Haim Naḥman Bialik

Haim Naḥman Bialik (born January 9, 1873, Radi, Volhynia, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died July 4, 1934, Vienna, Austria) a leading Hebrew poet, esteemed for expressing in his verse the yearnings of the Jewish people and for making the modern Hebrew language a flexible medium of poetic expression.

Born into poverty, Bialik was left fatherless when he was five or six years old and was brought up by his rigidly pious, learned grandfather. After an intensive education in the Jewish classics, he attended for a short time the Jewish academy in Volozhin (now Valozhyn, Belarus). These three influences—his poverty, his being an orphan, and his study of Jewish religious classics—were the wellsprings of much of Bialik’s poetry. In 1891 he went to Odessa, then the centre of Jewish modernism, where he struck up a lifelong friendship with the Jewish author Aḥad Haʿam, who encouraged Bialik in his creative writing.

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The following year Bialik moved to Zhitomir (now Zhytomyr, Ukraine) and to a small town in Poland. He worked unsuccessfully as a lumber merchant, then taught for a few years in a Hebrew school. The publication of his first long poem, “Ha-matmid” (“The Diligent Talmud Student”), in the periodical Ha-shiloaḥ (edited by Aḥad Haʿam) established his reputation as the outstanding Hebrew poet of his time. The poem is a sympathetic portrait of a student whose single-minded dedication to Talmudic study is awe-inspiring, even saintly.

His writing career assured, Bialik returned to Odessa as a teacher in a Hebrew school, at the same time publishing poems and some of the most highly regarded stories in modern Hebrew literature. His poems inspired by the pogrom that took place in 1903 in the city of Kishinyov (now Chişinău, Moldova) contain some of the fiercest and most anguished verse in Hebrew poetry. In such poems as “Be-ʿĭr he-haregah” (“In the City of Slaughter”), Bialik lashes out at both the cruelty of the oppressors and the passivity of the Jewish populace.

His other poems include a fragment of an epic, “Metey midbar” (“The Dead of the Desert”), and “Ha-brekha” (“The Pool”). “Metey midbar” imaginatively builds on a Talmudic legend about the Jewish host (in the biblical book of Exodus) who perished in the desert. “Ha-brekha” is a visionary nature poem in which the body of water reveals to the poet the wordless language of the universe itself.

Bialik translated into Hebrew such European classics as Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Friedrich von Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, and S. Ansky’s play Der dibek (“The Dybbuk”). An indefatigable editor and literary organizer, he was a cofounder of the Tel Aviv publishing firm Dvir (with his lifelong associate, the author and editor Y.H. Ravnitzky) and edited Sefer ha-agadah (1907/08–1910/11; The Book of Legends), a collection of traditional Jewish homilies and legends. He also edited the poems of the medieval poet and philosopher Ibn Gabirol and began a popular modern commentary on the Mishna (the codification of Jewish oral laws).

In 1921 Bialik left Soviet Russia for Germany, where Jewish writers had established a short-lived Hebrew centre, and then settled in Palestine (1924). There he devoted himself to public affairs, producing only a few poems, the most important of which was “Yatmut” (“Orphanhood”), a long poem about his childhood that he wrote shortly before his death.