Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934) was a Russian-Jewish poet who wrote primarily in Hebrew and Yiddish. He was part of that extraordinary generation of Jewish writers born in the late 19th century that included S. An-sky (The Dybbuk), Boris Pasternak (Dr Zhivago) and Isaac Babel (Red Cavalry).
Bialik is best known for his poem On The Slaughter (1903), his response to the terrible pogrom at Kishinev. In a mostly excellent introduction by the translator Peter Cole, he writes how a mob “hacked and cudgelled to death forty-nine Jews, or drowned them in outhouse faeces, they wounded hundreds, raped women and girls repeatedly, and looted over a thousand homes and shops”. For a superb account of what happened at Kishinev read Steven Zipperstein’s Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (2018).
At the time of the most famous pogrom in pre-1917 Russia, Bialik was living in Odesa, one of the centres of the modern Hebrew literary renaissance. He had just published his first book of poems and was asked to write a report documenting the devastation in Kishinev. He spent five weeks there, interviewing victims. It was never completed. Instead, he ended up writing his most famous, and controversial poem, which has been accused of exaggerating the passivity of the Jews of Kishinev. Mendele Mocher Seforim even accused Bialik of creating “a second pogrom”.
But On the Slaughter is also considered to be his literary masterpiece. Cole calls it “a work of compounded sympathy and staggering cruelty”. In addition, this book includes new translations of more than 30 poems covering Bialik’s entire career, from the 1890s to the last decade of his life when he escaped from the Soviet Union, first to Berlin and then to Tel Aviv where he was buried in 1934, after dying from a catastrophic prostate operation in Vienna.
In his introduction, Cole writes, Bialik “drew on all the registers of Hebrew literary history – the sublime style of the Bible; the grounded specificity of the Mishna; the dense and dexterous kineticism of the Gemara’s disputation and exchange; the narrative and exegetical figuration of rabbinic works and mystical texts…”
However, there is one criticism I would make. For some reason Cole moves from the pogrom in Kishinev to the current conflict in Gaza. It is not clear to me why he feels compelled to do so or why he thinks this is relevant to an introduction to the work of one of the great Russian-Jewish writers of the early 20th century.
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