Behind the Fence

The foundational figure of modern Hebrew poetry, recognized across and well beyond Hebraist and Zionist circles as “the Jewish national poet” by the time he was thirty years old, Chaim Nahman (Ḥayim Naḥman) Bialik was born in Radi and, having lost his father at age six, was raised in the nearby city of Zhitomir (today in Ukraine) by his grandfather. Bialik received a traditional education, and while studying at the Volozhin yeshiva, he immersed himself in secular writings. First coming to the attention of Zionist-Hebraist readers for a beautiful 1892 lyric poem expressing exilic longing for the Land of Israel, “El ha-tsipor” (To the Bird), Bialik developed into the most important Hebrew poet of his generation (alongside Saul Tschernikhovsky) between 1897 and 1908. Combining unprecedented musicality with deft use of intertextual reference to biblical and rabbinic classics to create profound resonances, Bialik became the first Hebrew poet to successfully interweave Jewish national themes—meaning, for him, the woeful condition of the exiled and exposed Jewish people—with deeply personal themes in a Romantic mode: poems of innocence and experience, deeply introspective and philosophical poetry of the self in nature and time, poetry about eros and shame, and the first great children’s poetry in Hebrew and Yiddish. His shattering poem of public rebuke “In the City of Slaughter,” composed in response to an unprecedentedly murderous 1903 pogrom in the southern Russian town of Kishinev, instantly became his most famous work in and beyond Hebrew. Although (or perhaps because) it heaped scorn on Jewish men for their ostensible cowardice and on the Jewish public for responding with alms and mourning rather than fury, it spurred many young Jews to organize self-defense groups. Emerging as a leading editor and publisher in Hebrew letters in Odessa and later Berlin and British Palestine, Bialik also conceived two grand projects of Jewish national-cultural revival beyond his literary writing. Reimagining the ancient corpus of Agadah (stories by and about the classical Jewish sages) as a Jewish “national epic” hiding in plain sight, he compiled with Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski on Sefer ha-agadah (The Book of Legends), an anthology of rabbinic tales wrested out of their original legalistic and philosophical contexts and reworked in a supple, accessible Hebrew. Somewhat later, wracked by growing doubts about the health of the Hebrew cultural revival and the adequacy of secular-national cultural ideals, Bialik called for the new Hebrew culture to reconnect to the textual tradition of the whole classical Jewish library, albeit in a secular mode. He envisioned a grand collective national project of kinus (gathering) that would recover, select, and recast the classical Jewish texts most suited to modern secular-national needs. During the last twenty years of his life, Bialik wrote little poetry and instead focused on these editorial projects, continuing and expanding them after moving in 1924 to the Yishuv in Palestine; he also wrote extensively for children. His prose fiction was a minor part of his oeuvre but powerfully connected realistic depictions of the small-town Jewish life of his childhood to deep questions of Jewish and modern life, as in “Behind the Fence,” about the attraction between a young Jewish man and a Ukrainian, Christian young woman.