Selected Poems.
Protest Poems
Of Russian-Jewish Life
[Judaica]. Bialik, Chaim Nachman. Selected Poems. Translated from the Hebrew by Maurice Samuel. New York: The New Palestine, 1926.
8vo.; frontispiece photograph of the author, with a signature below (presumably the author’s); title page lightly offset from facing photograph, not affecting text; black cloth, stamped in gilt, covers lightly worn; previous owner’s bookplate with large Star of David on front pastedown; a handsome, bright copy.
First edition of this American publication of Bialik’s works. Bialik, a Russian Jew, had previously published in Hebrew and in Russian publications.
This volume of Selected Poems by Chaim Nachman Bialik is issued by The New Palestine on the occasion of Bialik’s first visit to this country. It has been the aim of the editor to make a thoroughly representative selection which would give a complete and satisfactory conception of Bialik’s poetic range….We feel that the present volume by the character of its translations and of the selections will serve as a worthy introduction to the singer of the Jewish Renaissance. (p. 4)
Four poets stand out in contemporary Hebrew literature as the flower of the Hebrew renaissance -- Bialik, Chernichowsky, Schnaiur and Cahan. Of these four, Bialik is universally acknowledged as constituting a class by himself. (p. 9)
Chaim Nachman Bialik was born in 1873 in the village of Radi, Volkyner Gubernia, Russia. After his father’s death Bialik was sent to live with his grandfather, “a stern, fanatical Jew of the old school” (from p. 15, Biographical Introduction). Bialik, under his grandfather’s tutelage, became a scholar of Hebrew studies and entered the Yeshibah at age thirteen. As an adult, Bialik settled in Odessa, where he became a printer by day and a poet by night, eventually publishing his poetry in periodicals and finally in books. Bialik’s printing business came to an end with the advent of the Bolshevik regime. After the Revolution, Bialik fled Russia and made his permanent residence in the region then called Palestine.
Bialik’s poems were special because of their subtle and lyrical quality and because Bialik’s subject of choice was the daily life of the Jew in Russia and the oppression that he faced. Using beautiful and elegant language, Bialik wrote of pogroms, of discrimination and of the grindingly hard life Jews around the world, but especially in Russia, were forced to deal with. This volume contains some of the finest examples of Bialik’s lyrical protest poetry, translated into English for the first time.
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