Chaim Nachman Bialik
Chaim Nachman Bialik ( Hebrew חיים נחמן ביאליק, occasionally also: Chaim Nachum Bialik ; born January 9, 1873 in the village of Radin, near Zhitomir , Russian Empire ; died July 4, 1934 in Vienna ) was a Jewish poet, author and journalist who wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish . He is one of the most influential Hebrew poets and is considered a national poet in Israel .
Life
Bialik was born in a village in the Volyn countryside in Ukraine . After losing his father, a learned businessman, at the age of seven, he was raised in Shitomir by his grandfather, Jaakov Moshe Bialik, a strict representative of Orthodox Judaism . Here he received a traditional Jewish education, but also read works from European literature in German and Russian. As a 15-year-old he attended the famous yeshiva of Valoschyn . But under the influence of the Jewish Enlightenment movement Haskala , he gradually distanced himself from the principles proclaimed in the yeshiva.
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After the death of his grandfather, he married Mania Awerbuch in 1893. After a short stay in Sosnowiec , where he worked as a Hebrew teacher, he moved to Odessa in 1900 , where he lived until 1921. Here he joined the Chowewe Zion and made friends with Achad Ha'am , from whose cultural Zionism he was influenced. During this time he and other authors founded a Hebrew publishing house called Moriah , in which Hebrew classics and school books were published. He also translated Shakespeare's Julius Caesar , Schiller's Wilhelm Tell , Don Quichotte by Cervantes, poems by Heine and The Dybbuk by the Yiddish poet Salomon An-ski into Hebrew. In 1909 he traveled temporarily to Palestine for the first time.
With the help of Maxim Gorki , he was allowed to leave Soviet Russia in 1922 and moved from Odessa via Poland and Turkey to Berlin , where he founded the Hebrew publishing house Dwir , and shortly afterwards, on the advice of his doctor, to Bad Homburg vor der Höhe , where he lived for about two years . On March 26, 1924, he immigrated with his wife Mania to the then British mandate of Palestine ( Alija ) and settled in Tel Aviv , where he had an oriental-style villa built next to what was then the town hall. In it he held round tables and long meals with friends. The house, with its private library and study facing away from the street, also offered him the opportunity to retreat. Bialik was a very popular person in the community of the Yishuv . In 1934 he died of prostate cancer in Vienna after a failed operation and was buried in Tel Aviv in the Trumpeldor cemetery next to Achad Ha'am, who made the publication of Bialik's first poems possible. His house in Tel Aviv has been converted into a museum with the original furnishings.
Work and effect
Soon after Bialik's arrival in Odessa, his first poem, HaZipor , “The Bird”, was published, in which the longing for Zion , the “warm, beautiful land” is expressed. Occasion for Al haSchechitah , "On the slaughter", in which he calls heaven either to do justice immediately or to destroy the world, because retribution alone is not enough, as well as Be-Ir ha-Haregah , "In the city of killing" , were the pogroms in Kishinev between 1903 and 1906. The main theme in Bialik's poetry, however, is the conflict between religion and the Enlightenment (e.g. in Lavadi ). HaMatmid (“The [eternal] Talmudic student ”), written in 1898, testifies to his ambivalent feelings towards the Talmudic way of life: on the one hand, admiration for the devotion of the yeshiva students to their studies, on the other hand, contempt for their limited worldview. One of his most famous poems is Hachnisini tachat knafeech - “Take me under your wings”, a desperate prayer to the Shechina , who is addressed by the lyrical self as “mother and sister”.
Bialik's poems have been translated into around 30 languages and their settings are an integral part of Israeli culture . In comparison to today's Iwrit with Sephardic pronunciation, in which numerous words are stressed on the last syllable, the Ashkenazi pronunciation in Bialik's original version, in which the stress is often shifted to the penultimate syllable . Prose translations into English can be found in T. Carmi's anthology . The Bialik House in Tel Aviv, named after him, was built especially for him. Today it is a museum and cultural center with a 30,000 volume library.
Bialik was very active in public and traveled the world on Hebrew and Zionist affairs; In his later years his positive attitude towards Judaism grew and he became the founder of the popular Oneg Shabbat ("Sabbath joy"), these were spiritual and artistic celebrations introduced by Bialik in Palestine to organize the Sabbath day . Originally Oneg Shabbat had his own buildings in Tel Aviv.
Since 1933, the city council of Tel Aviv-Jaffa has awarded the Bialik Prize, named after him, annually for authors in the field of fiction and the science of Judaism .
Kirjat Bialik , a suburb of Haifa , is also named after him.
Works
- After the pogrom. From the Hebrew by Abraham Schwadron , Löwit, Vienna 1919.
- The Hebrew Book. In: Neue Jüdische Monatshefte , Vol. 4, Issue 2/4, October 25 / November 25, 1919, p. 25, July 10, 1917, pp. 25–35.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Rebecca Benhamou: Dictionnaire insolite de Tel Aviv . Ed .: Patrick Arfi, Vanessa Pignarre. Cosmopole, Paris 2015, ISBN 978-2-84630-093-3 , pp. 32 f .
literature
- Bialik, Hayyim Nahman. In: Encyclopaedia Judaica , 1972, Sp. 795-803
- Leo Baeck , Chajjim Nachman Bialik. An introduction to his life and work , 1935
- Gernot Wolfram, Birg mich - intercultural dialogue and Jewish identity with Paul Celan and Chajim N. Bialik , Frankfurt am Main etc. 2006
- Arianne Bendavid, Haïm Nahman Bialik: la prière égarée: biography , Croissy-Beaubourg: Éd. Aden, 2008
- Matthias Morgenstern : The Shekhina between Halacha and Aggada. Attempt on a poem by Ch. N. Bialik in conversation with Gershom Scholem . In: Bernd Janowski, Enno Edzard Popkes (ed.): The mystery of God's presence. On the traditional history of the Schechina concept in Judaism and Christianity (= scientific research on the New Testament ). Tübingen 2014, pp. 157–174.
- In the city of slaughter
- Jeffrey Kopstein: Kishinev . In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 3: He-Lu . Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02503-6 , pp. 357-362.
- To the bird
- Dan Miron : El ha-zippor . In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 2: Co-Ha . Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02502-9 , pp. 201-210.
Web links
- Literature by and about Chaim Nachman Bialik in the catalog of the German National Library
- Jewish Agency biography
- The poem Be-Ir ha-Haregah
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bialik, Chaim Nachman |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bialik, Chaim Nachman |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Poet, author and journalist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 9, 1873 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Radi (Zhitomir) |
| DATE OF DEATH | 4th July 1934 |
| Place of death | Vienna |