“In the City of Slaughter”
“In the City of Slaughter”
THE LITRARY WORK
A poem set in Kishinev, Russia, In 1903; first published in Hebrew (as Masa Nememv: later as Be-ir ha-haregah) in 1904, in English in 1906.
SYNOPSIS
Bialik’s poem envisions the slaughter and devastation left in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903.
Events in History at the Time of the Poem
Born in the Russian village of Radi in 1873, Hayyim Nahman Bialik was the son of an innkeeper who died when the boy was just seven years old. Bialik’s mother entrusted her youngest child to his paternal grandfather, who saw to it that the boy received rigorous instruction in Jewish law and tradition. At 16, Bialik entered a prestigious academy devoted to study of the Talmud (also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern Literatures and Their Times). A restless Bialik left the academy, which was located in Volozhin, in 1891. He traveled to Odessa, center of a burgeoning cultural movement in Hebrew letters and home to the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha‘am. Bialik met the influential thinker and became one of several key disciples. The Jews, warned Ahad Ha’am, were headed for extinction unless they underwent a profound spiritual regeneration. In keeping with this conviction, Bialik and a few other intellectuals set out to effect a spiritual revival through teaching and writing. Bialik embarked on a project to compile, translate, and anthologize a canon of literature that would impart a sense of Jewish identity to the people of his day—especially to the young. Early in 1902 Bialik, Y. H. Ravnitski, and S. Ben-Tsiyon founded the publishing company Moriah. By this time Bialik was an accomplished poet, his reputation having begun with the publication of “El ha-Zippor” (1891; To the Bird), a poem of longing for Zion. News of his dying grandfather had drawn him away from Odessa for a time (1892–1900), during which he married Manya Aver-buch, worked in the timber trade, taught, and wrote stories as well as poetry. In 1896, promoting the use of Hebrew as a modern written language, Ahad Ha’am launched the Hebrew journal Ha-Shiloach (The Dawn), which published several poems by Bialik. By the time he returned to Odessa in 1900, he was a renowned poet and his reputation would grow in the decade to come. Especially from 1903 to 1906, Bialik wrote emotionally charged poetic responses to a number of devastating Russian pogroms, or massacres of the Jews, consolidating his role as the “Jewish national poet.” Reflecting on the condition of the Jews around him, he penned a series of prophetic poems, including “Upon the Slaughter,” “In the City of Slaughter,” and “This Too Is the Punishment of God.” Shortly thereafter, Bialik experienced terrible doubts about his role as poet-prophet. His output slowed. Bialik produced little poetry after 1911, but continued as an essayist and critic, beyond his move from Odessa to Berlin, Germany, in 1921, and to Palestine in 1924. His reputation as the Jewish national poet never faded, though, due in large part to his having written such consequential poems as “In the City of Slaughter.”
Events in History at the Time of the Poem
Jews in tsarist Russia—waves of anti-Semitism
Early-twentieth-century Russian Jewry harked back to the community of Jews in the lands of medieval Poland. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, Polish Jewry multiplied into a substantial community as a result of a natural influx from central Europe into the economically expanding Polish kingdom. Large numbers of Jews settled not just in Poland but also in the Polish-held lands of Lithuania, the Ukraine, and Belorussia. By the late eighteenth century—when the Polish empire was lost to Russia, Austria, and Prussia (through divisions in 1772, 1793, and 1795)—the population included more than a million Jews. The majority of them lived in the lands that fell to Russia, whose ruler, Catherine the Great, quickly circumscribed the movement of her newly inherited Jewish population. In 1792, conceding to Moscow business leaders who wanted to keep out the Jews, she confined them to an area called the Pale of Settlement, extending their domain beyond the former Polish lands but restricting them from moving eastward into historical Russia. For the next hundred years, only a tiny minority of Jews, whose skills were deemed useful to Russia’s empire, could travel or work beyond the Pale.
A fitful policy of repression and relaxed rule ensued for the Jews of nineteenth-century Russia, depending on the tsar in power. The first half of the century witnessed the highly conservative regimes of Alexander I (r. 1801–1825) and his brother, Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855). During Nicholas’s reign, legislation related to the Jews reached a peak: over 600 edicts and regulations were passed. Besides setting the boundaries of the Pale into Russian law, Nicholas decreed that the Jews should pay double the taxes of other Russians. He forbade them from leasing land, running taverns, employing Christian servants, building a synagogue next to a church, or leaving Russia without permission (on pain of forfeiting their nationality). He tightened censorship laws, closing down all but two Hebrew printing presses. Finally he enforced a harsh conscription policy, requiring communities to supply soldiers for 25-year stints in the Russian army, which worked diligently to alienate Jewish conscripts from their faith.
The restrictions imposed by Nicholas I eased during the reign of his son, Alexander II (r. 1855–81). Although the new tsar shared his father’s distrust of Jews—viewing them as a foreign element—he re-evaluated their presence with an eye to assimilating them more successfully into the larger population. To this end, Alexander shortened the army conscription of Jews and other groups to a two-year stint. He initiated other reforms too, repealing an 1844 regulation that banned Jews from government employment and relaxing settlement restrictions on where Jewish doctors and a few other professionals could live. The future seemed promising.
The promise proved illusory, however. Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by a band of radical revolutionaries. Though only one of the revolutionaries was Jewish, the populace fixed on this detail, calling the assassination a Jewish plot. A wave of intense anti-Semitism swept the country. The next two tsars, Alexander III (r. 1881–1894) and Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), considered Jews a disruptive, sinister element that should be excised from—not absorbed into—Russian society. The era began ominously with a wave of pogroms, or wholesale attacks, on the Jews in 1881–82, followed by occasional outbreaks and another wave in 1905–6. In community after community, Jews were beaten, raped, and killed, and their properties were destroyed. “In the City of Slaughter” concerns one such outbreak—the largest, most destructive pogrom since 1881–82—which erupted in 1903 in Kishinev, a city about 90 miles northwest of Odessa.
Pogroms—the Jewish response
It took more than 15 years for the Jews of Russia to mount an effective, consolidated response to the devastation wrought by the pogroms of 1881–82, but in the end they responded successfully and through more than one avenue. The pogroms helped spur a vigorous effort to infuse a strong current of Jewish nationalism into Russian society. Beginning in the 1890s, a small group of intellectuals set out to teach, write, and publish in ways that would impart a sense of Jewish identity, especially to the young. Members of the group founded innovative talmudic academies and schools and embarked on related endeavors. Y. L. Ben-David founded a society to promote speaking Hebrew; Ahad Ha‘am introduced ha-Shiloah, his journal of new Hebrew thought and literature; Bialik generated modern Hebrew lyric poems; and other talents wrote landmark works in Russian (the historian Simon Dubonov) and in Yiddish (the storyteller Sholem Aleichem).
At the time, the sacred sources of Jewish literature were written in a format far removed from contemporary society. This format failed to speak to many of the highly assimilated Jews who lived in Odessa. Between 1903 and 1909 Bialik and his colleagues at Moriah assembled and initiated the publication of an authoritative national canon, including the sacred sources but in a modern format. They translated, updated, and published the classical Hebrew texts, compiled previously un-collected medieval Hebrew poetry (by such luminaries as Judah Halevi), and popularized new Hebrew poetry and prose, establishing a continuing tradition with which the Jewish nation could identify. Moriah released Bible Stories, Words of the Prophets, The Poetry of Israel, and more during these years. This feverish effort, on the heels of the pogrom in Kishinev, showed a devotion to biblical and post-biblical Jewish texts. For Bialik, this devotion existed uneasily alongside a distressing view of the Jews around him: “’Boorish-ness and indifference are increasing in every corner of the nation,’ he complained” (Bialik in Rubin, pp. 136–37).
Meanwhile, another small minority of Jews was mounting a political response to the pogroms, most notably a drive, known as Zionism, to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Israel. Spearheaded by Theodor Herzl, the movement gathered steam in the 1890s, building to the founding of the World Zionist Organization in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. Bialik looked skeptically on the timing of the Zionist movement, convinced that the first order of business was the people’s spiritual regeneration. He would nevertheless become a central figure in international and Russian Zionism.
As Bialik saw it, spiritual regeneration called for a rejection of the notion that Jews should accept their sufferings like good martyrs and die dutifully in God’s name. Out of the pogroms of 1881–82, there grew a momentum for self-defense, which would crystallize primarily in the pogroms of 1905–6, after the groundwork had been laid by Bialik and others. In the wake of the Kishinev pogrom, some of Odessa’s writers, including Ahad Ha‘am, Bialik, and Dubnov, issued
FROM ONE WAVE OF POGROMS TO THE NEXT: A 25-YEAR LEGACY OF HATE
1881–82 First wave of pogroms strikes Etizavetgrad, Kiev, Zhmerynka, Aleksartdrovsk, Odessa, Warsaw, and Balta.
1884 Pogrom in Nizhnii-Novgorod is marked by extreme cruelty; victims are killed by axes or thrown from rooftops.
1897 Two days of rioting break out in Spola.
1899 Nrkofaev pogrom erupts during the Passover holiday.
1903 Kishinev pogrom strikes at Passover and Easter; another pogrom in Homel meets with organized Jewish defense.
1904–1905 Pogroms erupt in Sroifa, Rovno, Aleksandria, and Mohilev-on-the-Dnieper\
1905 Second wave of pogroms ravages several hundred cities, including Kiev, Kishinev, Romi, Kremenchuk, and Odessa; in Odessa, 300 are killed, many more injured, and 40,000 financialfy ruined.
1906 Pogroms in Bialystok and Sedlfets; second wave ends, bringing pogroms to a temporary halt
a public statement urging the Jews to organize on their own behalf: ’” It is degrading,’” the statement said, “’for five million people… to stretch out their necks to be slaughtered… without attempting to protect their property, dignity, and lives with their own hands’” (Harshav, p. 51). The Jews of Russia heeded the call. In defiance of hostile authorities, an illegal self-defense movement sprang up throughout the Pale, thanks partly to Bialik’s “In the City of Slaughter.” Such a work, though critical of the people, was nevertheless “written from the inside” and therefore accorded legitimacy (Harshav, p. 64). Accepting the unflattering parts of the self-image such writings conveyed, more and more readers responded by embracing Zionism and other new ideologies. They stopped trusting that redemption would come to the Jews through divine mercy and opted instead for redemption through self-improvement. It was a monumental transformation, one that most Jews had not yet experienced (and not everyone would) when, after viewing the ravages of the Kishinev, Bialik wrote “In the City of Slaughter.”
The Kishinev pogrom
At the time of the 1903 pogrom, there were some 50,000 Jews living in Kishinev, alongside some 60,000 Christians (Baron, p. 57). Like Jews in other cities, the Kishinev community considered itself not just a religious but an ethnic-national grouping. Bound together by shared oppression and political as well as other interests, they had their own Jewish institutions of charity, defense, and education. But at the same time the community was deeply divided over such questions as how best to respond to the rampant anti-Semitism of the era.
Anti-Semitism had been smoldering for years in the Bessarabian city of Kishinev. Several prominent citizens fanned the flames of this hostility, including Pavolachi Krushevan, who published the local newspaper Bessarabets (Bessarabian); the businessman Georgii Alekseevich Pronin; and Vice-Governor V. G. Ustrugov, who oversaw the day-to-day administration of Bessarabia. To the proudly nationalistic Krushevan, Jews were “an evil force in the world, a well-organized, conspiratorial group seeking to subjugate the Christian masses” (Judge, p. 32). Pronin’s attitude, by contrast, had as much to do with rival business interests as with racial and religious prejudice, while the ambitious Ustrugov hoped to advance his career by enforcing the anti-Semitic policies of the empire.
In 1903 the anti-Semitism in Kishinev escalated to a dangerous peak, partly because of an infamous blood-libel case. A 14-year-old Christian boy, Mikhail Rybachenko, was found stabbed to death in the nearby town of Dubossary. Although the murderer was later discovered to be a member of the boy’s own family, a vicious rumor blamed the Jews for kidnapping and killing the boy. The rumor was an iteration of an age-old blood libel dating back to the Middle Ages in western Europe. The libel, which spread throughout the Christian world, charged that Jews needed Christian blood to make the unleavened bread (matzos) that they ate during Passover. Though patently false, the charges cropped up several times in the early nineteenth century and after in Russia. This time, in 1903, they ignited an anti-Jewish riot in a town close to Kishinev—no lives were lost. In Kishinev itself, Krushevan, already well known for his anti-Jewish editorials, published the rumor as near-fact in Bessar abets. He was obliged to print a refutation when an autopsy was done on Rybachenko and new details came to the fore. But the damage had been done. An uneasy feeling settled on Kishinev’s Jews, especially after they heard an attack was imminent over Easter. Alarmed, some of the community’s most prominent Jews approached Ustrugov’s superior, Governor Rudolf Samoilovich von Raaben. Well-meaning but ineffectual, von Raaben assured them there would be no violence, backing up his word with an increased police and army presence in Kishinev over the Easter holidays. But these measures proved inadequate.
Rioting broke out on Easter Sunday (April 6) in the late afternoon. The immediate cause is unknown, but it appears that an increasingly drunk and disorderly crowd broke into small groups, who then struck at Jewish property, throwing rocks and breaking the windows of homes and shops. More rioters followed, armed with canes and crowbars, after which looters and scavengers arrived to steal wares from the vandalized shops. The police were slow to intervene; from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. the violence proceeded mostly unchecked, subsiding around 11:00 p.m. The damage that Sunday was mainly to property, though the head physician at the city hospital would report 22 injured and 4 dead—2 Christians and 2 Jews.
On Easter Monday, several Jewish merchants, alarmed by the lack of police protection, banded together at the New Marketplace in hopes of defending themselves against future assaults. Ironically the police—so ineffective the previous day—arrived and promptly dispersed the group, arresting several of its leaders. Meanwhile, small bands of Christians assembled throughout Kishinev, planning to mount more attacks upon the Jews. These bands, unlike the group of Jewish merchants, encountered no resistance from the police.
Initially the Easter Monday attacks resembled those of the previous day, with crowds vandalizing and looting Jewish businesses. But as new rioters joined in, the attacks grew ever more
FROM THE HISTORICAL RECORD
Testimony of Rivka Shif, ripe victim:
“When the gentile kids broke into the attic through the roof, some of them jumped on Zaychik’s daughter first and slapped her in the face and surrounded her, The slap knocked her down. They rolled up her dress, turned her on her face and began to beat her behind, then they turned her back over, pulled her legs open; they covered her eyes and her mouth so she wouldn’t scream; one climbed on top of her and the rest stood around her and waited their turn. They all did what they did in front of all the people in the attic. Some of them jumped on me and my husband. We tried to run. They fell on him: ’Give us money!’ And Mitya Krasilchik wanted to brutalize me and demanded money. I begged for mercy: ’Don’t touch me, Mitya. Haven’t I known you for years? I don’t have any money/Others tore my dress off, and one slapped me in the face, saying: if you don’t have money, well get our pleasure from youa nother way’… 1 don’t know how many were with me, but certainly no fewer than five, and maybe seven.”
(Shif in Goren, p, 80; trans, 1C Moss)
Testimony of Chana Sobelman, at the scene of a murder:
“Oshumirski, in his efforts to escape from his murderers and their sticks, ran into the alley behind the privy ta narrow place between the privy and the wall of one of the houses with no room to turnj and there he fell down and rolled in his blood. His killers chased him into this alley, thought he was dead, but then saw the ladder that was standing there—and there was a jew also sitting up there. It was Yudl Krupnik, a man along in years, tutor to my children and an assistant to my husband in the loan business, who hid himself during the pogroms on the ladder while his son, who is about 28, hid near him in a corner between the dungheap and the privy. And the murderers turned away from Oshu-mirskt and pulled Krupnik senior down from the ladder by his feet and killed him there, and they caught his fleeing son in the middle of the courtyard and began to hit him with their weapons/’
(Sobelman in Goren, pp. 71–2; trans. IC Moss}
vicious. By the afternoon, the Jewish sector of Kishinev was overrun with hooligans, scavengers, and killers. The worst crimes took place in Jewish residential areas. Rioters broke into Jews’ homes, ripped apart feather beds, smashed furnishings and utensils, then turned their rage on the Jews themselves, beating them with “clubs, canes, crowbars, and other such blunt instruments” (Judge, p. 57). In one of Kishinev’s five police precincts, a 16-year-old Jewish youth found hiding in a closet was beaten to death in front of his family; an elderly woman was likewise killed before her grandson’s eyes. In another neighborhood, three Jews hiding in an attic were found and beaten by rioters, then flung into the street, where a mob killed them with crowbars.
Elsewhere, several Jews, including an adolescent girl who was also raped, met grisly deaths in a carpenter’s shed near the Skulianskii Turnpike in the Kishinev suburbs. Lacking clear directions from their superiors, the soldiers and local police—some of whom sympathized with the anti-Jewish crowds—made a few sporadic attempts to restore order. Only after von Raaben called for full-scale military force in putting down the riots did the violence at last subside. By 8:00 p.m. Monday night, more than 800 people had been arrested for rioting. Although some further disorder was reported the following morning, it was quickly quelled by the presence of military troops: the Kishinev pogrom was over. Figures released by the Ministry of Interior reported 51 dead—49 of them Jews—and 74 seriously wounded (Judge, p. 72). Other surveys reported extensive property damage: more than 1,500 shops and houses had been plundered or destroyed outright. Estimates placed the total cost at up to 2 million rubles.
The world reacted with outrage to the slaughter, which was perceived as all the more shocking because it was an isolated pogrom, one that had not been preceded by similar episodes (as in the string of 1881–1882 pogroms). Mass protests were held in England and the United States, while several prominent Russian intellectuals, including the novelist Leo Tolstoy, accused the government of complicity in the attacks. Most of the over 800 people arrested for rioting were charged only with minor crimes and misdemeanors. Although rioters accused of the more serious crimes were brought to trial, those convicted received relatively light sentences; no prison term exceeded seven years. Meanwhile, the government refused to make material amends to the victims, dismissing most of the Jewish civil suits. Tsarist officials reacted negatively only to the chaos, not to the suffering of the Jewish victims; some even opined that the Jews had gotten what they deserved. The culprits responsible for organizing the pogrom went unidentified and unpunished, remaining at large to conduct further damage in the future (a rash of even deadlier pogroms erupted in 1905).
Bialik never names the city featured in “The City of Slaughter,” thereby circumventing the Russian censors and universalizing the horror of the event. His poem, however, is clearly a response to the Kishinev pogrom. Along with several other dignitaries, he had been dispatched to the city several days after it suffered the pogrom to collect eyewitness accounts of the violence, which he embeds in his verse:
Proceed thence to the ruins, the split walls
reach,
Where wider grows the hollow, and greater
grows the breach;
Pass over the shattered hearth, attain the
broken wall
Whose burnt and barren brick, whose charred
stones reveal
The open mouths of such wounds that no
mending
Shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal.
There will thy feet in feathers sink, and stumble
On wreckage doubled wrecked, scroll heaped
on manuscript.
Fragments again fragmented—
(Biaiik, “In the City of Slaughter,” p. 114)
Significantly, Bialik directs his outrage not towards the attackers but towards the victims who seem to have passively accepted their fate. Although he was aware of Jewish attempts to defend themselves in Kishinev, including one instance of a Jewish sexton killed while trying to prevent the destruction of a Torah scroll, he deliberately ignored such instances in hopes of galvanizing his Jewish readers into taking more decisive, militant action against their oppression.
The Poem in Focus
The contents
“In the City of Slaughter” unfolds as a monologue. An unidentified speaker addresses a listener, who is called simply “man” or “son of man,” which is the same epithet God uses to address the prophet Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible. The man, a poet-prophet, is exhorted to “Arise and go now to the city of slaughter” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 114). Leading him through the devastated city, the speaker shows him the blackened blood, smoldering ruins, and wreckage of elements that once formed a vital part of human lives.
As the journey progresses, the poet-prophet witnesses increasingly terrible sights: pigs rooting in the mingled blood of a Jew and his dog, both decapitated by their killers; a garret where victims were disemboweled and their cloven bellies stuffed with feathers or their heads beaten in with hammers; a baby finding rest on the cold and milkless breast of its dead mother; another child knifed into silence; a cellar where women were raped and murdered while their husbands and brothers hid behind barrels and made no attempt to defend them. From toilets, pigpens, and other filthy places, the men “saw it all;/They did not stir nor move” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 119). “Concealed and cowering,” the menfolk were discovered; the issue of brave ancestors of ages past, they “died liked dogs” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 119). In somber silence, with their multitudinous eyes, the spirits of the martyrs ask a single, unanswerable question—” Why?” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 117).
Next the speaker directs the poet-prophet to the graves of the martyred: “See, see, the slaughtered calves, so smitten and so laid;/Is there a price for their death? How shall that price be paid?” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 122). Startlingly, the speaker reveals Himself to be God, who appears to have failed His people at their most desperate hour and has nothing to give the victims now either, no reward for their terrible sacrifice of life and limb. “Yours is a pauper-Lord! /Poor was He during your life, and poorer still of late…/See, I am fallen from My high estate” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 122). The speaker feels pain for his people, pain and shame. Neither He nor they knows why they died. Their sacrifice is for nothing. And the Shekhina, the Divine Presence, hides Her head in a cloud of shame because of the pain inflicted upon the people and the disgrace of their reaction. (According to rabbinic teachings, God has a transcendent presence, identified as He, and an imminent, worldly presence, the Shekhina, associated with the Hebrew Bible and identified as She.) The shame His children have brought upon the Lord outweighs His pain. This is the message that must be engrained in their hearts, a task with which the poet-prophet is charged.
Next the speaker bids the poet-prophet turn his attention to the survivors, who lament their dead in the synagogue. It is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, a day of fasting and confession. The survivors beg forgiveness for their sins, uttering the stock responses of ritual prayer: “We have sinned! And Sinned have we! —/Self-flagellative with confession’s whips./Their hearts, however, do not believe their lips” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 124). The Almighty speaker wonders at the selfflagellation, the lack of rage.
Is it, then, possible for shattered limbs to sin?
Wherefore their cries imploring, their supplicating din?
Speak to them, bid them rage!
Let them against me raise the outraged hand;—
Let them demand!
............................
Let fists be flung like stone
Against the heavens and the heavenly Throne!
(“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 124)
The poet-prophet must not join the people in their wailing, commands the speaker; it is a desecration of their tragedy. Should a cry issue forth from the poet-prophet, it will be stifled in his throat. Let the tragedy go unlamented, the speaker proclaims. Suppress your pity and your anger, let them fester, then loose them on the people “of thy love and hate” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 125).
As the poem builds to a bitter conclusion, the broken survivors attempt to pray, but without conviction. The fast is over, the final prayers are said. But wait! A preacher mounts the pulpit to stammer out some parting thought; he does not comfort or rouse his flock: “The empty verses from his speaking flow./And not a single mighty word is heard/To kindle in the hearts a single spark…/The mark of death is on their brows; their God/Has utterly forsaken every one” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 126).
The Almighty speaker turns next to the mass of broken men sighing and groaning at the doors of the rich, “Proclaiming their sores, like so much peddler’s wares,” using their battered heads and fractured limbs for personal gain (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 127). In disgust, God bids these parasitical survivors to keep trading upon their people’s misfortune and observes that their lives will continue unchanged. Let them dig up the bones of their fathers, pack them in their knapsacks, spread them on some filthy rags and do their business at all the country fairs, imploring sympathy from all the nations, as is their custom: “For you are now as you have been of yore/And as you stretched your hand/So will you stretch it, /And as you have been wretched/So are you wretched!” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 128).
Forbidden from crying out in anguish or anger or pity, the poet-prophet has no more business here. The Almighty speaker dismisses him with a final directive: “Rise, to the desert fleer with thy heavy heart. Unburden thyself to the elements, shed tears on the barren boulders and “send thy bitter cry into the storm!” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 128).
A call to action
Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of Bialik’s poem is that it spares nothing and nobody. The carnage of the Kishinev pogrom and its aftermath are presented in graphic, even nauseating, detail. The horrors are accentuated by juxtaposing them with the beauties of the natural world: “For God called up the slaughter and the spring together/The sun shone, the acacia bloomed, and the slaughterer slaughtered” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 116). Similarly the outrages inflicted upon the Jews are enumerated, then accentuated by ending with pat statements about a return to normal life: “The matter ends; and nothing more./And all is as it was before” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 119). While Bialik implicitly condemns the perpetrators of the pogrom by depicting their savagery, he reserves the greater share of rage for the passive victims. The poem denounces the Jews who hid behind casks while their women were raped—” the daughter in the presence of her mother and the mother in the presence of her daughter” (“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 118). It chastises them for betraying their once-proud heritage by hiding instead of fighting back, for cowering, then dying in their ignominious hiding places. Most of all, Bialik’s poem criticizes the broken, apathetic survivors who steep themselves in grief but do not stir.
Thus groans a people which is lost.
Look into their hearts—behold a dreary waste,
Where even vengeance can revive no growth, And yet upon their lips no mighty
malediction
Rises, no blasphemous oath.
(“In the City of Slaughter,” p. 123)
Grief, lamentation, and self-reproach will not counteract the murderous deeds of one’s enemies, the poem contends. Against such outrages, anger, resolve, and even hatred will stand the people in better stead than prayer and supplication.
Part of the team that collected eyewitness testimony after the pogrom, Bialik knew full well that a modicum of the resolve his poem advocates already existed. This can be substantiated by an excerpt from his own report:
I was walking on Ismailskii Street and I saw a gang of pogromists, and at its head was an educated man running and gesturing excitedly “This way, come on!” But the gang was met by a big group of Jews from Ismailskii and Gostinnii armed with sticks—and the gang ran away […]. Suddenly a police patrol showed up and dispersed the group of Jews. That’s when I realized how terrible things were. The patrol was dispersing the Jews, not the murderers. I hurriedly ran home.
(Oshumirski in Goren, p. 74; trans. K. Moss)
But such staunch resistance was the exception, not the rule. Bialik agonized over the common reaction, shown by, among others, the Kohanim, the descendants of priests. First they hid while their women were raped; then they sought out the rabbi to determine if it was religiously permissible to sleep with their ravaged wives. The poem excoriates such behavior.
The fact that others shared Bialik’s sentiments is evident in the movement for self-defense that grew out of the pogrom. In April 1903 the Jewish Labor Bund of Russia and Poland, a workers’ organization strongly influenced by socialist ideals, issued a statement condemning the attack and calling for Jews to confront their foes boldly: “We must answer violence with violence, no matter where it comes from. Not with sweet words but with arms in our hands can we prevail upon the frenzied pogromists. We mustn’t hide in attics but must go out face to face, ’with a mighty arm,’ to fight these beasts” (Bund in Roskies, p. 156). In terms very similar to those in Bialik’s poem, the statement declared, “Let not the Kishinev pogrom weaken our faith in our sacred ideal. With hatred and with a threefold curse on our lips let us sew the shrouds for the Russian autocratic regime” (Bund in Roskies, p. 156). Another statement, from the Union of Hebrew Writers to all the Jews of Russia, sent out an exhortation: “Brothers! The blood of our brethren in Kishinev cries out to us! Shake off the dust and become men! Stop weeping and pleading, stop lifting your hands for salvation to those who hate and exclude you! Look to your own hands for rescue!” (Union in Roskies, p. 158). The statement called for “a permanent organization … in all our communities, which would be standing guard and always prepared to face the enemy at the outset, to quickly gather to the place of riots any men who have the strength to face danger” (Union in Roskies, p. 158). There was a growing consensus that Russia’s Jews could not depend on anyone but themselves for protection, a consensus that stems back to major agents of change, such as Bialik’s poem. Future pogroms would not find the Jews similarly unprepared:
Within weeks after the pogrom, in city after city within the Pale of Settlement, Jewish self-defense groups were formed. … By 1905, when the next major wave of pogroms swept through the Pale of Settlement, Jewish defense was conspicuous almost everywhere.… The Kishinev experience, and the shame it engendered, helped to transform the Jews from passive victims to active and militant resisters.
(Judge, p. 144)
Sources and literary context
Bialik drew inspiration for his poem from the circumstances of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. At the behest of the Jewish Historical Society of Odessa, he served as the central member of a three-person committee sent to Kishinev to report on the devastation. Bialik returned to Odessa five months later with a stack of notebooks in hand, including interviews with the survivors. His report was not published because of a dearth of funds in the Jewish Historical Society coffers, but his poems were printed. Within four months of his return to Odessa, he had composed “In the City of Slaughter,” which differs from other poems that he wrote immediately after the pogrom. This one focuses not only on the distressing reaction of the survivors but also on “the futility of poetry as communication” (Mintz, p. 154). For a decade Bialik had been adopting the persona of the biblical
THE WORLD OBJECTS
While Bialik considered the victims and found them wanting, other drgnitaries took the rioters to task. The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy went so far as to implicate the tsarist regime in the pogrom, charging that it was “a direct consequence of lies and violence that the Russian government pursues with such energy” (Tolstoy in Judge, p. 89), Another writer, Vladimir Korolenko, traveled to Kishinev and then recounted some of the pogrom’s worst atrocities in his short story “House Number 13,” which blames Christian Russia as a whole for the pogrom.
Abroad, especially in Britain and the United States, the reaction was no less indignant Newspapers reported on the pogrom and their editorials cast an increasingly harsh light on the Russian governments role in it Two New York newspapers dispatched Michael Davit to Kishinev to investigate and report his findings. Davit confirmed the carnage, the failure on the part of the authorities to uphold Russian law and protect the victims, and the incendiary, anti-Semitic writing by Krushevan in Bassarabets.In dozens of American cities, from New York to Boston and San Francisco, protestors denounced Russia’s policies towards the Jews.
prophet to express national concerns in verse. This time he takes the strategy further than ever before and “exhausts it”—” the insensibility of the listeners” discredits the model of prophet and people” (Mintz, p. 154).
Bialik lamented the lack of originality in the poetry of his day. “There is not talent,” he complained, “and no new idea, no skill of language and no spark of God, but there is a spirit of fudging and pointless thoughts, a spirit of emptiness and wasted breath.… Lie and deceit… stands out in all their poems as [poets today] weep the destruction of their people” (Bialik in Miron, p. xix). Into this vacuum, Bialik introduced innovations in style and content. While most Hebrew poetry of his time centered on a collective I, he adopted a personal voice, an individual I. In his “poems of wrath” he adopted the voice of a prophet and used it unusually, to rage against the Lord and His people.
Other Russian poems about the pogroms waxed sentimental or philosophical. David Frishamn’s “David in the Lion’s Den” perceived the massacres as dashing hopes for a civilized world at the dawn of a new century. I. L. Baruch and Pesah Kaplan modeled their poems on accounts of the martyrs of 1096 (when the Crusaders attacked the Jews of Rhineland) and 1648 (at Nemirov, Kishinev, and other towns of the Ukraine). Finally, Bialik’s poetry expressed a degree of emotion and sense of inner turmoil largely lacking in most of the Hebrew poetry of his age but in keeping with The Diwan ofjudah Halevi (also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern Literatures and Their Times), a comparsion made in his own day. “We studied by heart [Bialik’s] poem[s],” explained one awestruck scholar in Odessa; “it was rumored that there were three hundred poems in his rucksack,” he continued, and that they were “unmatched since the time of Yehudah ha-Levi” (Hillels in Rubin, p. 41).
Publication and reception
“In the City of Slaughter” was first published in ha-Zeman, a Hebrew quarterly of St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1904. To avoid government censorship, Bialik was forced to publish the poem under the title “Masa Nemirov” (translated as “The Nemirov March,” “The Burden of Nemirov,” or “The Oracle at Nemirov”), which disguised the poem’s relevancy to the 1903 pogrom by linking it to a massacre of the Jews in 1648–49.
Early translations into Russian and Yiddish greatly expanded the potential impact of the poem. Although Hebrew was a key language of Jewish high culture at the time, the vast majority of Russian Jews did not know the language well enough to understand the verse in all its complexity. On the other hand, virtually all of Russia’s Jews spoke and read Yiddish, and a significant minority had begun to find Russian more accessible than Hebrew. Thanks in no small part to the translations, the impact of the poem was indeed significant.
ANOTHER POET’S PERSPECTIVE
A more conventional, even sentimental view of the pogrom than Bialik’s surfaces in Simon Frug’s “Have Pity,” which appeared on the front page of the St Petersburg Der Fraynd in April 1903, If “In the City of Slaughter” aimed to inflame readers, Frog’s poem intended to elicit pity for the victims and aid on their behalf.
Streams of blood and rivers of tears Deep and wide they flow and roar ...
Our misfortune, great and timeless
Has laid hands on us once more
Do you hear the mothers moan
And their little children cry?
In the streets the dead are lying;
The sick are fallen down nearby.
Brothers, sisters, please have mercy!
Great and awful is the need.
Bread is needed for the living,
Shrouds are needed for the dead.
.....................
How weak our hand is to do battle,
How great and heavy is our woe—
Come and bring us love and comfort,
a Jewish hearts, we need you so!
(Frug, pp. 149–150)
“In the City of Slaughter” became a rallying cry for Jews to fight back against their oppressors. The poem’s anger towards the passivity of the victims of Kishinev had a galvanizing effect on Russia’s Jews, who took the message to heart and resolved not to submit tamely to such atrocities again.
Never before had one living hero of the Jewish people so bitterly chastised those he loved; and never before had one people taken such a message to heart and vowed never to let such a tragedy be repeated. “In the City of Slaughter” became, not a challenge to further introspection and lament, but a clarion call to militant action.
(Jacobs, p. 124)
The clarion call rippled though Russia, and beyond. According to Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Jewish Legion, “The revival of Maccabean tendencies in the Ghetto really dates from that poem; the self-defense organizations which sprang up everywhere in Russia to meet the new pogrom-wave two years later, the Shomrim (Yeomanry) movement in Palestine, even the Jewish Legion which fought for the Holy Land in 1918—they are all Bialik’s children” (Jabotinsky in Jacobs, p. 124).
Besides spurring Bialik’s Jewish compatriots to action, “In the City of Slaughter” further consolidated his reputation as national poet. The people lauded him as a prophet too, equating him with the persona he adopted in a number of his poems. In a comment of 1907, which brings this poem to mind, the critic B. Ibry described Bialik as “a prophet whose very love for his people causes him to burn with indignation at their weakness” (Ibry in Poupard, p. 49). Through the ages, critics would continue to acknowledge the distinct, invigorating place he holds in Hebrew letters: his was “a lone voice of defiance running counter to the general atmosphere of despondency,” and, in the process, bringing to modem Hebrew poetry “a new sense of pride and vigor” (Gurevitch, p. 106).
—Pamela S. Loy
For More Information
Baron, Salo W. The Russian Jew Under the Tsars and the Soviets.New York: Macmillan, 1976.
Bialik, Hayyim Nahman, ed. “In the City of Slaughter.” Selected Poems of Hayyim Nahman Bialik Ed. Israel Efros. New York: Bloch, 1965.
Frug, Simon. “Have Pity!” In The Literature of Destruction. Ed. David G. Roskies. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1989.
Gassenschmidt, Christoph. Jewish Liberal Politics in Tsarist Russia, 1900–14: The Modernization of Russian Jewry. London: Macmillan, 1995.
Goren, Jacob, ed. Eduyot nifgee Kishinov, 1903 : kefi she-nigbu al-yede H.N. Byalik va-haverav. [Testimony of Victims of the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom as Written down by Ch. N. Bialik and Others]. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad; Ramat Ef al: Yad Tabenkin, 1991.
Gurevitch, Zali. “Eternal Loss: An Afterword.” In Revealment and Concealment, by Haim Nahman Bialik. Jerusalem: Ibis, 2000.
Harshav, Benjamin. Language in the Time of Revolution. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993.
Jacobs, Steven L., ed. Shirot Bialik: A New and Annotated Translation of Chaim Nachman Bialik’s Epic Poems. Columbus: Alpha, 1987.
Judge, Edward H. Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom. New York: New York University Press, 1992.
Mintz, Alan. Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature.New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Miron, Dan. Introduction to Songs from Bialik, by Hayyim Nahman Bialik. Trans. Atar Hadari. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000.
Poupard, Dennis, ed. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism.Vol. 25. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1988.
Roskies, David G., ed. Annotations to “In the City of the Slaughter.” In The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe.Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1988.
Rubin, Adam. From Torah to Tarbut: Hayim Nahman Bialik and the Nationalization of Judaism.PhD diss. University of California at Los Angeles, 2000.