Hayyim Nachman Bialik Hayyim Nachman Bialik, Israel's national poet, was born in January the 9th 1873 in Radi, Volhynia, Ukraine, Russia. Bialik was born into poverty, losing his father before the age of six.
Bialik studied Jewish classics, which was one of his three motivations as a poet. The other two was Zionism and the love for the reviving Hebrew language. Coming from a religious background, Bialik was not a "Shommer Shabbat". In many ways our generation is trying to go on the opposite journey that Bialik walked in - back to the shule.
Bialik soon moved to Zhitomir a small town in Poland. In this little town Bialik wrote is first long poem. The poem was called, Ha-Matmid in it Bialik described him self as, left in the shule while a new spirit takes everyone away from him. Bialik's writing career soon brought him back to Odessa as a teacher in a Hebrew school, at the same time publishing poems of a very high standard. The stories he wrote are not to be forgotten.
Bialik also translated European classics into Hebrew contributing even more to the revival of the Modern Hebrew Language. His poems "Upon the slaughter" inspired by the program that took place in 1903 in Kishinyov contains some of the fiercest and most anguished verse in Hebrew poetry - "Fit revenge for the spilt blood of a child The devil has not yet compiled". In such poems "be-'ir-he-haregah"("in the city of slaughter"), Bialik lashes out both cruelty of the oppressors and the passivity of the Jewish populace.
In 1924 Bialik left the Soviet Union and settled in Tel-Aviv. In Tel-Aviv Bialik was active in the public life in general, in the writer society in particular and in the Devvir publishing house in which he had partial ownership. In Tel-Aviv Bialik met and encouraged the young Shay Agnon. In Palestine Bialik was one of the people who invented words in Hebrew. Together with Ravnitzky Bialik wrote Seffer Haggadah, a monumental collection of tales from the Jewish History. Bialik had no children but he wrote lots of poetry for toddlers. He had a great talent and he used it to inspire people of all ages.
In the mid 1930s Bialik was rumoured to receive the Nobel price for literature. He did not. Agnon had to wait until 1966 to be the first and only Hebrew poet to be awarded that recognition. The highest prize for literature in Israel is the Bialik prize and it is awarded every year to an important poet. The Bialik institute is a centre for research into Judaism and literature. Kiryat Bialik, which was named after him, is a big City near Haifa.
Bialik also had a dark side - he was politicly incorrect. He said: "I don't like Arabs because they remind me of Sephardim." He once asked a fat lady coming to a meeting to take two chairs. In his greatest poem of them all he said: "They say there is love in this world, where is my love?" We find this inappropriate for a married man. Hayyim Nachman Bialik died on a visit to Vienna on July the 4th of July 1934. By Tal and Yochi Ottensooser.
Source: Britanica and my father's knowledge.
