Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T10:20:04.280Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 5 - Haim Nahman Bialik: The National Poet’s Cup of Sorrows

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2023

Yosefa Raz
Affiliation:
University of Haifa, Israel
Get access

Summary

Reluctantly crowned the national poet of the nascent Jewish state at the beginning of the twentieth century, Haim Nahman Bialik – a poet, essayist, and editor who spent most of his life on the margins of the Russian Empire – wrote a series of influential poems of wrath in the prophetic mode famously read as the expression of a crisis of secularism. In Bialik’s most affecting prophetic poetry, the almost imperceptible “wobble” in his teacher Ahad Ha’am’s style turns into a great storm of doubt, rage, sorrow, fragmentation, and loss. If Ahad Ha’am tried to construct a strong prophetic spirit as an educational tool, Bialik paradoxically uses prophetic failure and weakness to summon and goad his audience into a new kind of subjectivity. Reading Bialik’s crisis of secularism in a new light, I argue for a weak prophecy common to both Bialik’s poems and the biblical text.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Poetics of Prophecy
Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition
, pp. 152 - 173
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×