Weekly Reader: Hayim Nahman Bialik
Published on January 12, 2025.
It’s sometimes tempting to draw a neat line between Hebrew and Yiddish literature, especially since they were frequently driven by competing ideological and artistic impulses. But as we’ve seen, the division is often not so clear. Many Yiddish writers started out writing in Hebrew and only later switched to Yiddish, translating their early works along the way. Then there were writers who wrote primarily in Hebrew but also occasionally in Yiddish—it’s sometimes said that the first Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize was not Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978 but S. Y. Agnon in 1966, since he originally wrote in that language. But the Hebrew writer who exercised the greatest influence on his Yiddish peers was undoubtedly Hayim Nahman Bialik. Though best known as a Hebrew poet par excellence, Bialik also occasionally wrote in Yiddish, and his work was quickly translated. For his Yiddish admirers, Bialik exercised an influence nearly as great as someone like I. L. Peretz. In honor of his birthday, which was last week, let’s take a look at this great Hebrew—and Yiddish—writer.
—Ezra Glinter, Senior Staff Writer and Editor
A Yiddish Voice
It’s easy enough to find Bialik’s work in the original Hebrew or in English translation. But what does he sound like in Yiddish? For many Yiddish readers, this was no mystery—a volume of Bialik in Yiddish translation was once a staple of any good library. You can still find all of those books in our Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, along with Bialik’s own original Yiddish writings and a few studies of the great poet by literary scholars like Dan Miron.
In Your Ear
If there’s any proof necessary of Bialik’s popularity among Yiddish speakers, here it is: not only was his work translated into Yiddish, but those translations were turned into audiobooks for convenient listening. In our Sami Rohr Library of Recorded Yiddish Books you can find a volume of Bialik’s poetry as well as a volume of his collected writings.
The City of Slaughter
Bialik’s most famous work was his 1903 poem about the Kishinev pogrom, “In the City of Slaughter.” As Kenneth Moss writes, the poem is “the single most influential Hebrew poem—perhaps the single most influential Jewish literary text—of the twentieth century.” Here you can access Moss’s teaching resource kit of the poem, which includes two different English translations as well as a response to the poem by the Yiddish writer Mendele Moykher Sforim.
Yiddish Connections
As noted above, the connections between Hebrew and Yiddish literature were always closer than a first glance might indicate. In this oral history interview, Itay Zutra, the I. L. Peretz Folk School Yiddish Teaching Fellow at the University of Manitoba, shares his surprise and amazement at the intimacies between modern Hebrew and Yiddish, particularly as revealed in the works of authors like Bialik, Uri Tsevi Grinberg, and S. Y. Agnon.
Lasting Influence
It’s not hard to find references to Bialik among the writings of his peers and successors—for them, the Hebrew poet was an inescapable literary presence. But his work continued to influence Yiddish writers long after his own time. In this oral history interview Moshe Shklar, a Polish-born Yiddish poet who passed away in 2014, describes his main influences as I. L. Peretz, Dovid Bergelson, and, yes, Bialik.