For God called forth the Spring and slaughter together - H. Bialik's pogrom poem

Get up, go to the city of slaughter and you will come to the courtyards,
And with your eyes you will see and with your hands you will touch the fences
And the wood and the stones and on the plaster walls
The congealed blood and the hardened brains of the fallen. (1-4)

That's the beginning of H. Bialik's "In the City of Slaughter" (1904), an angry poetic response to the 1903 Easter pogrom in Kishinev. The Biblical language reaches back, mostly, to the Psalms and Jeremiah and Lamentations and the other prophetic books. Bialik's poem sounds like a new prophetic book.

It's a brutal and unsparing poem, full of horrors, details about filthy hiding places and violent deaths. It's a bit hard to read, although perhaps not more so than, read in the right spirit, Jeremiah.

To the cemetery, beggars! Dig up the bones of your fathers
And the bones of your martyred brothers and fill your haversacks
And carry them on the shoulder and go out to the road, prepared
To do business with them at all of the markets; (258-61)

As this passage suggests, Bialik is not particularly angry at the Russians. He's angry at the Jews. Disgusted - "And everything will return to its usual manner, everything will return to its proper form." The Jews will clean up, grieve, and go on as if nothing happened. Vladimir Jabotinsky gives Bialik credit for inspiring Jewish self-defense leagues (he calls it "[t]he revival of Maccabean tendencies"),* putting "In the City of Slaughter" in the company of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Nicholas Nickleby as one of the rare literary works to have genuine political impact. Which is hardly why I read it.

For God called forth the Spring and slaughter together:
The sun shone, the acacia bloomed and the slaughterer slaughtered. (21-2)

* Quoted in Jacobs, Steven L., Shirot Bialik: A New and Annotated Translation of Chaim Nachman Bialik's Epic Poems (1987), Alpha Publishing Company, p. 124.

H. Bialik's modern Hebrew - A dim corner and parchment scrolls

Reading about Yiddish literature, the name of one non-Yiddish writer kept appearing: H. Bialik, the pioneering Hebrew poet. In some rough sense, his project was similar to that of I. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem and other Yiddish writers, modernizing a traditional language, bringing it into imaginative literature.

I finally read a bit of his work, and it turns out to be something unique. But, of course, Bialik was a poet, so his problems and solutions would be different. And Hebrew isn't Yiddish.

Shirot Bialik* includes four Shirot, or "Epic Poems." These four epics barely fill eighty pages, so there's our first Modernist irony. Bialik was not writing The Iliad.

Here are the titles and subjects:

"The Yeshiva Student" (1894-5), where a student renounces all earthly things for the study of the Torah. Bialik sees this choice as tragic, admirable yet deadening.

"The Dead of the Wilderness" (1902), about a group of pre-Jewish giants, cursed and frozen in the desert. The story is an expansion of a passage in the Babylonian Talmud. It is presumably an allegory.

"In the City of Slaughter" (1904), an angry response to Russian pogroms. Absolutely amazing. I think I'll save it for tomorrow.

"The Pond" (1908), in which the poet sits by a pond for eleven pages. There's also a storm. Epic!

All four poems, as different as their subjects are, share a common meter and technique, an intimate interweaving with the Hebrew Bible. I know this from the extensive footnotes. It turns out that the Biblical references are often to single words, which I would never be able to detect myself. But the cadence, the feel of Bialik's verse is Biblical, even in English, which not surprisingly sounds like a translation of the Hebrew Bible. From "The Yeshiva Student" (69-76), on the reason students leave the yeshiva:

Also, there was one chosen for a bridegroom and a maiden,
A village girl, coarse, fat, was his lot,
And another one of the secluded ones was redeemed
And became a great rabbi in a worthy town -
But one stands like a hammered nail,
The deeds, the years pass behind him;
And before him? Before him a wall of iron is planted,
A dim corner and parchment scrolls are seen.

For "redeemed," a note points to Leviticus 25:24 ("you must provide for the redemption of the land")**; the "wall of iron" is from Ezekiel 4:3, a typically weird passage for that book. The hammered nail, an image that recurs in Bialik's poem, is his own, modern, as are, of course, the village girl and the rabbi and so on.

Here's a bit of Bialik in sublime mode, from "The Dead of the Wilderness" (135-7):

Yet sometimes the wilderness becomes disgusted and grows weary of the eternal stillness
And awakens to be avenged with one big vengeance for its desolation by its Creator,
It lifts itself up against Him with a tempest and with pillars of sand rebels against Him.

Note how different the line lengths are compared to "The Yeshiva Student." One might think that this passage is a pastiche of Biblical references, but the notes identify just one, a link to Judges 16:28, where a blind Samson prays for strength "to take revenge of the Philistines." The language is Bialik's.

* Jacobs, Steven L., Shirot Bialik: A New and Annotated Translation of Chaim Nachman Bialik's Epic Poems (1987), Alpha Publishing Company.

** Biblical translations from the New Jewish Publication Society version (1985).