Crafter of cultural identity

Gabriel Josipovici enthuses over a legendary life. Keren David enjoys a three-in-one Hayam Nahman Bialik: Poet of Hebrew

Yale University Press, £16.99 Reviewed by Gabriel Josipovici

LIKE YEATS for the Irish, Bialik was more than the first great modern Hebrew poet; he was the conscience of his people. At his funeral in Tel Aviv in 1934 all shops and factories were closed at noon, public buildings and schools were draped in black and some 100,000 people, roughly a third of Palestine’s Jewish population, followed the coffin to the grave.

His origins were inauspicious. Born in 1873 into a large family of timber merchants in the Ukrainian town of Zhitomir, his ineffectual dreamer father died when he was seven. His mother, unable to support her children, left him with her rich father-inlaw, thus in effect orphaning him. His grandfather was a stern and religious old man and living with him and his housekeeper was misery for the boy.

Fortunately, he excelled at his studies and at 17 was sent to the prestigious yeshiva in Volozhin to pursue his religious education. But he had already begun to question his faith — and to write poetry.

Unlike Yeats, who took half a lifetime to find his mature voice, Bialik found his almost at once. A visit to Odessa, the bustling home of Zionist endeavour and Hebrew literature in Russia, and an introduction to its leading light, Ahad Ha’Am, led, in 1892, when Bialik was only 19, to the publication of his first poem, To the Bird, which was immediately recognised as heralding the arrival of a major poet. For Bialik seems to have immediately discovered H. N. Bialik: ‘Hebrew National Poet’ who signed off to his public as a ‘sick man’ in a ‘sick society’

how to write personal poetry that yet spoke to the nascent nation. In Ha Matmid (The Talmud Student), for example, he rejects with almost physical revulsion the life of the yeshiva, but ends with the bleak: “I perished in a different way.” It’s so simple yet it catches the central dilemma of modernism: we can no longer believe in the old traditions, but what is to replace them?

Bialik moved to Odessa in 1900 and found his answer: You have to replace religion with culture. With demonic energy, he set up a publishing house with his older friend, Ravnitski, to make available the best of Hebrew literature down the ages, poured out anthologies, short stories and poems for children,

and went on writing few but always important adult poems, such as his response to the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, In the City of Slaughter. By the end of the decade, he was recognised everywhere as the Hebrew National Poet, a term he loathed yet embraced with pride.

When he moved to Tel Aviv in 1924, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, he became even more of a public figure, eventually having to escape from the grand house he had built for himself and his wife in Tel Aviv to a flat in Ramat Gan to get a little bit of privacy.

By 1911, his own poetic gifts had more or less dried up, leading to prolonged bouts of depression. To “his” people, though, he never ceased to give,

though never afraid of telling them the truth as he saw it. When, worn down by illness, he prepared to set off for Vienna and the operation which would end his life, he said to the crowds who had come to see him off:

“I am a sick man and this is a sick society. We see greed and anger everywhere. This must change or we are lost”. That was 1934.

Avner Holtzman, a professor at the University of Tel Aviv, has written a lucid and moving biography of this wonderful man. Read it.

Gabriel Josipovici’s recent books include the essay collection, ‘The Teller and the Tale’ (Carcanet)