone to melancholy—but 
how lively she could be when it was just you and her; how she 
could talk and talk without end, chirping like a little bird. There 
are types of people which nature only creates once, just one 
single copy, and she was one of those.

And she loved him and gave herself over to him with all 
the energy of her hidden temperament. They decided to get 
married, but for that she needed to convert.

“It’s remarkable,” he told me, “how attached you people are 
to that religion of yours. She wasn’t in the least observant, but 
even I know what torment it was for her until she finally decided. 
Long, long nights without sleep, long days going around 
like mad, until love, her first love, finally overcame her and 
convinced her to take that step.”

The only obstacle was her parents. They were well-off, 
cultivated people. She hoped to get their blessing, travelling 
all the way home with that express purpose, but once she got 
there, she found herself unable to say a single word to them 
about it. The anti-Jewish pogroms were in full swing in Russia 
at that time, and her parents had suffered because of them. 
She returned, tired and broken, not knowing what to do. In the 
end she confided her secret to her brother who was studying 
in Bern. He telegraphed their parents and her father came out 
immediately. She had to give him her word that she wouldn’t 
convert. Once her father left, mollified, I came to her room and 
barely recognized her; she was terribly distraught, pale and sad.

“What is it, my love?”
She didn’t tell me the whole story but I could tell that 

something was amiss.
“You don’t love me anymore?”
“Oh, don’t talk! Don’t talk! Please….”



Daniel Kennedy    87

“But her voice, her kisses, and her eyes told me more about 
her love than could ever be expressed in words, and we set off 
together into the mountains, here to this very village. In this very 
hotel she poisoned herself after one long, hot night of love.

She wrote me a letter telling the story of what happened 
with her brother and father. In a separate letter to her parents, 
whom she loved deep down, she said her goodbyes and asked 
that her body should not be disturbed. She wanted to be buried 
here.”

And so went the sad tale of a Jewish girl who lies buried in 
an Alpine village, in her own private corner of the Protestant 
graveyard.

We continued walking in the moonlit night until we 
came to the little graveyard that surrounded the church. 
Low gravestones and crosses twinkled in the light. On the 
gravestones, you could read short inscriptions from the living to 
the dead, in the modest style of country folk. We continued until 
we reached a certain corner with a small iron fence surrounding 
a flat stone. The Norwegian, unselfconscious despite my 
presence, knelt down in his childlike naivety. Leaning against 
the fence, he knelt in silence. Mute.

And all the while, the far-off bells continued to ring and the 
waterfalls murmured without cease.

*****

Hersh Dovid Nomberg (1876–1927) was a writer, essayist 
and political activist, born in Mszczonów near Warsaw. A protégé 
of I. L. Peretz, he began publishing poems and short stories in 
around 1900 in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Alongside Sholem Asch 
and Avrom Reyzen, he was one of the most influential Yiddish 
writers of his generation. Having penned dozens of successful 
short stories, he shifted his focus towards journalism and politics 
following the First World War. He was one of the founders of the 
Folkspartey, a party dedicated to safeguarding secular Jewish 
cultural autonomy within the Polish Republic, for whom he served 
as a delegate to the Sejm in 1919–1920.

The bulk of his stories deal with themes of alienation and 
isolation, with characters who are torn between their traditional 
upbringing and the intellectual freedoms of the modern world. 

“Bay an aynzamer matseyve” (lit: “By a lonely gravestone”) 
was first published in 1911 in the Haynt, a popular daily newspaper 



88    Hersh Dovid Nomberg

printed in Warsaw between 1908 and 1939, and later republished 
in volume 7 of Nomberg’s collected works in 1930. It is one of 
several stories that Nomberg set in Switzerland, a country 
he visited on his travels, where he indulges in romanticized 
depictions of a picturesque landscape, so alien and exotic for his 
readership. 

This translation was completed as part of the 2015 Yiddish 
Book Center’s translation fellowship.

D. K.


