by Hayyim Nahman Bialik

Born in the Russian village of Radi in 1873, Hayyim Nahman Bialik was the son of an innkeeper who died when the boy was just seven years old. Bialik’s mother entrusted her youngest child to his paternal grandfather, who saw to it that the boy received rigorous instruction in Jewish law and tradition. At 16, Bialik entered a prestigious academy devoted to study of the Talmud (also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern Literatures and Their Times). A restless Bialik left the academy, which was located in Volozhin, in 1891. He traveled to Odessa, center of a burgeoning cultural movement in Hebrew letters and home to the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha`am. Bialik met the influential thinker and became one of several key disciples. The Jews, warned Ahad Ha`am, were headed for extinction unless they...