Berlin, Germany, where his son Joseph was born. From 1922 to 1924 he worked there as a freelancer for the Yiddish journal Milgroim ("Pomegranate") and also edited, along with David Bergelson, several Yiddish literary journals, though they didn't last long. In Berlin, he also published a two-volume collection of his short stories under the title Gedakht ("Imagined"). The book was his first modest literary success. When the Milgroim closed in 1924, he moved with his family to Hamburg, where he worked for two years for the Soviet Trade Mission. In 1926, like many fellow exiles, he returned to the Soviet Union and settled in Kharkiv. In 1929, he published in Kiev Fun mayne giter ("From My Estates"). The work contained a complicated web of metaphors tied to Hasidic mysticism - especially on the Kabbalah and the symbolic stories of Nachman of Breslov - that can create a universe of images and parables, folk tales, children's poems and rhymes. His long sentences create a hypnotic rhythm. But they also reflect the increasing pressure that has been exerted at that time by the Soviet regime on Jewish intellectuals. However, the symbol-laden work, rich in Jewish themes, was declared reactionary by the Soviet regime and its literary critics. He was subjected to the increasingly stringent Soviet censorship. In 1929, he was criticized when the Russian Yiddish newspaper Di Royte Velt ("The Red World") reprinted his tale Unter a Ployt ("Bottom Fence"). The then president of the Russian Yiddish Writers Federation, Moyshe Litvakov, initiated a smear campaign at the end of which Der Nister had to renounce the literary symbolism. He tried now to write his literary work within the constraints of prevailing socialist realism and began to write stories. These collected essays appeared in 1934 under the title Hoyptshtet ("Capital cities"). He stopped publishing his original works and earned a living as a journalist. In the early 1930s he worked almost exclusively as a journalist and translator, translating works by Tolstoy, Victor Hugo and Jack London. His own literary work was limited to four small collections of short stories for children. Just before World War II, the Soviet government briefly adopted less censorious policies over writings considered to be promoting Zionism. Der Nister began working on his real masterpiece: Di Mishpokhe Mashber ("The Family Mashber"). The first volume of work appeared in 1939 in Moscow. The work was almost universally praised by critics,