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.
The book’s popularity was instantaneous. “It is an unfortunate thing that this book cannot be in the home of every Jewish family in this country,” declared the Independent Order, a periodical sponsored by the Jewish Masonic Lodge of the Free Sons of Israel; “It is likewise unfortunate that it cannot be in the home of every non-Jewish family.” The Jewish Publication Society of America soon reissued it under its own imprint, releasing several thousand additional copies of the book (produced originally by the publishing house A. S. Barnes) and arranging for copies to be sent to the president, vice president, members of Congress, and justices of the Supreme Court. So inspired was the society’s board, which boasted a rich array of American Jewry’s grandees, that despite the book’s support for Zionism—which upset many of them—it announced a plan to launch an entire series of new books built on the basis of Davitt’s spotlighting the terrible fate of Russia’s Jews. This effort would culminate with Simon Dubnow’s magisterial three-volume History of the Jews of Russia and Poland, published by the Jewish Publication Society of America between 1916 and 1920, still the most widely consulted work on the subject.11
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 sa
w 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
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