The allusion to spring and blossom cannot but remind Hebrew readers of the "sunny weather" in National Poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik
's poem "Be'ir haharega" ("In the City of Slaughter"), written soon after the Kishinev Pogrom of April 1903: "For God called up the slaughter and the spring together / The slayer slew, the blossom burst, and it was sunny weather!" (129-30).
Other authors discussed are: Yehuda Amicha, Hayyim Nahman Bialik
, Shulamith Hareven, Haim Gouri, Hanoch Bartov, Aharon Megged, and Amos Oz.
This is the account Hayyim Nahman Bialik
, by far the dominant voice
Born in the Ukraine in 1873, Hayyim Nahman Bialik
received a strict religious Jewish education.
For example, chapter 2 begins with a succinct summary of modern Hebrew poetry's ambivalent relation to "the word." Like all good modernists, Hebrew writers were troubled by language's tendency both to "reveal and conceal," in the phrasing of Hayyim Nahman Bialik
, whom Cohen calls the "architect of modern Hebrew poetry." Placing Wallach in this trajectory of radical doubt, the author, nevertheless, locates a surprising affinity between the fin-de-siecle Bialik and the late-twentieth-century Wallach.
Efros, editor, Selected Poems of Hayyim Nahman Bialik
(New York: Bloch Publishing Company for Histadruth Ivrith of America, 1948), pp.