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Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934) - name also transliterated Chayim Nachman Bialik |
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Poet, translator, essayist, storyteller, editor, one of the greatest Hebrew poets of all time. Bialik is considered Israel's national poet, although he did not live to witness the birth of the State of Israel. Several of his poems have been set to music and gained wide popularity as songs. Some of his works Bialik wrote in Yiddish but most of his important writings are in Hebrew. In many poems Bialik depicted the suffering of his people, but he also could ridicule the weakness and passivity of his fellow intellectuals. You have not changed, you're antic old, Hayyim Nahman Bialik was born in Radi, in Volhynia, Russia. He was the youngest of seven children of Reb Yitzok Yoissef Bialik, a scholar and unsuccessful businessman, and Dinah (Priveh) Bialik. After his father's death in 1880, he was raised in Zhitomir by his learned, sternly Orthodox grandfather Reb Yaakov Moishe Bialik, whose motto was "Spare the rod, spoil the child." The loss of his father at an early age and life in new surroundings shaped Bialik's thought and later his poems about exile also echoed his personal feelings of rootlessness. Bialik received a traditional Hebrew education, but was also influenced by his mother's interest in Russian and European literature. At the age of eleven he read the Kabbalistic literature of the Middle Ages. Some years later he began to study the Talmud, and spent much time in the beth hamidrash, the traditional house of learning. In 1890 he moved to Volozhin in Lithuania to study at its famous Talmudic Academy (yeshiva). For his disappointment, the curriculum did not include secular subjects. Next year he went to Odessa and devoted there himself to the study of Russian and German. During this period he composed poems which reflected the themes and styles of the Jewish enlightenment (haskalah). Among his friends and mentors was the early Zionist ideologist Ahad Ha'am (1856-1927), whose thoughts influenced his writing. He also admired the work of Samuel Frug, a romantic Russian Jewish poet. Unable to find employment in Odessa, Bialik returned in 1892 to
Zhitomir, and married Manya Auerbach. It was an arranged marriage; his
wife was a daughter of a prominent lumber merchant. Bialik's business
venture with his father-in-law failed and he moved in 1897 to
Sosnowice, a small town near the Prussian border. There Bialik worked
as a teacher, edited and produced Hebrew school texts and children's
poems, and tried to earn extra income as a coal merchant without
much success. However, Bialik's fame as a poet had started to grow and
he returned to Odessa, a center of Hebrew literature. When
most Jews were forbidden to live in Moscow or St. Petersburg, Odessa
had many times more Jews than any other city in the Russian part of the
empire. Later the people of its famous ghetto, the Moldavanka, was
celebrated in Isaak Babel's Tales of Odessa (1931). Babel was devoted to Yiddish literature and translated from Yiddish purely for his own enjoyment. Bialik worked in Odessa as head teacher in a new Ahad Ha'amist
elementary school, and continued his activities in Zionist and literary
circles. Bialik's first volume of poetry came out in 1901 in
Warsaw. He visited Palestine in 1904 and 1908 and also spent some time
in Warsaw (1903-05), editing the magazine Ha-Shiloah, which had
been founded by Ahad Ha'am. In the early 1900's Bialik founded with
Y.H. Ravnitzky (1859-1944) a Hebrew publishing house, Moriah, which
issued Hebrew classics and school literature. He translated various
European works, such as Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, Cervantes' Don Quixote
(probably from the Russian and German versions), and Heine's poems. In collaboration with Yehoshua Hana Ravnizsky Bialik published Sefer Ha Aggadah (1908-1911, The Book of Legends), a three-volume edition of the folk tales and proverbs scattered through the Talmud. For the book they selected hundreds of texts and arranged them thematically. The Book of Legends was immediately recognized as masterwork and has been reprinted numerous times. Bialik also edited the poems of the medieval poet and philosopher Ibn Gabirol and began a modern commentary on the Mishna, the oral law. Bialik's first long poem, 'Ha-Matmid', published in Ha-Shiloah,
established his fame as one of the most important Hebrew poets of his
time. It presented the Taldumic student as a heroic force of Judaism
and depicted the rapidly vanishing life of traditional orthodox Jewish
past. Bialik's early poems often dealt with the gap between modern life
and religious faith, and the bitterness of exile. He used biblical
language and images, but did not slavishly imitate earlier writings. Although Bialik's best-known poems are about the tragedy of the Jewish people and national and individual redemption, he also produced passionate love poems. Apathy and inability act was mocked in such poems as 'On My Return' and 'Summer is Dying,' saying in the latter: "The heart is orphaned. Soon a rainy day / Will softly tap the pane." The poem continues with another voice, which wakes up the day-dreamer: '"Look to your boots, patch up your coats, go fetch / The potatoes again."' With his call for a reawakening and modernization of language Bialik deeply influenced the Renaissance period of Hebrew literature on its way from Europe to Palestine. Rise and go to the town of the killings and you'll come to the yards 'City of the Killings' concerned the Kishinev Pogrom in the capital
of Bessarabia, during which
about 50 people were massacred. Bialik was the central member of a
committee of investigation that was sent by the Jewish Historical
Committee in Odessa to the city to investigate the horrors and write a
report based on victim testimony. Despite fears that censors would not
permit it, the editor of Ha-Shiloah,
Joseph Klausner, decided to publish this revolutionary poem. The
speaker the work – the God himself – guides the reader through the
horrible sights of the slaughter and asks: "And who else is like God on
earth and can bear this in silence?" Readers were shocked for Bialik's
contempt of the weakness of the victims: "all the flesh of their bodies
hurts
– but they've grown used to their hurts. / and they've accepted their
lives of shame, and what's the sense in their consolation?" (translated by Atar Hadari) "To this
very day I do not forgive him for his Kishinev deed," said the
literary patriarch Solem Yankev Abramovitsh. (Hayim Nahman Bialik: Poet of Hebrew by Avner Holtzman, 2017, p. 95) When Maxim Gorky read the poem, he burst into tears. It is said that Bialik's castigating passivity against anti-Semitic violence furthered the idea of founding Jewish self-defense groups in Russia, and eventually the Haganah in Palestine. His other famous poems include 'Metei midbar' (Dead of the Desert), 'Ha-Berekhah' (The Pool), and 'Mgilat haesh' (1905, The Scroll of Fire), set in the time of the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem. From 1908 Bialik wrote more prose than poetry. Most of his works Bialik wrote in Hebrew, believing that Yiddish was doomed to die out in eastern Europe. After the Bolshevik Revolution the Communist authorities viewed with
suspicion Bialik's advocating for the Hebrew culture, and the publishing
house Moriah was closed. With the help of Gorky, Bialik and other Hebrew writers received a permission to
emigrate. Bialik was allowed to take with him only books, papers,
and maniscripts essential to his work. He migrated to Berlin,
where he established the Dvir publishing house. In 1924 he moved to Tel
Aviv in 1924. At that time Palestine was administered by Britain under a
League of Nations mandate. Bialik founded in Tel Aviv a weekly philosophical and literary
discussion forum, calling it as "Oneg Shabbat" (Enjoyment of
the Sabbath). During the last decade of his life, Bialik
participated in a number of cultural pursuits, but wrote only a few
poems. He delivered the address that marked the opening of Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, was a member of its board of governors,
visited the United States on behalf of the Palestine Foundation Fund and toured in Poland. London depressed him. As a young writer, he
had nurtured a negative attitude towards American culture, which he
associated with "noise, confusion, ta-ra-ram,... with those things we
condems in the strongest terms: bluff,...'business,' etc."Basically, Bialik felt of being a "small-town boy." ('Waste Land with Promise: Chaim Nachman Bialik's America' by Michael Brown, in Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 6, No. 3/4, Fall 1994, pp. 50-52) Later he overcome some of his prejudices, and appreciated, among others, the Hollywood silent film Ben Hur. Bialik died as a result of complications from a routine prostatectomy in Vienna, Austria, on July 4, 1934. "Israel is orphaned: Hayim Nahman Bialik is gone," wrote Davar, the leading Hebrew-language newspaper in Jewish Palestine. Bialik was buried in Tel Aviv on July 16. His casket was driven through the streets of the city. Buildings were draped in black flags. Bialik's poems have been translated into some 30 languages. His home, designed by Yossef Minor at 22 Bialik Street in Tel Aviv, was later opened to the public as a museum. Bialik's poems – and songs based on them – have become an essential part of the education and culture of modern Israel. They are read at schools, and his verses and expressions are frequently recited in festivals and all kinds of public events. For further reading: Bialik, the Hebrew Bible and the Literature of Nationalism by David Aberbach (2023); Hayim Nahman Bialik: Poet of Hebrew by Avner Holtzman; translated from the Hebrew by Orr Scharf (2017); National Poetry, Empires and War by David Aberbach (2015); Twentieth Century Jews: Forging Identity in the Land of Promise and in the Promised Land by Monty Noam Penkower (2010); Sunshine, Blossoms and Blood: H.N. Bialik in His Time, a Literary Biography by Sara Feinstein (2005); H. N. Bialik and the Prophetic Mode in Modern Hebrew Poetry by Dan Miron (2000); Li-netivah ha-ne`elam: `ikvot parshat Irah Yan bi-yetsirat Byalik by Zivah Shamir (2000); Byalik ben `Ivrit le-Yidish by Yitshak Bakon (1987); Mivhar shire H.N. Byalik: `im sheva` hartsa'ot `al shirav / me-et Pinhas `Sadeh by Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1985); 'Bialik, Chaim Nachman,' in World Authors 1950-1970, ed. by John Wakeman (1975); After the Tradition by R. Alter (1969); Bialik Speaks: Words from the Poet’s Lips, Clues to the Man by Mordecai Ovadyahu. [Translated by A. El-Dror (1969); Byalik be-shirato by Zvi Adar (1966); The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, ed. by S. Burnshaw (1965); Ritmim be-shirat Biyalik by Zusha Shapira (1965); Pirke zikhronot by Manya Auerbach Bialik (196-); Mar'ot shetiyah be-shirat Byalik by Elieser Kagan (1959); Bialik by Fischel Lachower (1944-49); Hayyim Nahman Bialik by Israel Isaac Efros (1940); Chajjim Nachman Bialik; eine Einführung in sein Leben und sein Werk. Mit einigen Ubersetzungsproben und Gedichtanalysen by A.E. Simon (1935); Hebrew Reborn by S. Spiegel (1930) - Note: I wish to thank Mirkku Ben-David (Israel) and Orly Orava (Kuusankoski, Finland) for their help in writing this page. Selected works:
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