On Hayim Nahman Bialik

Mikhail Krutikov reviews a new biography of the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik at Forward. The biography, Hayim Nahman Bialik: Poet of Hebrew, by Avner Holtzman, published by Yale University Press, is "insightful," according to Krutikov, but misses a "key element." While the biography addresses the intersections between national and religious identity in Bialik's poetry, Krutikov notes that the voices of Yiddish-speaking critics, in this biography—are silent. More:

Why and how did Hayim Nahman Bialik become Israel’s national poet? Avner Holtzman, a professor of Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University, poses this very question in his new biography, “Hayim Nahman Bialik: Poet of Hebrew”, published as part of the “Jewish Lives” series by Yale University Press.

According to Holtzman, nothing in the environment or circumstances of Bialik’s childhood could have explained or predicted his later importance. In fact, Bialik’s creative abilities were exhausted by age forty, and in the last twenty years of his life, he barely produced anything of great artistic significance.

Holtzman’s book reads like a fascinating novel, basing itself on a firm factual foundation and sharp analysis of Bialik’s poetry. The combination of facts and literary interpretations gives the reader a sense of both his inner and external life.

Bialik’s childhood wasn’t a happy one. His father, a wood merchant, died when Hayim Nahman was eight years old and left his family with nothing. His mother brought her son to his grandfather and left him there. He didn’t see her for over twenty years, until she was old and frail, when he brought her to live with him in Odessa.

Nevertheless, his childhood remained an important theme in Bialik’s poetry as a time of happiness and great hope. Bialik never had children of his own which caused him a deep sense of grief. He loved children, delighted in playing with them and dedicated a great deal of time and effort to improving Hebrew education. He wrote children’s songs in Hebrew and Yiddish. Although he spoke Yiddish all his life, Hebrew was his language of creativity. Ideologically, he was close to the circle of the “Odessa wise men” led by Ahad Ha’am, but he played no political role in the Zionist movement.

Continue at Forward.