Bialik

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HEINE

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MENDELSSOHN

AND THE RELIGIOUS ENLIGHTENMENT

David Sorkin

AHAD HA’AM

ELUSIVE PROPHET

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ARLOSOROFF

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To Mimi

with much love

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Although this book was written especially for the Jewish Thinkers series, it began life in 1975 as an Oxford thesis and later developed in the form of articles for Encounter, Prooftexts, International Review of Psycho-Analysis, Hebrew Union College Annual and Moznayim. I remain indebted to my Oxford teachers during the formative period: the late Dr Meir Gertner, Mr Francis Warner and Dr David Patterson.

I am also most grateful to many others who read the book, or parts of it, at various stages in its growth and who made many helpful suggestions: Dr Glenda Abramson, Mrs Sonia Argyle, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Professors John Bayley, John Carey, David Daiches and the late Richard Ellmann, Judy Gough, Dr Michael Hilton, Rabbi Dr Arthur Hertzberg, Dr Albert Hourani, Miss Deborah Maccoby, Profesor Harold Merskey, Betty Palmer, Professor Ezra Spicehandler, Dr Anthony Storr and Dr Leon Yudkin.

Thanks are also due to Dr Martin Gilbert for preparing the map preceding the preface of this book.

I also wish to record my gratitude to the librarians of the libraries that I used: Bet Bialik, Tel Aviv; Bodleian Library, Oxford; King’s College, Cambridge; Kressel Archives, Yarnton Manor, Yarnton, Oxford; Houghton Library, Harvard Univer­sity; National Library, Jerusalem; Tavistock Clinic Library, London.

Acknowledgement is due to Faber and Faber for permission to quote from ‘Ash Wednesday’ and ‘The Waste Land’ from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot.

Finally, and most important, I thank Peter and Martine Halban for their encouragement and help during the writing of this book.

Note on Transliteration

The general system of transliteration has been used. The dot under the H has been included to denote the Hebrew letter chet and has been used where essential to pronunciation or meaning. A superior comma has been used to denote the Hebrew letters aleph and eyin, e.g. Ba’al.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Map

Preface

Introduction

1 The Man and the Legend

2 The Background

3 Literary Roots

4 Romantic-National Poet

5 National Figure

6 Poet of Private Grief

7 Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Bialik’s Works

General Index

About the Author

Other titles in the Jewish Thinkers series

Copyright

PREFACE

Of modern Jewish poets, Bialik is the most influential, culturally and politically, and in some ways the best. Measured as a Hebrew poet against the biblical standard of the Book of Isaiah or of Job, or the Song of Songs, Bialik is a major poet: there is no disputing his originality, power and mastery. Bialik is, perhaps, the only modern Hebrew poet who warrants comparison with the great Romantics – with Pushkin, Schiller, and Wordsworth – who, more than the Modernists, his contemporaries, represented to him (as to most of the Russian and Jewish intelligentsia of his time) the ideals of Enlightenment, high culture and poetic genius. In the original Hebrew, Bialik’s poems display extraordinary thematic versatility and emotional range, but their lasting significance is their rare power to move and inspire, to astonish and delight. Though the sentimentality and rhetoric of his early and late poems are not to everyone’s taste, most of the poems of his greatest period, in Odessa 1900–11, are instantly recognizable in Hebrew for their sensitivity and toughness, precision and musicality. These are among the finest poems in Hebrew, and it is worth learning Hebrew to read them.

Yet, Bialik is important for other reasons as well. His poetry represents in miniature a summing up and recasting of an entire, mostly religious, literary tradition in modern secular form. It is poetry of metamorphosis, from victimization to empowerment, from traditional passive faith to scepticism and political activism, from disillusionment to new hope. Bialik was instrumental in transforming Hebrew poetry from primarily a religious mode of expression and, among a growing minority, a didactic vehicle for the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), into a powerful instrument of cultural nationalism and artistic self-expression. His poetry also enacts the transition from the relatively stable and primitive rural village existence of East–European Jews to the sophistication, opportunities, and anomie of urban life.

With the collapse of traditional Jewish life in the newly-created Soviet Union after the 1917 revolution, Bialik in common with countless others became a penniless refugee. He found shelter first in war-ravaged Berlin, then from 1925, in the tiny boom-town of Tel Aviv, now under British mandatory rule, where he lived until his death in 1934. Looking back on his childhood in a Ukrainian backwater, Bialik must have felt at times that his early existence, though in some ways paradisal, was virtually medieval, since so much had changed, and so rapidly.

The image of the poet remains complex, enigmatic, and often paradoxical: as a secular poet in a religious literary tradition; an artist bereaved in childhood; a public figure with intensely private concerns; a prophet who felt himself to be corrupt; a charismatic icon who exposed the sham of his public image; a sensitive love poet plaintively bewailing the love he never knew; a national poet of a people who for two thousand years had rejected political nationalism; a poet who wrote of despair with such confidence and power that he instilled in his people a sense of purpose and hope; and a critic of the national cause which he ably represented, setting, for the first time in Hebrew, the poet above the religious figure as custodian of national culture.¹

The contrast between his styles and moods – the thundering prophet and the child-like mystic, for example – continues to fascinate. The poems are impressive for the variety of their styles and emotional range. Even in translation, they can be profound and moving. For those with only the rudiments of Hebrew, it should be clear that Bialik was a master of the craft of poetry, of rhyme and metre, diction and nuance.² He had a superb ear for the sound of the Hebrew language. He, as much as any Hebrew poet, reminds the reader that the Hebrew for ‘poetry’ is ‘song’, shira. No other Hebrew poet has had so many of his lyrics set to music.

The deep conflicts in Bialik are reflected in his poetics. Bialik returned Hebrew poetry to free verse after over a thousand years of metre and rhyme. He never abandoned them, but in 1897 – the year of the First Zionist Congress – he turned for the first time to free verse. It may be that nationalism triggered in him poetic emancipation, a rejection of non-Jewish European (ultimately Arabic) poetic forms, and a return to the rough and tumble of the biblical prophetic style. The cumulative effect of his poetry is of fragments made whole, a raw and wild gift disciplined, masculine power and feminine sensitivity harmonized, despair and hope reconciled, the personal and the national united, religious feeling harnessed to the national cause.

Time has increased the irony that the Jewish national poet should in fact be an unrecognized poet of the Ukrainian landscape which he loved. In contrast, when Bialik writes of Zion he does not know what he is describing but draws on ancient literary constructs deriving to a large extent from the Bible and Talmud. Bialik’s poetry is a living reminder that Jewish nationalism was based to an unusual extent on the literary imagination, on the power of the word.

Bialik’s poetry is part of the history of Russia and America as well as Israel. Bialik belonged to an extraordinary, deeply split generation of Russian Jews who, as socialists and revolutionaries, had disproportionate influence on the course of the Russian Revolution and the formation of the early Soviet state. As emigrants, the Russian Jews made up the bulk of the American Jewish community – about two million by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Most importantly in the context of Bialik’s emergence as a Jewish national poet is the fact that the Russian Jews comprised the vast majority of the first three aliyot (mass emigrations to Palestine), in 1881–1900, 1903–14, and 1917–21, a total of about 100,000 people. Significantly, each aliyah coincided with a wave of Russian pogroms. Without the Russian Jews, the foundation of the Jewish state could not have been built.

The three key historical events of Bialik’s formative years were the first two waves of Russian pogroms, in 1881–2 and 1903–6, and the establishment of the World Zionist Organization by Theodor Herzl in 1897. The moral vision based on a revival of history and culture which Bialik articulated in his poetry and in his program of kinnus (‘ingathering’ of Jewish culture through the ages into a unified whole) gave direction to radical political activism. Bialik’s poetry, in its striving and turbulence, its passion and despair, its rage and hope, is a mirror of the age. It makes clearer than any other body of creative writing the emotional forces driving about a third of the Russian Jewish population of nearly five million to emigrate in the years 1881–1914.

At the same time, although class warfare is not a theme in Bialik’s works, the revolutionary character of his poetry in Hebrew and in Jabotinsky’s Russian translations was an inspiration to socialists and was part of the Russian Zeitgeist in the period leading up to the Russian Revolution. Though Bialik wrote exclusively for Jews, his poetry is universalist in its overriding concern with the struggle for personal and national fulfillment. He was the first modern Hebrew writer to be widely translated and to have a large non-Jewish readership.

Bialik was a leader of an elite group of Jewish intellectuals cut off by their secular education (usually self-achieved and incomplete) from the orthodox Jewish tradition into which they had been born, but equally alienated by anti-Semitism from gentile society. Traditional bastions of Jewish identity described by Bialik, such as the bet midrash and yeshiva were seen as retrograde, futile retreats into the past, irrelevant, even dangerous in the face of the massive need for action and change confronting Russian Jewry. After 1881, the idea of assimilation or ‘Russification’ under the banner of Enlightenment was no longer viable. Russian Jewry after 1881 underwent a severe crisis of identity and self-definition in reaction to the pogroms and the anti-Semitic legislation (the so-called ‘May Laws’ of May 1882) which blamed the Jews for provoking the pogroms. Wounded and lacking an outlet for intellectual gifts refined by one of the most exacting of educational traditions, a small but decisive number of Russian Jews turned to nationalism and to Hebrew culture as a new basis for crumbling Jewish solidarity. This almost totally unexpected turn from the universal ideals of the Enlightenment to more narrow, aggressive aims of nationalism was general in nineteenth-century Europe. Virtually unique, though, was the revival and secularization of an ancient culture and language in a land which most Jews had never seen.

The feeling of national exile in Bialik’s poems was given added poignancy and conviction by Bialik’s sense of personal exile as a child orphaned of his father at six and separated soon after from his mother. Bialik constantly returned in his poetry to these traumas, which could be interpreted or misinterpreted as expressions of longing for reunion with the motherland. In a career lasting over 40 years, Bialik’s poetic output was relatively small – after 1911 he hardly wrote poetry except for children – yet practically every poem of his, especially in the years 1900–11, has a distinct character and contributes both to the psychological map of the poet and the spirit of the age.

A number of personal and national themes recur in Bialik’s poems. A sign of the relative poverty of Hebrew literature of the late nineteenth century is that his earliest published poetry, in the 1890s, when he was still in his teens, though relatively weak and derivative, immediately established him as a leading Hebrew poet. After the death of Judah Leib Gordon in 1892, Bialik had the field virtually to himself. Bialik’s fame spread with In the City of Slaughter, written after the Kishinev pogrom in 1903. This was one of a series of ‘poems of wrath’ written in a stirring neo-prophetic style during the pogroms of 1903–6. At the other extreme, in some cases contemporaneously, Bialik wrote delicate love lyrics and semi-mystical poetry which are as quiet and private as the others are loud and public. Another group are the folk poems, frequently set to music, which have delighted generations of children as well as their parents, though the poems for children and grown-ups are closely related. The jouissance in his poetry, though often in a minor key, is that of a child alone in a toy shop: the poetry is not work but play and song.

Still, Bialik took a great risk in writing Hebrew as part of a movement that might easily have failed. He persisted in his total commitment to Jewish cultural nationalism, supported by an outstanding literary circle in Odessa, led by Ahad Ha’am and Mendele Mocher Sefarim, and by an elite and exceptionally discerning readership.³ Each poem he wrote was pored over by some of the sharpest, most critical readers in Tsarist Russia, many of whom had spent years intensely studying and arguing over sacred texts. These readers were highly sensitive to the conflicts inherent in Bialik’s poetry between a powerful Jewish religious tradition and the call of a new, untried, attractive, and frightening secular world. They responded to the subtleties of his language, its play and allusiveness, its often shocking use of sacred texts in a profane context, the radical break with the past while deriving power from it. Bialik’s closest intellectual and emotional affinity was with this class of uprooted, disillusioned Jewish intellectuals.

Bialik’s poetry can be read or sung and appeals to a wide variety of readers, but ideally it should also be studied. For in common with his readers, Bialik was born into a world in which Hebrew literature mainly meant the Bible, the Talmud and the siddur, the prayer book, and it was still possible for one person to read everything of value in Hebrew. His mastery of Hebrew in all its strata was reinforced by his scholarly work on talmudic and midrashic aggadah (Jewish legend and folklore) and on the Mishnah, as well as on modern editions of the medieval Hebrew poets Solomon ibn Gabirol and Moses ibn Ezra.

The richness and power of Bialik’s language have roots both in the Jewish and Russian traditions: in both, the function of literature is to change people and societies for the better. And in this aim Bialik succeeded as much as any national poet: a decade and a half after his death, the people whom he lambasted and lamented, who at the time of his birth had no territory of their own nor