To America or to the Land of Israel

Born in Minsk, Russian Empire (today in Belarus), Yehudah Leib Levin, known by his initials as Yehalel, had a traditional religious upbringing and was briefly drawn to Lubavitcher Hasidism, but he rejected both for the Haskalah by 1865. Having made a mark as an emerging Hebrew poet and a sharp critic of traditional Jewish society, he moved to Kiev (Kyiv) in 1871 to work as a private teacher for the Brodskii family. There he published a well-received collection of poetry titled Sifte renanot (Lips of Singing), his first lengthy literary work. In the 1870s, Yehalel joined several other younger maskilim in a turn toward socialism, contributing to the first Hebrew-language socialist journal Ha-Emet and writing the first expressly socially radical Hebrew poetry concerned with the exploitation of workers. By the close of the 1870s, Yehalel was also pulled toward inchoate Jewish nationalist ideas, in part under the impress of reactionary trends in the Russian government, and he wrestled with the relationship between socialism and nationalism in print. After the pogroms of 1881–1882, he became a committed and outspoken Zionist, translated Benjamin Disraeli’s Tancred into Hebrew, and earned the tsarist regime’s ire for his political activity. Forced out of Kiev (Kyiv), he settled in Tomashpol (today Tomashpil, Ukraine), where he continued writing, although he was far from the main currents of the modern Hebrew literary revival. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, Yehalel returned to Kiev, where he died in poverty.