Haim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), one of the leading poets of modern Hebrew, was born in the village of Radi, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. At the age of six, his family moved to Zhitomir. A year later, his father died, and Bialik went to live with his paternal grandfather, who gave him an Orthodox education. At first, he studied with the traditional teachers of the heder, the religious school for boys, but from the age of 13, he was self-taught. He studied alone in the increasingly empty yeshiva on the outskirts of the village. While studying rabbinic literature, he began reading about medieval theology and the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment.

At the age of 15, he convinced his grandfather to send him to study at the Volozhin yeshiva, where he began to read Russian poetry and European literature on his own and wrote his first poem, «El Hatzipor,» «To the Bird.» He soon joined a secret student society that sought to integrate Zionism and the Enlightenment with the Orthodox tradition, following the teachings of Ahad Haam.

In the summer of 1891, he moved to Odessa, attracted by the intellectual circle that had formed around Ahad Haam. He sought to prepare for admission to the Modern Orthodox seminary in Berlin. To support himself, he taught Hebrew while reading Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Gogol. He learned German grammar and read Schiller and Lessing. He persuaded Ahad Haam to read his poems and have them published in the first volume of Ha Pardes. In early 1892, he learned that the Volozhin yeshivah had been closed and returned to Zhitomir to find his dying grandfather. He didn’t want him to know he had abandoned his studies.

In 1893, he married Manya Averbuch. Bialik used the time he spent in the forests, working for his father-in-law’s lumber business, to write poems that blended images of the old tradition with the new Israel. Between 1897 and 1900, he worked as a teacher in Sosnowiec, a town near the Prussian border. There, he began writing short stories and also writing in Yiddish. In 1900, he found work as a teacher in Odessa, where he met notable figures such as Mendele Mojer Sforim, Simon Dubnow, Haim Tchernowitz, and others. He translated Mendele’s works from Yiddish into Hebrew, as well as works by Shakespeare, Schiller, Cervantes, and Heine. In 1903, after the terrible pogrom in Kishinev, he wrote the epic poem «In the City of Slaughter,» in which he condemned the massacre, but also the passivity of the victims. In 1908, with Yehoshua Ravnitzky, he edited «Sefer Ha Agadah,» a compendium of legends from the Talmud and Midrash. He lived in Odessa until 1921, when he was able to leave for Berlin thanks to Maxim Gorky and then, in 1924, emigrate to Israel. He was a member of the governing board of the Hebrew University. He died in 1934.

Bialik loved the traditional religious Judaism he learned from his grandfather. He also believed in Zionism, especially the cultural approach of Ahad Ha’am. He understood that the social problem of Jews in the Diaspora had to be solved, having witnessed the tragedy of the Kishinev pogrom with his own eyes. He knew that Yiddish was part of Jewish culture, but also that Hebrew was the language of the future. With the Haskala, he realized that Judaism could not be isolated from the secular culture of the world. And through his poetry, he integrated all these identities into one. Bialik is an example of how one can have a multifaceted Jewish identity.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Encyclopaedia Judaica and other sources.