Bialik, Chaim Nachman

Born Jan. 9, 1873, in the village of Rady in the Volyn’ region; died July 4, 1934, in Vienna. Jewish poet.

Born into the family of a poor innkeeper, Bialik began his literary career in the 1890’s. Part of his poetic work is connected with the bourgeois Zionist movement and is permeated with nationalistic feelings. Some of his verses and narrative poems that voiced protest against the Jewish pogroms organized by the tsarist government gained wide popularity (On the Slaughter, 1904). They called for a struggle against passive submission to social and racial injustices. Bialik is the author of cycles of poetry and verses on nature and love (the narrative poem Radiance, 1901, and the lyric verses The Pool, 1904). The Scroll of Fire (1905) and The Dead of the Desert (1902) are pessimistic, symbolist narrative poems. In his prose he proved himself a master at portraying everyday life as well as depicting psychological traits (the short stories “Aryeh the Burly” and “Behind the Fence”). Together with I. Ravnitskii, he prepared and published the four-volume work Jewish Legends (2nd ed., Berlin, 1922). In 1920 he emigrated to Western Europe and in 1924, to Palestine. His works were published in Russian in 1910-12 and 1918.