The Pogrom

again some writer

runs howling to his art.

—W. H. AUDEN, “Journey to Iceland”

The same streets in Lower Kishinev that Sergei Urussov would find so shocking at his first glimpse as Bessarabia’s new governor general had already been anticipated in a 1903 play performed before sellout crowds on three consecutive nights at New York’s Chinese Theater. Kishinev had struck a nerve with Chinese American leaders, perennial strangers in their new land, who immediately threw themselves into its relief effort. Located on Doyers Street, the theater was the only hall in Chinatown with a capacity (five hundred) large enough to seat the crowd wishing to attend. The New York Times reported that this was “almost certainly the first time in history that the Chinese people had come forward in the defense of Jews.”1

The event was spearheaded by the community activist Joseph Singleton, who was born Chew Mon Sing in China. His Kishinev-related efforts, however, did not end there. The debut was capped off with a banquet at Mon Lay Won, a Pell Street eatery that billed itself as the Chinese Delmonico: a reference to the famed New York steak house. The restaurant, packed with a mixed crowd of Jews, Chinese, and a host of city dignitaries, heard a veritable multitude of speeches, including a breathtakingly lengthy oration delivered by a local rabbi in Yiddish—a language familiar only to a sprinkling of the audience. Singleton himself spoke about how his people, much like the Jews, had been the victims of Russian tyranny. The actors donated their wages to Kishinev relief, and the enterprise yielded the handsome sum of $280, worth around $8,000 today.2

The Pell Street restaurant was on New York’s Lower East Side, where the U.S. government’s 1902 confirmation of restrictive immigration policy toward the Chinese made the prospect of linking their cause with that of their Jewish neighbors particularly compelling. The Kishinev tragedy continued to dominate newspaper headlines, with crowds gathering daily outside the offices of William Randolph Hearst’s New York American—which had, with Michael Davitt’s reporting, made itself into a central address for news of the pogrom—and other newspapers as well, seeking information about the fate of relatives: “The American people in this matter are not being led by the press; the press is being led by the people.”3

Pell Street restaurant, Chinese Delmonico.

By now, just weeks after the pogrom’s end, it was commonplace to liken Kishinev to the worst of Jewish history’s catastrophes, including the destruction of the temples of Jerusalem. Special liturgies highlighting the tragedy were introduced into American synagogues. (Elsewhere, in France and England, for instance, synagogue ritual was more centrally controlled.) The poem “Have Pity,” by Shimen Frug, which appeared soon after the pogrom, was immediately set to music and recited at Yom Kippur services that fall: “Brothers, sisters, please have mercy!/Great and awful is the need/Bread is needed for the living/Shrouds are needed for the dead.” The Yiddish writer Sholem Asch produced a yizkor, or memorial for the dead, that also would be widely integrated into religious ritual life. The ersatz Yiddish poet Yisroel ben Yehudah Fein, a Baltimore clothier, captured attention for a time with snippets of his unseasoned, ferocious work, much of it built around reverent evocations of Moshe Kigel; it was recited at communal gatherings throughout the United States.⁴

The impetus for nearly all of this was the Jews of New York City’s Lower East Side. As the historian Jonathan Frankel writes: “This was the time that the new immigrant community in the United States (more than half a million Jews had arrived from the Russian empire since 1881) found itself observing from afar a major crisis in the mother community, in der heym.”5 The socialist leadership of the Jewish Lower East Side—particularly Forverts—was able to stand at the forefront of a massive, community-wide campaign with its emphasis on relief, not politics. (Rumors that they had collected as much as five hundred thousand dollars even in the first few weeks may well be accurate.) They found themselves able to galvanize the initially quiescent established American Jewish leadership—hailing from the German Jewish immigration of the mid-nineteenth century—into action, and found a ready ally in the Hearst press. Within two or three weeks of the news reaching the United States, a previously reticent New York Times started reporting regularly on the pogrom as well. By May 16 the Times admitted that the Lower East Side was completely “wrought up” amid the steady stream of dreadful news still coming from Kishinev.⁶

Hugely popular were plays celebrating the heroism of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund. Frequently knocked off in a matter of days, they were performed—much like the spectacle at the Chinese Theater—to create communal solidarity and especially to help with relief support. A vocalist performing “The Song of the Suffering Jews” in a Bowery theater so excited the audience that, as the New York Times reported, “they threw $500 in coins and bills on the stage during her performance.”⁷

Far more elaborate was the production written for the resplendent New Star Theater (why it was never staged remains unclear): The play Kishineff features as its protagonist the swashbuckling Dave Michels, a naive and good-hearted journalist from the United States, whose courage is all the more impressive since he is one-handed. The villain is a powerful, lustful local nobleman—modeled, it seems, either on the Kishinev-based secret-police official Baron L. M. Levandal or Plehve himself; the character is relentlessly antisemitic, and his infatuation with a beautiful, innocent Jewish girl inspires him to foment the pogrom. Michels manages to save the city’s Jews—he is particularly attentive to the fate of its maidens—and the play ends with the brother of the beauty so coveted by the nobleman declaring that Michels is without doubt “the truest, dearest friend our people ever had.”8 Similar in its theme was the production by M. Horowitz of The Story of Kishineff: A Tragedy in Five Acts, which was performed at the Bowery’s Windsor Theater for weeks. In this play Bessarabia’s governor general falls madly in love with a Jewess whom he rashly pursues. She is killed in the pogrom, and a Jewish youth also in love with her commits suicide on her grave.⁹

Jewish audiences required no prompting to recognize that Dave Michels was modeled on Michael Davitt, whose articles from Kishinev in the New York American had so mesmerized readers. One-handed (because of a childhood accident) and Irish (not American), he was responsible for the most harrowing—certainly the most widely read—accounts of the Kishinev pogrom, all of which were sympathetic to the Jewish victims, which catapulted him to meteoric fame. He was the inspiration for several other plays, too, as well as Yiddish poetry. His untimely death in 1906 would be treated much like the death of a holy martyr, marked by Jewish commemorative events attended by huge appreciative crowds.¹⁰

Davitt riveted such large audiences both because of his widely reprinted articles and because they were followed almost immediately by his book, Within the Pale: The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecution in Russia. The volume, culled largely from his newspaper pieces, would set the standard for the next decade for almost all treatments in the United States of Jewish life in Russia. Its enthusiastic reception was unsurprising: It was a firsthand account by a seasoned and trusted non-Jewish journalist—and celebrated Irish radical—who, after a ten-day stay in Kishinev, agreed with nearly everything Jews and their sympathizers already believed about the pogrom, its origins, and its dire long-term implications.

Michael Davitt.

To the extent that any other work on Kishinev could capture a readership equal to Davitt’s, it was Bialik’s “In the City of Killing,” still seen as the finest—certainly the most influential—Jewish poem written since medieval times. A writer celebrated earlier in the smallish hothouse of Hebrew literature as its “national poet,” the thirty-year-old Bialik’s reputation soared with the appearance of “In the City of Killing.” Davitt’s book portrayed a community of many millions, surrounded by hatred and in need of instant repatriation, with a return to ancient Zion the only credible solution. In contrast Bialik offered an unforgiving portrait of the weight of age-old persecution having recurred time and again, now in full view on Kishinev’s streets and causing irreparable harm to the bodies and souls of contemporary Jews.

“In the City of Killing” almost immediately swept aside nearly all other literary works on Kishinev, including Frug’s ubiquitous—if also transparently maudlin—“Have Pity.” Entire schools of Jewish poetics would define themselves in relation to Bialik’s work, with some insisting that it was not poetry at all but, at best, a mere journalistic compendium. Others excoriated it for its lack of accuracy and the cruelty of its unwarranted attack. On and off, Jewish educators in Palestine and later in Israel would debate whether it benefited or harmed the Israeli school curriculum (where it would long occupy pride of place). Debate over the public role given his poetry remains robust: Israel’s most prominent literary critic, Dan Miron, recently insisted that the noxious influence of Bialik’s pogrom poetry on schoolchildren—particularly because of its jaundiced view of Diaspora Jewish life—was sufficient reason for it to have been removed from Israel’s school reading lists.12

With its biblical cadence and the authority of a witness—Bialik had spent five weeks in Kishinev soon after the pogrom—it sounded much like a call from the grave: “Rise and go to the city of killings. . . .”

Joseph Klausner, a leading Odessa-based Hebrew critic of the day, said that, when first reading the poem, he read and reread it over three consecutive days, fearing at times that he was on the verge of going mad. Later he wrote Bialik that he was convinced it was a greater achievement than Ecclesiastes. Bialik’s Hebrew combined declarative biblical cadence with a delicately individual poetic voice; its capacity to capture—through the eyes of a witness of sorts—the most jarring of all Jewish horrors of the time gave the work a role comparable in its day to that of Elie Wiesel’s Night half a century later.

Different as it was from Davitt’s reportage, Bialik’s poem, too, was the product of meticulous and prolonged examination of Kishinev’s tragedy. It was this that prompted critics, including several of the very first responses to the poem, to argue that its detailed evocation was not poetry at all but little more than a newspaper account. Its first reviewer in the Hebrew press, Shmuel Perlman, went so far as to insist that he found it lacking any semblance of imagination. Bialik’s five weeks in Kishinev overlapped with Davitt’s stay, and they shared the same assistant, a local Jewish schoolteacher. But, it seems, the two men never met, coming as they did from such vastly different backgrounds and with, quite literally, no common language. Bialik’s poem has, indeed, something of the feel of a reporter’s notebook: Miron has astutely suggested that it bears a resemblance to the wartime reportage of Stephen Crane, widely celebrated in the Jewish press, with its reliance on an interplay between copious detail and sensationalism similar to that displayed in Yiddish journalism in the United States and elsewhere.13

Both Davitt and Bialik had been dispatched to Kishinev to amass data; Bialik’s decision to scuttle the task and write his poem would come somewhat later. Both managed to distill the catastrophe in ways all the more enduring because their accounts were so precise and concrete. And both would come away, as it happens, with the same sense of what they were certain was the event’s single most disturbing feature—namely the cowardice of Kishinev’s Jewish males. Both writers saw this as what most decisively defined the tragedy. Davitt excised all mention of it in his published work. Bialik situated it at the heart of his poem.

Even before the pogrom Bialik, born in 1873 in the village of Radi, near Zhitomir, was lauded as one of Jewish literature’s most promising writers. The prophet-like figure he would soon become in the Jewish imagination—echoing, no doubt intentionally, in his Kishinev poem features of Alexander Pushkin’s brief and powerful “The Prophet” (“Tormented by a spiritual thirst/I stumbled through a gloomy waste”)—differed drastically from the convivial, somewhat coarse, mostly self-taught man his literary friends knew well. The essayist and rabbinic scholar Chaim Tchernowitz, a close friend, wrote in his memoirs that the Bialik whose reputation so soared in these years bore little resemblance to the rough-and-tumble fellow with whom he spent so much time once he settled in Odessa. A farm boy ever concerned about his rusticated manners and the tenuousness of his intellect in contrast to the more rigorously disciplined figures around him, Tchernowitz’s Bialik little resembles the genius whose lines would soon be memorized by generations of Jewish readers. A good example, Tchernowitz suggested, of the chasm between his reputation and reality was the notion that Bialik was a veritable Talmud master (a matmid, a prodigious devotee), which was the title of one of his most beloved poems. Tchernowitz insisted that this was inconceivable if only because Bialik was so hungry for company that rarely would he permit himself to be alone long enough to achieve true mastery of rabbinic Judaism’s voluminous library.14

Bialik moved from Volozhin, near Vilna, where he studied in its famed yeshiva, to Odessa in 1891, eager to fall in with its celebrated Jewish intellectuals. He worked hard to gain their approval, to rub shoulders with the group’s luminaries, and to publish his poetry in their journals. Most important, as he saw it, was to put himself at the disposal of its dominant figure, the Hebrew essayist Ahad Ha’am (the pen name of Asher Ginzberg), who had been embraced by the small but ambitious Odessa-based group of Hebrew-inflected intellectuals as indispensable to the redefinition of Judaism: He was seen by them as the most original and subtle of all living Jewish thinkers.¹⁵

Ahad Ha’am’s writings were mostly in the form of brisk, tightly constructed essays melding classical Jewish and worldly erudition. Authoritative in their prescriptions—such authority was greatly valued by readers, often barely more than a few steps removed from the traditional Jewish study house—they were rendered in a limpid, elegant Hebrew. Broadly speaking Zionist in its convictions—with his goal, much like Theodor Herzl’s, the creation of a Jewish political entity in the land of Israel—Ahad Ha’am’s writing about the movement was bitingly critical. He attacked its capacity to translate goals into reality, its vaunted realpolitik (which he scored as childishly naive), and its professed pragmatism (which he loathed because of its inattention to morality).16

Zionism’s goals, he insisted, must be both less and more ambitious than Herzl proclaimed. Its belief that it was capable of immediately transporting large numbers of Jews to Palestine was not merely unrealistic but undesirable: The local economy could not absorb them, the Arab population would resist the encroachment, and the national entity born of a haphazard, ill-conceived exodus of this sort would be a dreadful embarrassment. What could be achieved by Zionism was still grander; however, this was achievable only in Palestine and, unless confronted immediately, was certain to slip out of Jewry’s hands.¹⁷

This goal amounted to little less than the salvaging of Jewish civilization. No comparable challenge had faced Jews since the temple’s destruction in the first century; this moment was no less momentous. And, much as in the distant past, the tools essential for such work were cultural, not political—a marshaling of Jewry’s spiritual timber with far-reaching influence on all aspects of Jewish life and profound impact on the rhythm of Jewish life in Palestine. The errors of Herzl’s Zionism were not in its focus on Palestine but in its mindless aping of European nationalism.¹⁸

Hence the moment at hand, as Ahad Ha’am saw it, was no less convulsive—also potentially redemptive—than the crucible following the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem. Then Judaism had been confronted by its implosion as a cultic faith in the first century. Now Jewry’s entry into a larger cultural world no longer demarcated by religious differences meant that—unless new, credible boundaries were constructed to define the contours of Judaism that were receptive to larger currents but also true to Jewish cultural qualities—these qualities could well recede into oblivion. Such a delicate mix was conceivable only if its epicenter was in the land of Israel, where the inexorable pressures elsewhere to assimilate would be mediated in a Jewish milieu and where modernity could be embraced without risk.19

Ahad Ha’am offered men like Bialik—nearly all in his Odessa circle were males steeped in Jewish tradition and eager to blend past beliefs into the present—an indispensable road map. The symbiosis he promised could be realized only if Jews built a new home in their old land with a suitable cultural infrastructure. Only there would the interplay between isolation and cultural immersion permit Jews to live free from ethnocentrism and yet be unreservedly Jewish. It was England that provided Ahad Ha’am with his most palpable model of how this might work: It was the mightiest empire of the age with a singularly cohesive culture, as he saw it, secular yet in tune with its unobtrusive religious rhythms. No more intrusive than England’s fog or rain, these rhythms offered Jews a model for the future.²⁰

In its own way Odessa was no less an influence. Boisterous, multinational, and relatively young (the city was founded in 1794), Odessa had long been a major commercial port and had a rich array of cultural institutions—with its lavish opera house and its schools and libraries—all of which were a major influence on the tenor of its Jewish life. Jews constituted a third of its population—albeit with the same swollen army of Jewish laborers and poor as elsewhere. But here too lived a large, highly visible slice of professionals (half of the city’s doctors were Jews), most of whom were liberal in their cultural and political convictions, and many were second-generation Russian-speakers, often distant from the patterns, linguistic as well as religious, of Jewish life. Odessa’s Russian schools, despite quotas, were packed with Jews. Vladimir Jabotinsky, born in Odessa, in his early twenties was already a successful journalist for the city’s Russian-language liberal press and fluent in Italian long before he mastered either Hebrew or Yiddish.21

Ahad Ha’Am, Bialik, and their circle.

So it was that, unlike smaller towns in the Pale of Settlement, in this highly acculturated Jewish milieu neither Ahad Ha’am nor Bialik were viewed as particularly relevant. In the minds of local progressive youth, to the extent that Ahad Ha’am and Bialik were known at all, they were seen as musty conservatives obsessed with the perils of assimilation, speaking a homegrown, awkward (at least accented) Russian, and were proponents of curious endeavors like the revival of literary Hebrew. Hence the preoccupation of Ahad Ha’am’s circle with first-century Judaism that had managed, as they saw it, in the shadow of the temple’s destruction, to rebuild a vibrant Jewish life. The first meeting between Ahad Ha’am and Simon Dubnow (then still little known but soon the leading chronicler of Russian Jewry) found the two lost in a spirited talk about first-century Judaism, a topic jarringly pertinent for both.²²

Bialik’s Jewish nationalism was especially fierce, stitched out of wounds—above all the scars of an awful childhood (the early death of his father and his mother’s abandonment) that he would come to see as a correlative of exile’s terrors. Thus, in his Kishinev masterpiece, he managed to conflate—more powerfully than ever before or since in Hebrew—nationalist aspiration with personal anguish. Its narrator is the messenger of God, an irreparably flawed divinity that is, as Miron aptly put it, “irrational, moody, arbitrary, capricious, and at certain moments half-demented.”23

Bialik arrived in Kishinev armed with patronizingly detailed instructions drawn up by Dubnow, who was head of a historical commission—as he himself rather grandly characterized it—cobbled together in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom. Dubnow, a decade older than Bialik and with a touch of pedantry, immediately identified Kishinev’s massacre as a historical turning point that demanded just the sort of politically engaged scholarship he and others of this milieu had long championed. He hoped to amass detailed, accurate information regarding the tragedy and to use these data to strengthen the cause of Jewish nationalism. His was a liberal nationalism fixed on Jewish continuity in the Diaspora, not in Palestine, and he saw a healthy Jewish life in the immediate future sustained by Jewish autonomy in a multinational, liberalizing world.²⁴

Nonetheless, like Ahad Ha’am, Dubnow was intent on the reconstruction of Judaism as uncompromisingly modern, secular, and authentic. Lessons culled from Kishinev’s tragedy—of self-sufficiency, national honor, and resistance to tyranny—could now, as he saw it, prove to be crucial building blocks in this larger project. His intent was to use the raw data culled by Bialik for historical reconstruction that would help instruct Jews as to how best to respond to horrors in the future. In Kishinev’s wake, Dubnow was convinced that such eruptions were certain to recur time and again.²⁵

Shy, essentially unschooled, Bialik was an odd choice for the assignment; most likely he agreed because he was desperately short of money. Greatly respected in the small circle of devotees of Hebrew poetry, he was little known beyond it. He brought with him to Kishinev his list of interview questions for eyewitnesses and had already written an initial, poetic response, “Al Ha-Shehitah” (“On the Slaughter”). The poem was rather conventional in structure and theme: “Vengeance for the little children/The devil has not framed.” He now devoted himself to the meticulous recording of witness testimony. His weeks in Kishinev, listening day after day to victims, drove him, as he later admitted, “half-mad.”26

Drawing out witnesses with a rare delicacy—an assistant later described Bialik’s singular power of empathy—he and his associates filled five notebooks with the testimonies, translated from their original Yiddish into Hebrew. Once this labor was finished, Bialik left Kishinev for his father-in-law’s summerhouse several hundred miles away, in the countryside between Kiev and Zhitomir. There he set his notebooks aside, never touching them again, and worked instead on his Kishinev poem, which he had already started during his sojourn in the pogrom-afflicted city.²⁷

There is every reason to believe that Bialik set out to do just what he had been asked to, but then, of course, he did the opposite. Or so it might appear. Yet this would not be how Dubnow saw it: He was greatly pleased with Bialik’s poem, and he recognized that it had a far greater impact than any work of history could. Curiously, as Dubnow seemed to see it, no substantive difference existed in this instance between the tasks of a chronicler and those of a poet; the lines separating history from journalism or poetry blurred in the pogrom’s wake. With victim relief as well as the moral education of the Jewish people at stake, poetry seemed a far more valuable—perhaps an even more accurate—vehicle than the historical narrative Dubnow had first envisioned.²⁸

In part this was because (as Dubnow’s Odessa circle saw it) there was little new information to be learned, since the substance of Kishinev’s story was already known. Immediately on hearing of the massacre, that circle of writers had formulated—and circulated widely—their sense of what transpired; this occurred well before Bialik was dispatched on his mission. Kishinev’s tragedy was amply visible to all around them: Odessa’s hotels were packed with refugees, the Odessa railway station was inundated, and rumors of still another pogrom were rife. Based on little more than what might be gleaned from those fleeing Kishinev for Odessa and points west, as well as the reports of the Kishinev schoolteacher Pesach Averbach—an eyewitness, soon one of Bialik’s Kishinev assistants, whose accounts were already appearing in the St. Petersburg Hebrew daily Ha-Zeman—a declamation was issued within days of the riot. This statement prejudged not only the pogrom’s cause but also its long-term implications. It was written largely by Ahad Ha’am and declared that, without doubt, Kishinev’s massacre was only the first of many such tragedies, that Russian authorities were culpable (this was written weeks before the surfacing of the Plehve letter), and that the most troubling aspect by far was not the violence perpetrated by gentiles but the cowardice of the Jews.29

Supported by Bialik together with others in the Odessa Jewish literary orbit, and circulated throughout Russia’s Jewish community, the declamation insisted that the lamentable shortcomings of Jews were Kishinev’s most shocking feature. When asked a week or so after the disaster to contribute to a volume whose earnings would be donated to victim relief, Ahad Ha’am wrote in a letter: “This isn’t, in my view, a run-of-the-mill misfortune for which it is appropriate to provide succor with the use of regular solutions of this sort.” No one doubted the usefulness of such efforts, he admitted, but they failed to address the fundamental dilemma so vividly revealed by the pogrom, namely the “inner poverty” of Jewish life now apparent for all to see. It was because of such wretched inadequacy that Jews responded in Kishinev like “slaves” undergoing humiliations that healthy human beings would never have tolerated. The only credible response now was the “raising of a new flag . . . a flag of inner freedom, a flag of individual honor.”30

As soon as he heard news of the massacre, Ahad Ha’am said it “filled his heart,” making it “impossible to do anything else.” It so shattered and overwhelmed him that his deep-set inclination toward moderation—such caution being among his most pronounced characteristics—and his politics, so often assailed as hopelessly bourgeois, were now decisively cast aside. So thoroughly were these renounced that he insisted that the Odessa document call for Jews to defend themselves by taking up arms and that all its signatories list their names despite the risk of imprisonment. Calmer heads prevailed, and, once the text was issued, its authorship was attributed to the (nonexistent) “Association of Hebrew Writers.” (Learning of this decision after it was already on record, Ahad Ha’am’s response was bitter and uncompromising.)³¹

The thrust of the statement, however, was just as he wrote it. It condemned the terrible actions of the mob and the inaction of the Russian government as inexcusable. But these comments were almost an afterthought. Its target was Jewish passivity—a passivity so noxious that such behavior was itself a possible source of gentile hatred.

Not since the massacres of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—more or less in the same region—had Jews undergone anything comparable with the Kishinev pogrom that was not the doing of rank criminals, as Russian officials claimed. Such behavior would have been inconceivable had Jews enjoyed equal protection under the law and not been subjected to the whims of the mob. “A human being for whom there exists no obligation to treat with justice” possessed no true rights. In the absence of such protection, the belief prevailed that beating—even killing—Jews was justified. No decree, no commission, no jail time could dislodge such assumptions, reinforced daily by government hostility.32

This was all sufficiently dreadful. But far worse—and here the document reached fever pitch—was the wretchedness of a people numbering some five million who saw as their only recourse to throw themselves on the mercy of others, indeed to do so without so much as trying to protect themselves or their loved ones from attack. “Who knows if such disgraceful behavior isn’t the fundamental cause for the hatred felt for us by the masses?” Had it been known that Jews would not tolerate such treatment, the pogrom never would have erupted.³³

“Brothers, the blood of Kishinev cries out to you,” the document exclaimed, as much cri de coeur as reproof. What must be launched, it urged, was a “perpetual organization” with its goal being ever-vigilant preparation for armed resistance. The document never spelled out explicitly its call for the arming of Jews; indeed, it acknowledged that the precise details of what Jews were to do must not be spelled out. But its militant message was sufficiently clear—so clear, in fact, that many of its readers were shocked at its brazenness. Though issued without a listing of the names of those responsible for it, this soon became an open secret among Jews. Bialik, a chubby, nondescript man, arrived in Kishinev with its bitter words ringing in his ears.³⁴

Davitt came to Kishinev with altogether different baggage. Long a fixture in the Irish struggle against England—a point of identification that helped shape his sympathies—he was widely regarded as a figure of stalwart principle. (He broke with Irish Parliamentary Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell after the latter’s divorce.) An ailing, middle-aged man of strong independent views, Davitt exerted significant political influence for a time. His early advocacy of working-class solidarity across English and Irish lines was a major force in the creation of the British Labour Party. Tireless in his insistence on the linkage between landownership and political freedom, he was a powerful inspiration for the young Mohandas Gandhi. James Joyce, an admirer, would draw on him in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Self-made, born into a poor family, Davitt endured long terms in British jails as the result of his political activity; these stints, curiously enough, were interspersed with his election to Parliament. For years he eked out his living from journalism and public speaking.35

Contacted by the London editor of Hearst’s New York American—then a scandal-splattered tabloid with sparse international coverage—Davitt was invited during an age of great muckraking (Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, for instance, was published in 1906) to travel to Kishinev to cover the pogrom’s aftermath. Front-page notices declared him the paper’s “emissary” to devastated Kishinev. The trip was an arduous one: It required connections in Paris and then Constantinople, with transport to Odessa before, finally, arrival in Kishinev. Despite precarious health—Davitt died three years later, at the age of sixty—he threw himself into the task.³⁶

As it happens, Davitt’s views on Jews were complex, born of sympathy yet based on unassailable beliefs regarding inbred racial characteristics that presumably led Jews to exploit the weak, ignorant, or naive. In a bloated six-hundred-page tome published in 1902, The Boer War for Freedom, he singled out as prime exploiters of the beleaguered South African region no fewer than forty “Anglicized and German Jews” who, alongside Cecil Rhodes, were “the capitalist kings” most responsible for oppression of the Boers. Davitt never entirely turned his back on such notions: In the preface to his Kishinev book, written the following year, he states: “Where anti-Semitism stands in fair political combat . . . or against the engineers of a sordid war as in South Africa . . . I am resolutely in line with its spirit and programme.”37

It seems that Davitt endorsed not-dissimilar views even while on his way to Kishinev. By coincidence he found himself traveling on a sleeping car in a seat across from the British businessman and Marxist politician (the author of the first introduction to Marx in the English language) Henry Hyndman. Hyndman knew Davitt because of his activity in Irish causes, and he relates in his memoirs how surprised he was on entering the car and noticing on the opposite seat the name “M. Davitt.” Once Davitt entered, Hyndman writes, “Our fellow travelers were astonished to see two elderly and apparently sane travelers suddenly set to work to dance a fandango of jubilation in the corridor of the sleeping-car.” The first words out of Davitt’s mouth were: “There is not a police bureau in Europe [that] would believe this was an accidental meeting.”³⁸

They talked about the boon of small landownership (by far Davitt’s greatest preoccupation as an Irish nationalist), about the beauty of the Bavarian and Austrian countryside, about socialism, and about Jews. Hyndman would remain in touch with Davitt after his Kishinev stay. The gist of what Hyndman took away regarding Davitt’s views of Jews was that, while he felt great antipathy for those responsible for the massacre, he saw Jews as fanning discontent or worse. “Undoubtedly, Davitt in private while not excusing the Russian authorities felt that Russia would be much better off if she had no Jews at all in her boundaries.” (Hyndman might have exaggerated Davitt’s antagonism to Jews in light of his own jaundiced opinions: “Anglo-Hebraic empire in Africa” was how he referred to South Africa.) Sitting together on the train, Hyndman related to Davitt the story of one ragged Jew who, within a few months of stumbling into a Russian village, had “to use Marx’s phrase, . . . eaten up the pores of this simple society. All now was his with the peasants and their families little better than his slaves.” Hyndman was left with the impression that Davitt agreed that the story captured something essential, if also tragic, about the economic activity of Jews.39

True, upon returning to Ireland, Davitt defended Jews in the wake of the Limerick riot and boycott of 1904, widely described at the time as a pogrom—no more than two thousand Jews then lived there—where he criticized anti-Jewish attackers in print while also visiting the homes of victims. However, he continued to share a set of staunch views regarding the intractable characteristics of the races: English motivations he would forever distrust; African “savages” he sidelined in his book on South Africa; and the responsibility of Moldavians for most of Kishinev’s violence could be traced to their ancestry as Roman slaves. And then there were the Jews—harmless where gentiles were clever, such as in the United States, but justly feared in backward Russia. He never did rationalize their oppression, but it was a sufficient argument for Jewish mass migration elsewhere—preferably, as Davitt would come to see it, to Palestine.⁴⁰

Davitt reached Odessa on May 2 amid fear of new anti-Jewish attacks and was greeted straightaway by the local Jewish leader Meir Dizengoff, who served as Davitt’s translator during his first day or two in Russia. (A few years later, in Palestine, Dizengoff would emerge as the founding—and long-standing—mayor of Tel Aviv.) Davitt quickly summoned Kishinev’s Jewish communal leader Jacob Bernstein-Kogan, just back from St. Petersburg, where he had gone to report on the pogrom, to his Odessa hotel room. (Davitt had arrived in Odessa eager to speak with Bernstein-Kogan since, when first hired by the Hearst press in London, he had been given a list of local contacts, with Bernstein-Kogan’s name at the top.) In that hotel room he related details of the massacre for seven or eight hours. Davitt spent the next two days speaking with a cluster of Russian officials and merchants and also an English merchant or two residing in the city. All condemned Kishinev’s violence while also singling out the rapacity of Jews as its essential cause. As one Russian official put it, the Jews “exploited the Christians in a hundred unscrupulous ways, to their own aggrandizement.”41

Once Davitt arrived in Kishinev some five weeks after the pogrom’s end—during the Russian Orthodox festivities of the Feast of Ascension and Holy Trinity and persistent rumors of new riots—his hotel room was swamped by Jews beseeching his help to immigrate to the United States, though he was unlikely to have much influence on this score. He communicated with the help of two translators, Averbach (who would also work with Bialik) as well as a retired Hungarian Jewish officer, both of whom were fluent in Yiddish.⁴²

A meticulous journalist, Davitt spent his few days in Kishinev collecting impressions, speaking with Mayor Schmidt and others, and even seeking out Krushevan and—once it was clear that the latter had left months earlier—his closest coworkers. Almost immediately Davitt was browbeaten by his London editor for articles and warned that, if he did not come up with something soon, he would have to abandon Kishinev for an interview with Tolstoy. Davitt resisted the pressure, insisting on gathering with care the many disparate details of the massacre. Thus, as he would acknowledge in his book, “to discover the truth amidst a mass of conflicting evidence would be a formidable task; to arrive at definite conclusions as to the immediate and the contributory causes of the sanguinary outrages perpetrated upon the Jews of Kishineff on the 19th and 20th of April, was a tedious and painful process, beset with innumerable difficulties.”43

It is no exaggeration that the five weeks Bialik spent in Kishinev irrevocably changed the rest of his life. Entering ransacked homes, day after day, he sat with victims and bystanders, prompting them with rare gentleness to air the most gruesome experiences. Not infrequently he spent hours at a time with a single victim.

During the same period Bialik was urged by the literary critic Klausner, a close friend and editor of Ha-Shiloach, the journal most closely linked to Ahad Ha’am, who had now stepped down from the editorship, to write an autobiography of sorts. Klausner planned to draw on it for a biographical essay, the first to appear, on Bialik. The poet threw himself into this task too, producing a document in the form of a letter many dozens of pages long. In it he dwelled, much as Klausner had urged him to do, on his earliest years. At the same time, of course, he also started work on his Kishinev poem. The meshing of childhood recollections—some of them achingly painful as he listened, day after day, to stories of the rampage on Kishinev’s streets, including the rape of its young girls and women—served to strengthen his belief in the perversions of exile. This contagion, as he now felt more strongly than ever before, could only be rectified once Jews finally removed themselves from the Diaspora’s dark, terrible shadow.44

Quite how intimately Bialik conflated his personal anguish with that of Kishinev’s defiled females has been explored by the literary scholar Michael Gluzman, who unearthed how Bialik expropriated the language of Rivka Schiff without quoting her—whose rape testimony was the lengthiest and most detailed that Bialik recorded—in an early draft of his autobiographical letter. Schiff had described to Bialik how, once she finally stood up after the multiple rapes that she endured, “I was pulverized and crushed, like a vessel filled with shame and filth.” So overwhelmed was Bialik by the phrase that he expropriated it, introducing the same words into the first version of his letter to Klausner. He did this in a description of a childhood humiliation that he now admitted had haunted him ever since; it involved the repeated beating of his buttocks in an outhouse by an older cousin, who was probably mentally unstable, soon after the death of young Bialik’s father. The phrase would also appear in the original Yiddish version of the autobiography—though this manuscript remained unpublished—but was eventually dropped once the Hebrew version adapted by Bialik appeared in print.⁴⁵

Gluzman believed that Bialik’s inner turmoil at the time was composed of a fierce condemnation of weakness directed simultaneously inward and at the Jews of Kishinev. The raw recollections of the rape victims he now heard, sometimes daily, recalled for him a long-suppressed, dreadful memory when he too found himself intimidated, powerless, and shamed. What Bialik would do with this humiliation was to recast it, replacing it with rage directed at the beaten Jews of Kishinev. “This rage,” argued Gluzman, “. . . leads him to construct the Jews of Kishinev as abject, and in the process to reshape and reconstruct his own identity.”⁴⁶

Amid this turmoil—intimate, political, and literary—Bialik fell in love, quite how deeply remains unclear. The object of this love was a married woman four years his senior who had a child. The interplay between shame and silence figured prominently in his poetry, with this episode an unspoken but nonetheless open secret in Palestinian-Jewish and Israeli literary circles that was revealed publicly only after the death of his widow, Manya, some forty years after Bialik’s passing in 1934.

The woman with whom he fell in love was the painter Esfir Yeselevich, known later by the pseudonym Ira Jan. A friend of Ahad Ha’am’s daughter, Jan grew up in a Russian-speaking acculturated Jewish home in Kishinev with no knowledge of Hebrew and probably little Yiddish. She was married to a physician with close ties to the Social Revolutionary Party, and her father, a lawyer assisting Jewish pogrom victims at the time, hosted one of Kishinev’s most-sought-after intellectual salons. He had opened his home to Bialik so that he might write in peace during his Kishinev stay, and Bialik spent a good deal of time sitting on their veranda in the temperate spring weather. It was there that the romance blossomed. His wife, Manya, whom he had married young, was unschooled, rough-hewn, and intensely loyal, and she went to her death unaware of Bialik’s affair—or, at least, of its intensity.47

Jan’s letters to Bialik are passionate; his to her have disappeared. Soon after his departure she announced that she was leaving her husband and child. She began studying Hebrew; she translated Bialik’s poems; and she drew the portrait that appeared in the second volume of his collected work. Jan continued to collaborate with him until she eventually left for Jerusalem with her daughter; in 1907 she joined the newly opened Bezalel Art Academy, where she was Palestine’s first female Jewish artist. Soon after meeting her, Bialik announced that he too would soon leave for Palestine, where he agreed to take up a teaching position at a new school planned for orphans of the Kishinev pogrom. He went so far as to negotiate his starting salary as well as a teaching schedule, and his plans to emigrate were aired in the Jewish press. However, he changed his mind, and he never publicly explained why.48

Esfir Yeselevich, known as Ira Jan.

Her love for him persisted; whether or not his did remains ambiguous (he was known at times to speak of her disparagingly to friends). He may have continued to meet her in Odessa and Warsaw, perhaps also in Palestine. Whether or not she still hoped he would join her is also uncertain. She remained in Palestine until World War I, then was forced to move to Egypt when wartime Russian Jews came under suspicion from Ottoman authorities. While she was there, most of her paintings disappeared. Her return to Palestine was disastrous: She contracted a fatal illness and died just after the war’s end.

Bialik’s love poetry was fiercely erotic; the most powerful of the love poems were almost certainly written with Jan in mind, but they also contain a palpable revulsion at sexual passion or, better said, the act of sex. This attitude could well have intruded on their relationship, which was one of his very few passionate romances.49

Stepping out of this cauldron—something of an idyll, too—and spending the summer at the home of his father-in-law in the countryside just beyond Zhitomir, Bialik was now slated to produce his summary of the Kishinev massacre transcripts. There is little mention of this work in his letters of this period; nearly all his correspondence about his writing focused on the progress of the pogrom poem.⁵⁰

How the witness accounts Bialik absorbed during his five weeks in Kishinev informed his poem has long bedeviled his readers. Was its half-mad narrator God himself or a hapless emissary? Either way, the government censor responsible for approving it for publication—he was a Lubavitch Hasid and also a Russian Orthodox convert who reverted to Hasidism during annual visits to his family abroad—would permit its appearance only after the removal of lines he deemed offensive to Jewish tradition.⁵¹ Its lacerating portrait of the bestiality of gentiles and the passivity of Jews would contribute to its sanctification in Israeli culture but also to repeated calls for its removal from the school curriculum because of its distorted portrait of exile. Yet despite such controversy, it retains an authority akin to that of an amalgam of Samuel Taylor Coleridge with Walt Whitman and the Book of Job:

Rise up and go to the town of the killing and you’ll come to the yards

and with your eyes and your own hand feel the fence

and on the trees and on the stones and plaster of the walls

the congealed blood and hardened brains of the dead.52

His narrator moves from neighborhood to neighborhood, often building on the massacre’s chronology. He uses imagery drawn from Bialik’s interviews as well as newspaper reports. Hence the poem opens with feathers filling the city’s streets from the ripped bedding of ransacked Jewish houses on the riot’s first day. Bialik invokes the interplay between Kishinev’s sudden temperate weather on the first morning of the pogrom and the pogrom’s eruption; critics have suggested that one reason he does this is to juxtapose early-twentieth-century springlike expectations with the backdrop of the massacre’s terrible reality.⁵³ The city’s courtyards, attics, and outhouses, sites of many of the worst outrages, are described with details drawn from the newspaper accounts—like the disemboweling of pregnant women—that were eventually dismissed as inaccurate:

The case of a disemboweled chest filled with feathers,

the case of nostrils and nine-inch nails with skulls and hammers,

the case of slaughtered human beings hung up from beams like fish.⁵⁴

Bialik introduces the worst of the outrages in Lower Kishinev as the narrator descends physically as well as psychologically:

And you will go down the hill of the city and find a vegetable garden. . . .

And like a camp of giant owls and terrible bats

fears sprawl over the corpses drunk with blood and tired.55

Although holy martyrdom in the Jewish past was once enacted in the name of fealty to the divine, such faith is now in tatters. God is no longer a palpable presence in the lives—or the deaths—of Jews. Such killings are thus now meaningless, with God himself but a shadow, a veritable beggar:

Forgive me beggars of the world, your God is as poor as you,

poor he is in your living and so much more in your deaths

and if you come tomorrow for your due and knock on my doors—

I’ll open for you: come and look! I’ve gone down in the world!⁵⁶

Bialik’s prophecy looks, wrote Miron, “as if it came not to revive the people but to put it to death. . . . God sends the poet-prophet on a difficult and frustrating mission. He must go to the city of slaughter, scour all its corners, penetrate its basements and attics, its gardens and stables and, in each place where there transpired during the pogrom a deed of murder or rape . . . the impressions will accumulate in a painful mass, but God forbids him to give them expression of any kind.”⁵⁷

Still, the incendiary core of the poem was its devastating laceration of Jewish male cowardice. Amid the din of accusations and counteraccusations following the pogrom—with many Jews, most vocally the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund, denouncing the wealthy for caring only to protect themselves and their property—was the charge that Jewish men hid themselves while doing nothing to stop the rapes. These accusations would eventually capture a greater visibility than the horrors experienced by the city’s females, drawing on the stereotypes of feminized Jewish males hopelessly softened by the humiliations of the Diaspora (as argued by Zionists) or the superstitions of a blandly passive religiosity (as argued by Jewish socialists and others).58

By the time Bialik’s poem appeared in late November, the public had seen a steady spate of newspaper coverage of Kishinev’s massacre that featured photographs of devastated synagogues, shredded Torah scrolls, down feathers blanketing the city streets, and, of course, rows of shrouded dead bodies awaiting burial. But now, with the appearance of Bialik’s poem, the moral failings of Kishinev’s men would overshadow all else; it soon became shorthand for the utter vulnerability of the Jewish people, their devastation of soul and body alike.

Bialik’s taunts are relentless:

The descendants of the Maccabees, the great grandchildren of lions . . .

They fled the fight . . . and like tics

Died like dogs where they were found.⁵⁹

With these are his best-remembered, most horrifying lines:

And see, oh see: in the shade of that same corner

under the bench and behind the barrel

lay husbands, fiancés, brothers, peeping out of holes,

at the flutter of holy bodies under the flesh of donkeys

choking in their corruption and gagging on their own throat’s blood

as like slices of meat a loathsome gentile spread their flesh—

they lay in their shame and saw—and didn’t move and didn’t budge,

and they didn’t pluck out their eyes or go out of their heads—

and perhaps each in his soul then prayed in his heart:

master of the universe, make a miracle—and let me not be harmed.60

There is no mention in the poem of Jewish self-defense—not even the most concerted of all such efforts, the Jewish attack early in the pogrom’s second day—which Bialik himself recorded in considerable detail in his Kishinev transcripts. Contemporary critics found this elision all the odder since the fight was given considerable prominence in the trials of pogromists by their defense attorneys—the trials were closed to the public but news of their proceedings invariably leaked where the case was repeatedly made that the defendants were the true victims of Jewish aggression. Moreover, Bialik knew well the wide range of Jewish responses during the massacre. For instance, when recording the gut-wrenching account of Rivka Schiff, the most painfully candid of all those who gave rape testimonies, his transcribed notes made clear that not only did she exonerate her husband from all blame but, as soon as her rape ended, she went searching for him, fearing that his vigorous resistance to the attack on her might well have led to his death.⁶¹

Bialik’s decision to shunt this aside in the poem has mostly been explained in terms of his inclination to merge nationalist conviction with individual despair. Literary historian David Roskies saw this as evidence of Jewish culture’s preference for memory over history—the discrepancy between lived reality and the incomparable power of received wisdom—with long-reigning beliefs overshadowing all else. This is consistent with Bialik’s constant gesturing in his poem toward the prophets (Isa. 8:9: “Make an uproar, O you peoples and you shall be broken! . . . Gird yourselves and you shall be broken”) as well as his desire to produce a modern-day literature of lamentation that, despite his work’s many concrete details, was intended as commemoration rather than history. David Roskies also argued that “it is never the public record, however, that tells the story. Having come to expect the subjective reality to set the norm and give rise to new responses, we should look to Bialik’s creative effort before and after the visit to see how one man writing at a critical moment in Jewish history was able to provoke action by transforming the poetics of violence.”62

To be sure, Ahad Ha’am had reached the same conclusions even before Bialik’s arrival in Kishinev, distilling them into his statement on the pogrom on which Bialik signed off. It should not come as a surprise that Bialik held firmly to them despite evidence to the contrary; not only was this consistent with his cultural and political predilections, but it was also in line with his belief that the massacre’s overarching lesson—namely, its searing spotlight on the degradations of Jewish exile—was far more crucial than the riot’s many conflicting details.

Yet Davitt, too, recorded the same impressions of male cowardice. In contrast to Bialik, however, he chose not to publish them and left them in his notes. Davitt was a meticulous note taker. Over the course of his Kishinev stay he recorded lengthy lists of issues he planned to clarify, the summaries of books on Jews he read, and statistics on Jewish and non-Jewish occupations: “Visit Cemetery, Hospital, Prison. Investigate alleged mutilation of women & children. Ascertain if there is any trans Carpathian propaganda from Roumania working with anti-semitic feeling in Bessarabia. . . . No. of Moldavians & Wallachs in Kishineff. Workingmen? Or Merchants, shopkeepers. Jealousy?”63

Arriving in Kishinev, he described in detail the city center, which impressed him as more imposing than he had expected. He toured the “Jewish quarter,” which was his designation for the Old Town, or Lower Kishinev, finding it “in no way repulsive” though its residents still had “frightened & hunted looks particularly in the localities where people were killed.” He recorded the continued misery weeks after the pogrom’s end at the Jewish hospital: “Saw two girls—one very beautiful in the female ward. Perfect type of Jewish beauty. Head battered with iron bludgeon. Her father killed but she does not yet know it.” Based on numerous interviews, Davitt sought to ferret out the number of rioters. Told at first that there had been no more than three hundred—an underestimate, he soon learned—with the bulk of them “imported thugs,” he jotted: “What were the 30,000 Jews doing?” He identified weapons used by the attackers (mostly clubs) and how they occupied themselves at night (“violating women”). He quantified the number of the city’s liquor stores as well as the brothels owned by Jews, calculated how many Jewish prostitutes worked in Kishinev, asked if there were disproportionate numbers of masons amid the pogromists, and wondered how many women participated in the attacks alongside men. He sought to discover whether the rumor that a five-year-old girl had been raped was true; after interviewing no fewer than ten doctors at the Jewish hospital and two more at the Russian institution, he found himself unable to confirm the report. He learned that the youngest pogrom victim, just a year old, died when the mother dropped the infant while in flight.⁶⁴

Davitt counted the fresh graves at the Jewish cemetery, interviewed rabbis to learn how many husbands had divorced their wives because they were raped (eleven is the number he recorded, but he suspected there were more), and confirmed that in at least one instance nails were, as rumored, driven into the head of a Jewish victim. After much effort he managed to acquire a list with the names of thirteen girls and women between the ages of seventeen and forty-eight who were raped, with another six unnamed but identified, and he speculated that there were at least forty rapes. The Russian doctors with whom he spoke admitted that the press reports of the pogrom’s outsize violence were not exaggerated. He noted that “some of the Jewish ladies told me that scores of girls who were engaged to be married are now disregarded by their promised husbands.”65

No Jewish saloon, he said, remained intact, whereas not a single non-Jewish bar or store was damaged. In one instance the mob labored no fewer than four hours to break into the safe of a Jewish-owned liquor store—and all the while police were “actually looking on while the robbery was being done.” Still, the story that surfaced in his notes, and soon afterward in his articles and book, was nuanced, filled with often-conflicting details regarding the riot and, in particular, the responses of local non-Jews. He discovered, in fact, considerable sympathy for the victims in nearly all the intellectuals he met, and many of the nobles vociferously deplored the violence. He also spoke with some of the city’s wealthier merchants, who repeated the charge that Jews were all “pro-socialists and enemies of the Govt.” Davitt’s analysis of the pogrom’s origin (he saw Krushevan as its crucial influence) emphasized the acute tensions in Bessarabia between town and country, the interplay between the mob’s culpability, its savagery, and hunger for booty and drunken distraction. Much of his account aligns with the better, more persuasive historical literature written about the riot. In short, Davitt’s account holds up, on the whole, as first-rate journalism and reliable history.66

On his return to Ireland, Davitt admitted that “in [its] naked horror” what he learned surpassed “almost anything which the imagination could invent.” Invention was something he assiduously avoided—his notes are studded with lists of “facts,” many laboriously extracted. Known in Irish nationalist circles as stalwart, principled, and rather stubborn, his resistance to the forwarding of articles before he felt them to be ready obviously exasperated his London editor. The sheer quantity of interviews he conducted during his ten days in Kishinev was testimony both to his industry and to his commitment to precision. Davitt also claimed that no fewer than a hundred Jews sought him out in his hotel room, with many of them sharing dreadful tales that may have been linked to attempts to persuade him to help with their emigration, since their lives and those of their families had been rendered unbearable. In this context he then added the following:

Note: Jewish men appear, except in rare instances, to have acted as contemptible cowards. In no instance have I heard from women of any courageous stand being made either by their husbands or sons. . . . Several of these miserable poltroons came to my hotel to recount their marvelous escapes but no one had a story of courage or of counter attack to relate.⁶⁷

Davitt knew, of course, of efforts of Jews to resist; he described the fight waged by those in the wine courtyard. Yet nowhere in his dispatches or his book did he mention the confessions made by Jewish men in his hotel room. The nearest he came is the observation in the book of how striking it was that the mayhem was caused by rioters numbering no more than two thousand—his initial estimate was revised considerably after further research—in a city with tens of thousands of Jews. “Ninety percent of [the Jews] hid themselves or fled to safer parts in and out of the city for refuge.” He then let the statement stand without further comment.68

It seems likely that both Davitt and Bialik recorded what was then common knowledge and also just the sort of indelicacy that tends to fall between the cracks, especially when a beleaguered people like Jews are its target. Davitt’s decision, apparently, was to excise or at least disguise mention of it, whereas Bialik built the accusation into the very core of his poem. Like Davitt, so Dubnow, too: Neither in his memoirs, in which he devotes considerable attention to the pogrom, nor in his historical work on the subject does he allude to this charge despite a lengthy description of his collaboration with Bialik and his great admiration for “In the City of Killing.”

Bialik may well have felt that introducing this accusation—part and parcel of talk among Jews at the time—into an imaginative work was an act less overtly provocative than including it in a journalistic or historical account. Bialik understood that his poem would be read alongside the cascade of pogrom reportage still being produced at the time of the poem’s appearance, since trials of the accused continued well into December 1903. But already by then an essentially canonized version of the massacre had consolidated for Jews across the political spectrum, the bulk of liberals and radicals in Russia, and their sympathizers abroad. In such accounts, news of Kishinev’s wealthy Jews and their rush to safety or, for that matter, the role played either by Krushevan or by local seminarians in fanning the pogrom’s flames was sidelined or entirely dismissed. This was consistent with the certainty that the massacre was, first and foremost, the work of the government.

The appropriation by Bialik of some details of the pogrom and not others, and his decision to sideline resistance, were tinged, no doubt, by his own deeply felt cultural Zionist convictions. Still, the choice to concentrate so much of his poem on the most cowed of Kishinev’s Jewish males was likely part and parcel of his effort to piece together the pogrom’s raw data, his culling of unmediated reportage devoid of contextualization or countervailing evidence that was nevertheless not inaccurate. Like so much else in Bialik’s poem, traversing in astonishing detail every quarter of the city and its suburbs, this too can be said to have been done with the intention of telling the truth—an expression of the poet’s desire to capture the pogrom’s terrors as meaningfully as he could.

Bialik’s poem was designed to coexist with the onslaught of press reports, ideological tracts, instantly crafted synagogue liturgy, protest meetings, and the like inspired by Kishinev’s tragedy—to complement it while also superseding it. (Never was Bialik more ambitious or more fertile than at this point in his life.) In this respect at least, his prophetic-like eruption can be seen as more transparent than Davitt’s journalism. Perhaps it felt to Bialik less of a cruel confrontation to inject into a work of poetry the reference to the failings of Kishinev’s men than it did to journalist Davitt, scrupulously honest as he was but also attentive to the overriding message he hoped to deliver—namely that the likely fate facing the Jews of Russia was catastrophic and that their exit from the empire was essential. Here as elsewhere in his writing, journalism was hitched to an overriding moral or political lesson.

Indeed, Bialik’s anguished poem—long seen by critics, literary scholars, and historians as brilliant in its imaginative power but a distortion of the historical record—deserves to be reassessed. At its core is a kernel of historical truth that is painful to acknowledge, aired widely at the time and then, like so many other details, deemed shameful and therefore sidelined. This is an indication of how the most lavishly remembered event of the Russian Jewish past is also among the most assiduously edited, with many of its details treated like unnecessary baggage for an already overburdened people.

Bialik sought to piece together the pogrom with the intention of capturing its terrors as tellingly as he knew how. And it seems likely that he felt better equipped to include all that he did because his was a poem detailed much like journalism but of course not journalism. Criticized then and later for all that he excluded, he nonetheless managed to reveal in it uncomfortable details that those writing about Kishinev in newspapers or elsewhere felt less equipped to acknowledge.

Avraham Kariv, among Bialik’s most enthusiastic Israeli boosters in the 1950s and 1960s, commented often on how surprising it was that, sixty years after the appearance of “In the City of Killing,” it still inspired such vigorous debate. Bialik had long since passed from the scene, dead since 1934. Yet despite the many upheavals in Palestine, later Israel—political, demographic, and cultural—he retained a presence unlike any other writer. Even after his death, Bialik would be referenced in discussions of the full range of contemporary affairs—above all, the European Jewish catastrophe. The titles of his Kishinev poems remained household words: For example, the memoir in a Tel Aviv weekly in May 1940 about the escape of a Jew from Vienna to Lublin with the heading “In the City of Killing” needed no elaboration. Despite his secularism, he would be cited on religious conundrums, as well. When the religious Zionist newspaper Ha-Tsofeh reflected in 1947 on theodicy during the Nazi horrors, the writer thought it natural to query what Bialik might have said.69

Amid the turbulence of prestate Palestine and the rise of Israel, such veneration served to intensify the antagonism of some. Bialik’s poetic romanticism, his skittishness with regard to the use of sexual imagery in his poetry, his insistence that Jewish tradition must somehow animate his people’s future, and even his bourgeois lifestyle—as a publisher, public figure, and eventually also as the owner of one of Tel Aviv’s grander homes—made him into a natural target for those who found such characteristics repelling. Joseph Klausner had marveled, in his turn-of-the-century sketch of Bialik, at his capacity to capture the attention (not infrequently, the ire) of readers across the generations. This would remain true later in the century, too. Bialik was that rare figure who bridged the otherwise mostly unbridgeable chasms of early Israeli society. Bialik had long been praised by right-wing Zionism’s Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of his best translators, and by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, an avid reader since his teens. But for those exasperated with the new state’s wariness of individualism, its insistence on sacrifice, and its disdain for the Diaspora past, the ideal foil was Bialik.⁷⁰

His Kishinev poetry was offered pride of place—alongside some of his other writings—in Israel’s school curriculum; this was set in motion in the early 1950s under the aegis of Minister of Education Ben-Zion Dinur. A superb historian and devoted nationalist, his admiration for Bialik was boundless, and he knew the poet from his days in Odessa. His curriculum sought to infuse the next generation of Israelis with a sense of shared destiny as well as a ready-made literary canon. This seemed all the more critical because half of the state’s school-age population came from outside the European orbit. Bialik would come to occupy a prominent role in this endeavor; his poetry slotted into the widest of rubrics.

Bialik’s poems—annotated with requisite lessons to be learned from them—became a fixture of Israeli textbooks in the first few decades of the state’s existence. They were said to teach, for example, that absolutely nothing new happened in Kishinev that had not already long been an aspect of Jewish fate. The value of prayer was now for Jews a thing of the past, since it was, as Bialik wrote, “all dried up.” So large would the poet loom that one seventh-grade text from the 1950s included no fewer than three sections featuring him: “the ways of torah,” or sacred knowledge; “Jewish childhood”; and “festivals.”71

Once this curriculum found itself undergoing a thorough review in the mid-1960s—similar efforts were then under way in the United States and Great Britain—Bialik’s prestige became subject to particular scrutiny. High on the list of criticisms was his portrait of Diaspora Jews as cowards. Whether or not critics of his portrait of Jews cowering in the face of aggression were inspired by Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem and its constant talk of Europe’s Jews going “like sheep to the slaughter” is unclear. But Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s use of the trial as a vast schoolroom—an effort also at the core of Hannah Arendt’s lacerating attack in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil—likely provided the backdrop to the discussion among Israel’s educators about Bialik’s value in the classroom.⁷²

The idea that Bialik’s Kishinev poems, because of their disparaging talk about Jewish passivity, were a corrosive influence was spearheaded by the Haifa-based educator and poet Noah Peniel. A graduate of Vilna’s Tarbut, or Hebrew school system, and a wartime refugee, he greatly admired Bialik, and over the years he had produced a spate of textbooks that prominently featured him. But Peniel now argued that Bialik’s works, especially his Kishinev poems, brilliant as they were, caused irreparable harm and planted—more authoritatively than anything else—in the hearts of schoolchildren a loathing for Diaspora Jewry. Amid the torrent of recent references to pathetic Jews going abjectly to their deaths, a generation had been left with no sense of what it meant to live alongside gentiles.73

Peniel’s campaign met with little success—so little in fact that, in a 1977 book on the role of literary study in Israel’s school curriculum, he offered a systematic evaluation of responses to Bialik’s poetry in Israel’s university-qualifying exams, or bagrut. He admitted it was inconceivable to imagine a high-school literature curriculum stripped of Bialik, but still insisted that the heavy reliance on him left a deep scar on Israel’s collective psyche. As proof he cited repeated mention in bagrut answers to questions about “In the City of Killing” of the cowardice of European Jews, of shock at their unwillingness to save their own lives, and of their succumbing to death much like a beaten pack of dogs.⁷⁴

Whether Bialik’s portrait of Kishinev’s Jews was historically accurate remains a source of controversy, but, even if it was, Peniel doubted the value of teaching contempt for Jews of the past, whose attitudes toward military matters were completely different from that of the new generation of Israeli schoolchildren. When teaching “In the City of Killing,” he described how he sought to soften its blow with a fuller portrait of Jewish life in the past. Short of this and unless—as he continued to insist—the poem was not sidelined in all of Israel’s schools, there remained the risk of rendering the country’s youth incapable of understanding anything about their immediate past. The poem had long left a pernicious residue, Peniel said, with its portrait of the intractability of gentile hatred and, above all, its targeting of Jewry’s exilic origins, the dreadful clay out of which Israel inexplicably emerged.

“True Russian Heroes.” Postcard with satirical drawing of Krushevan (left) alongside extreme nationalists V. Gringmut and V. Purishkevich.