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.”
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