Background
Hebrew poet, was born Jan. 9, 1873, at Radi, Volhynia, Russia. After the early death of his father, Bialik went, at the age of seven, to live with his grandfather, a learned and rigorously pious man.
Chaim or Haim
Hebrew poet, was born Jan. 9, 1873, at Radi, Volhynia, Russia. After the early death of his father, Bialik went, at the age of seven, to live with his grandfather, a learned and rigorously pious man.
Born in a Ukrainian village, in his poetry he fondly recalls his childhood as a lost paradise of fields and woods.
His happiness ended abruptly at the age of seven when his father died and he was sent to Zhitomir to be raised by his grandfather, whose stem Orthodox upbringing he found unbearably stifling. At the age of fifteen, he entered the yeshiva (Talmudic academy) of Volozhin in Lithuania, hoping to find some way of mediating for himself between the Jewish Enlightenment and Orthodoxy.
While there, he began to write Hebrew poetry and prose. He also came under the influence of Ahad Ha’Am, the spokesman of Jewish national revival, and joined a clandestine Zionist society. Although he was a good student, he found the yeshiva atmosphere too confining and left for the great cultural center of Odessa, where he began to gain recognition as a Hebrew poet.
He returned for a period to Zhitomir, where he worked as a timber merchant for his father-in-law, and during this time wrote profusely. Four years later, he returned to Odessa to teach in the Hebrew school and lived there for the next twenty years, writing essays, stories, and poems, and editing and publishing Hebrew literary journals. A great part of his poetry was written during this period.
During the years preceding World War I, he stopped writing poetry for a period that has come to be known as the silence, and which is a subject of endless speculation. During that time he became preoccupied with the concept of kinus, the collec¬tion of diverse elements of Jewish culture from the Diaspora.
After three years in Berlin, Bialik settled in Palestine in 1924. He became a national figure and was so busy in his public functions that his literary activity declined.
He was one of the greatest masters of Hebrew in modern times and wrote essays as well as poetry. His poetry (written according to the Ashkenazi pronunciation) ranges from nationalist poems which deal with the crisis of faith, the nationalist revival, the tension between his love of Jewish life and his scorn for all that was stifling in that life, to the private poems filled with images of childhood grief lost, love and yearning for the innocence and security of childhood.
He was often sent abroad as an emissary of the Zionist organization. His death of a heart attack in Vienna, at the height of his fame, was seen as a national tragedy. His home in Tel Aviv is now the Bialik Museum.
With the rise of Zionism and the revival of Hebrew, he came to be known as the poet-prophet of Jewish nationalism. His influence was immense. He inspired Zionists and revolutionaries in Russia, pioneers in Palestine, and thousands of school children, who studied his poetry wherever modern Hebrew was taught.
He scorned Jewish apathy and many of his poems criticized his fellow Diaspora Jews for their humble acceptance of the negative aspects of their existence. Most notable was "In the City of Slaughter", written after the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, in which he both expressed his sorrow and attacked the cowardly, parasitical survivors. This poem was a major stimulus to the Jewish self-defense movement. Many other such “poems of wrath” followed between the years 1903 and 1906.
Quotations:
• The Bible is always with me, I do not dip pen in ink without looking at it.
• Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
• Each people has as much heaven over its head as it has land under its feet.
• Say this when you mourn for me:
There was a man — and look, he is no more.
He died before his time.
The music of his life suddenly stopped.
A pity! There was another song in him.
Now it is lost forever.
He was regarded, somewhat to his own embarrassment, as the great poet of Jewish nationalism and was widely honored.
One anecdote tells of two children who spotted him in a barbershop in Tel Aviv. One said, “There’s Bialik!” “Don’t be silly,” his friend replied. “Bialik is a street name.”