A Tourist in 'Ir ha-Haregah (A Tourist in the City of Slaughter) -- Kishinev 1903

The storm that H. N. Bialik stirred up with his poem "Be-'ir ha-haregah" (In the City of Slaughter) has hardly subsided since its appearance one hundred years ago. When first published,¹ the poem was perceived by many as expressing the anguish of its Jewish readers. An anonymous reader wrote in Ha-tsofeh:

After reading the poem the reader feels, despite the horrible things painted by the artist, a certain relief, as if he were given the ability to cry, to sigh deeply, to express the sadness that weighed on his heart many days. Rise up and go to the city of slaughter (kum lekh le-kha el 'ir ha-haregah). And the reader walks with the poet seeing and feeling the details of the "destruction of Nemirov" the heap where a Jew and his dog were beheaded . . . He ascends to the attics and feels the fear of death . . . hears the different stories about the stomach that was ripped apart . . . and while we move from house to house from cellar to attic, we wonder at seeing outside the spring and sunlight.²

Many readers perceived the poem as heralding Jewish efforts of self-defense in Russia.³ Others disagreed, claiming that the organization of self-defense started before the publication of the poem.

A century, a Holocaust, and a state later, the poem is still cause for controversy. This time Bialik is not the harbinger of a new spirit of Jewish pride but a culprit. His condemnation of a weak Jewish response to murder, rape, and destruction has become grounds for accusations of lack of compassion toward the suffering of the victims. Now the poem is deemed rhetorically absurd and confusing to the readers, aesthetically and ethically bankrupt, and irrelevant.⁴

These judgments reflect, I think, an impasse in the reading of the poem, relating to a tradition that places the speaker in the poem in a biblical prophetic context. The issue of speaker and listener has been a quintessential one in the literary criticism of the poem since its publication. Who addresses whom? Is Bialik consistent in maintaining a single speaker throughout the poem? What message does the speaker deliver? And why does the poem sustain such force even when the speaker is so harsh to the victims and listener?

Over the years there have been several conceptual transitions in the application of the biblical prophetic model to "Be-'ir ha-haregah." The link between the speaker in the poem and the biblical prophet was proposed by Shmuel Perlman in his response to the poem when it was published under its first title "Masa' Nemirov" (The Burden of Nemirov).⁵ Perlman interpreted the title's masa' as a prophetic moral vision or preaching. He saw in the poem an attempt to revive a decayed soul of the Jewish nation. In 1944, Fishel Lahover saw the poem as modeled on the voice of the prophet Ezekiel and as a mixture of styles and motifs of biblical poetry.⁶ Uzi Shavit would embellish this theme in 1994 when he developed the intertextual connection to Ezekiel's prophecy.⁷ Shavit understands the prophetic vision as a parodic irony that ends not as a prophecy of solace or redemption like Ezekiel's prophecy of the dry bones (Ez 37) but in Bialik's grotesque prediction that the beggars will sell the bones of their dead—an attempt to trade off their suffering. Menachem Peri was the first to suggest the shift in the identity of the prophet speaker to God as the speaker. He noticed a change in line 92 of the poem from the poet/messenger to the voice of God. His interpretation placed what was accepted until then as the prophet's anger against God in an absurd light, since the poetic God was now speaking against himself.⁸

In...