Hayim Nahman Bialik (Hebrew: חיים נחמן ביאַליק; January 9, 1873 – July 4, 1934) was a Russian-Jewish poet who wrote primarily in Hebrew and Yiddish. Bialik is considered a pioneer of modern Hebrew poetry, part of the vanguard of Jewish thinkers who gave voice to the new spirit of the time in the Jewish world. He is recognized today as Israel's national poet. Aside from his work as an essayist, poet and story-teller, Bialik translated major works from European languages into Hebrew.
Hayim Nahman Bialik was born in Radi, Volhynia Governorate in the Russian Empire to Itzik Yosef Bialik, a wood merchant from Zhytomyr, and his wife, Dinah Priveh. He had an older brother, Sheftel (born in 1862), and two sisters, Chenya-Ides (born in 1871) and Bluma (born in 1875). When Bialik was 8 years old, his father died. His mother took him to Zhytomyr to live with his Orthodox grandfather, Yankl-Moishe Bialik. Bialik did not see his mother for over twenty years, until he brought her to Odessa to live with him.
In Zhytomyr, Bialik explored European literature alongside the traditional Jewish religious education he received. At the age of 15, he convinced his grandfather to send him to the Volozhin Yeshiva in Vilna Governorate to study under Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, where he hoped he could continue his Jewish schooling while expanding his knowledge of European literature. There, Bialik encountered the Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) movement and drifted away from yeshiva life (religious life). A story in the biography of Chaim Soloveitchik cites an anonymous student, presumably Bialik himself, being expelled from the Yeshiva for involvement in the Haskala movement. As Rabbi Chaim was escorting him out, Bialik asked, "Why?" In response, the rabbi said he had spent the time convincing Bialik not to use his writing talents against the yeshiva world. Poems such as HaMatmid ("The Talmud student"), written in 1898, reflect Bialik's great ambivalence toward that way of life: on the one hand, admiration for the dedication and devotion of the yeshiva students to their studies; on the other, a disdain for their narrow world.
At 18, Bialik left for Odessa, center of modern Jewish culture in the southern Russian Empire. He was drawn by his admiration for authors such as Mendele Mocher Sforim and Ahad Ha'am. There, Bialik studied the Russian and German languages and literature while dreaming of enrolling in the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. Alone and penniless, Bialik made his living teaching Hebrew.
In 1892, Bialik published his first poem, El Hatzipor "To the Bird", which expresses a longing for Zion, in a booklet edited by Yehoshua Hana Rawnitzki (1859–1944), which opened the doors into the Jewish literary circles in Odessa. There, he joined the Hovevei Zion movement where he befriended the author Ahad Ha'am, who had a significant influence on his Zionist outlook.
In 1892, the Volozhin Yeshiva had closed and Bialik therefore returned home to Zhytomyr in order to prevent his grandfather from discovering that he had discontinued his religious education. He arrived to find both his grandfather and his older brother close to death. Following their deaths, Bialik married Manya Averbuch in 1893.
For a time, he served as a bookkeeper in his father-in-law's lumber business in Korostyshiv, near Kyiv. This proved unsuccessful, so in 1897 he moved to Sosnowiec, a small town in the Dąbrowa Basin in Vistula Land in Congress Poland, which was under Russian Control. There, Bialik worked both as a Hebrew teacher and, to earn extra income, a coal merchant. In 1900, feeling depressed by the provincial life of Sosnowiec, Bialik secured a teaching job in Odessa.
Bialik visited the United States, where he stayed with his cousin Raymond Bialeck in Hartford, CT. He is the uncle of actress Mayim Bialik's great-great-grandfather.
The year 1900 marked the beginning of Bialik's "golden period": he continued his activities in Zionist and literary circles, and his literary fame continued to rise. In 1901 his first collection of poetry was published in Warsaw, where it was greeted with much critical acclaim, being hailed as "The Poet of National Renaissance". Bialik relocated to Warsaw briefly in 1904 to serve as literary editor of the weekly magazine Ha-Shiloaḥ founded by Ahad Ha'am, a position he served for six years.
In 1903, in the wake of the Kishinev pogroms, the Jewish Historical Commission in Odessa asked Bialik to travel to Kishiniev (today Chișinău) to interview survivors and prepare a report. In response to his findings, Bialik wrote his epic poem "In the City of Slaughter" (originally published under the name "Massa Nemirov"), a powerful statement of anguish at the situation of the Jews. The poem's condemnation of passivity against antisemitic violence is said to have inspired thousands of Jewish youths to cast off their pacifism and join the Russian underground against the Czar, the founding of Jewish self-defense groups in the Russian Empire, and, later on, the Haganah in Palestine.
It was during his visit to Odessa that Bialik first met the painter Ira Jan, with whom he conducted a secret love affair for many years.
In the early 1900s, Bialik, together with Yehoshua Rawnitzki, Simcha Ben Zion and Elhanan Leib Lewinsky, founded Moriah, a publishing house aimed at issuing Hebrew classics and school texts. He translated into Hebrew various European works, such as William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Friedrich Schiller's William Tell, Miguel de Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, Heinrich Heine's poems, and S. Ansky's The Dybbuk.
Throughout the years 1899–1915, Bialik published about 20 of his Yiddish poems in different periodicals throughout the Russian Empire. These poems are often considered to be among the best of modern Yiddish poetry. Starting in 1908, Bialik switched to writing in prose: In collaboration with Rawnitzki, Bialik published Sefer HaAggadah (The Book of Legends, 1908–1911), a two-volume edition of the folk tales and proverbs scattered throughout the Talmud. The book comprises a selection of hundreds of texts arranged thematically. It was immediately recognized as a masterwork and has been reprinted numerous times. Bialik also edited the poems of the Andalusi poet and philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol and began a modern commentary on the Mishna, but only completed Zeraim, the first of the six Sedarim (Orders), of the Mishna. For this, Bialik intentionally chose to use the traditional Vilna edition of the Mishnah instead of a more scientific text and created, arguably, the first modern commentary to a Seder of Mishnah that included, in its introduction, a summary of the content as well as all of the relevant biblical passages. In the 1950s, under the direction of Hanoch Albeck, the Bialik Institute published a commentary on the entire Mishnah, an expansion of Bialik's project.
In 1919 in Odessa, Bialik founded the Dvir publishing house. The institution, now based in Israel, is known today as Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir after it was purchased by the Zmora-Bitan publishing house in 1986, and subsequently merged with Kinneret Publishing. It was in Odessa, where BIalik befriended the soprano Isa Kremer, and inspired her to become the first woman sing Yiddish music on the concert stage.
Bialik remained in Odessa until 1921, when the Moriah publishing house was closed by Soviet authorities as a result of mounting paranoia following the Bolshevik Revolution. Through the intervention of Maxim Gorky, a group of Hebrew writers were given permission by the Soviet government to leave the country.
Bialik moved, via the Second Polish Republic and Revolutionary Ankara Turkey, to Berlin, where, together with his friends Yehoshua Rawnitzki and Shmaryahu Levin, he re-established the Dvir publishing house. There, in collaboration with the rabbinical college Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Bialik published the first Hebrew language scientific journal.
In Germany, Bialik joined a community of noted Jewish authors and publishers. Among them were Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Salman Schocken (owner of Schocken Department Stores and founder of Schocken Books), the historian Simon Dubnow, Israel Isidor Elyashev, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Jakob Klatzkin (cofounder of the Eshkol publishing house in Berlin), Moyshe Kulbak, Zeev Latsky ("Bertoldi") (cofounder of Klal-farlag publishing house in Berlin in 1922), Simon Rawidowicz (co-founder of Klal-farlag) Zalman Shneour, Nochum Shtif, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Shoshana Persitz (founder of Omanut publishing house) and Martin Buber. They met routinely at the Hebrew Committee House (Hebrew: בת וועד העברי, romanized: Bet Havad haIvri) in Berlin's Scheunenviertel, in Café Monopol, which had a Hebrew-speaking corner, or Café des Westens (both in Berlin's more elegant western boroughs).