Legend of the Chalice

Born in the Russian Empire in Bobrovy Kut—an agricultural colony on the Inhulets River in what is now Ukraine—to the family of a clerk, Shimon Frug had a traditional heder education. In 1875, he moved to Kherson as a clerk for the administrative district rabbi, where at age nineteen, he published his first poem in the Russian Jewish weekly Razsvet. Shaken by the pogroms of 1881–1882, he joined the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement; his poem “Jewish Melody” (ca. 1882) served as an anthem for those seeking a restored Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. Frug’s award-winning “Legend of the Chalice” (1882), a response to the pogroms, was translated into Yiddish by poet Y. L. Peretz, which brought Frug greater fame. He was a trilingual poet who initially appealed to a broad audience representing diverse cultural and ideological groups: maskilim, Zionists, radicals, Russified Jews, and Yiddish readers alike. Later, despite wide enthusiasm for his folksy and often tragic Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew works, he struggled to retain readers’ interest as Jewish literature and its readers outgrew him in sophistication; ultimately, he was reduced to writing tabloidesque verses for the Russian Peterburgskii listok. However, Frug remained a well-loved popular poet until his death, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of people who attended his funeral in Odessa. His Russian-language poetry influenced Bialik, Tshernikhovski and other Hebrew poets of his time.