Bialik's Other Silence

Chaim Nahman Bialik's (1873-1934) poetic "shtikah" or silence from 1911 to the time of his death in 1934 has been widely discussed and conjectured about from social, psychological, and literary perspectives. "Bialik's Other Silence" focuses on Bialik's vernacular "silence" in representative works of his fiction. To what extent did Bialik's essays express his intellectual support of the necessity for Hebrew speech as part of a nationalist and cultural mobilization of the Jewish people, while his fiction refused to "speak" Hebrew? In "Bialik's Other Silence," Bialik's debut story "Brawny Aryeh" (1899) and one of his final stories "A Fatted Ox or a Dinner of Herbs" (1931) are explored in order to understand the troubled relationship between dialogue and narrative in Bialik's fictional corpus. Throughout the discussion, the particular challenges of Hebrew literary production during the Hebrew revival, the Tehiyah, are explored as they pertain to the ideologies and politics inherited by its practitioners from the Haskalah, or the Jewish Enlightenment.