At the same time that Zionism was crystallizing as a political movement, Hayim Bialik’s poetic output was coming into the limelight. Many of his readers believe that Bialik reached his artistic apex with his Poems of Wrath series, a shockingly powerful bracket of pieces.
The first poem, Al ha-Shehitah (On the Slaughter, 1903), was composed before the artist’s visit to Chișinău in the aftermath of the pogroms that raged in that city. Dispatched by the Jewish Historical Commission of Odessa to interview survivors and compile firsthand reports of the massacre, the 35-year-old poet took some 60 photographs of the atrocities. The poem’s title betrays a sense of subversive anger and irony, since the term Al ha-Shehitah is borrowed from the penultimate passage of the blessing pronounced by the ritual slaughterer before slitting an animal’s throat.
Bialik may have been suggesting that the Jews, the emasculated victims, are the ones who had brought this calamity on themselves, or that the pogrom was not only evidence of God’s nonintervention, but—worse—a display of ritual martyrdom commanded by God. The speaker is wrapped in complete desperation, shattered by the lack of divine intercession.
As the poem begins, the narrator, in a thunderous outburst, turns to the heavens and solicits immediate justice and retribution for the victims, although he is uncertain that God is still there and whether, sitting upon his throne, he will listen to the supplicant’s angry demands:
“shamaim bakshu rachamim alay! Im yesh bacehm el velael bachem native—veani lo metzahativ—hitpalelu atem alay! Ani—libi met vehein od tfi la bisfatay”
(Heavenly spheres, beg mercy for me! If truly God dwells in your orbit and round,
And in your space his pathway that I have not found—Then you pray for me!
For my own heart is dead; no prayer on my tongue).
In essence, when the poet states that his “heart is dead,” he bespeaks a loss of faith in God, yoked with a feeling of extreme disappointment, “ad matay—an ana—ad matay?” (O until when? For how much more? How long?). Conversely, the poet could be pointing to his own inadequacy since he cannot pray, cannot find the right registers that would open the gates of heaven and lead him to God.
In different ways, this passage underlines the Jew’s renouncing of his own personal capacity to connect with his creator. Thus he pleads with the heavens to pray for him. Moreover, the pity he appeals for is not sought for him but for the Jewish people as a whole and underlines the deeply veined sense of dejection embodied in the words “hope has passed.”
The stormy and prophetic tone of the poem is striking for its depiction of the gentiles’ savage brutality:
“hatalyan eh tzavar—kom she-khat! Arfeni ka-kelev lecha zeroha im kardom, vekol ha’haretz li gardom—vehanchnu—anachnu hamehat! Dami mutar hach kodkod”
(Ho, headsman, bared the neck—come, cleave it through! Nape me this cur’s nape! Yours is the axe unbaffled!
The whole wide world—my scaffold! And rest you easy: we are weak and few. My blood is outlaw. Strike then, the skull dissever).
And yet alongside his indictment of the mobs, Bialik expresses overwhelming disgust with the helplessness and impotence of the Jews.
The poem’s tone and title imply that the murdered are akin to acquiescent animals whose necks are presented to the slaughterer’s knife. At one point, the poet offers himself to the killers: “hatalyan eh tzavar—kom she-khat” (Ho, headsman, bared the neck—come, cleave it through). By directly addressing the hangman, who represents the criminals who butchered the Jews, the speaker identifies with the victims and concurrently states that the whole land has become a killing field and, by extension, intimates that killers rule the Earth rather than God.
Instead of God’s mighty hand, the ax and scaffold rule his domain. Power now resides with the wicked. At the same time, the speaker depicts the helplessness of the victims, whose blood runs freely, and reminds us that the rioters murdered young children and the elderly, and as such their blood will forever stain the clothes of the executioners like the mark of Cain:
“dam yonek vesav al kutnatcha velo yimach lanetzach”
(Let blood of babe and greybeard stain your garb—stain to endure forever).
Imbued with fury, the poet demands that justice appear at once. He warns that if it appears only after the destruction of the Jews, only after he is killed, then let the throne of God be smashed, dooming the perpetrators to live in a world of hellish violence.
The poem concludes with the speaker cursing those who seek vengeance for the crimes perpetrated because even Satan has not conceived of a revenge for the death of a young boy. Yet immediately afterward, he promises that the blood of the victims will seep through the darkest recesses of the Earth and corrode its depths until it rots and reverts to the chaotic state before creation. The evildoers will be plagued for eternity by the memory of the dead; their punishment will be to be consumed by guilt for their deeds. There is no passage toward redemption or forgiveness for the gentiles.
The buried message of the poem is that if mercy, compassion, justice, and a path to God do not emerge in the backwash of the pogroms, anarchy will reign as retribution for the innocent blood of the Jews that was spilled.
It is noteworthy that the narrator assumes different personas throughout the opus. At the beginning, he adopts the witnessing posture, then embraces the first-person stance, reverts to the eyewitness position, and at the end takes on the role of the prophet of wrath. Although the poem is clearly a charge sheet of the horrific acts committed against the Jews, it also embodies a new perception of a reality denuded of a God that will protect his people.
On the Slaughter was followed by the epic masterpiece Be’ir Haharegah (In the City of Slaughter, 1904), the longer of the two lamentations; it again foregrounds the bloodbath by the perpetrators. Bialik was so upset by the massacre that he wrote the poem without delay so as to stir Russian Jewry out of its submissiveness.
Thematically it is structured as a searing address to God by the prophet, who surprisingly scolds the survivors for their meek capitulation and denounces their lack of resistance to the attacks. One might venture the observation that Bialik, in castigating the chosen people for their supposed cowardice and meekness, overlooks the few acts of resistance by the Jews during the assault.
In a similar vein, the poet laments the absence of justice, portraying the God of the Jews as an impotent entity, unmoved by his people’s suffering and unable to quell the violent storms of an indifferent, uncivilized world.
The penetrating eye of the poet, overflowing with tears of shame, takes the reader on a visceral survey of the physical and spiritual devastation. The explicit account reports on the cemetery where the ground is soaked with the blood of the martyrs. From there the prophet-speaker moves to the synagogue, disgusted with the mourners’ slavishness and loss of pride and dignity.
One of the cardinal leitmotifs of the poem is the self-flagellation of a people who have reached the nadir of humiliation and are unable to rise against their enemies. All in all, the two poems had a practical effect of goading the Jews to establish Jewish self-defense squads composed of youths who resisted further desecration of life and fought back.
Categories: Israeli Literature, Jewish Literature, Literature, World Literature