Poetry
In the City of Slaughter
בעיר ההרגה
Hayim Nahman Bialik · 1904
Synopsis
A voice, which turns out to be that of God, orders the poet to rise and set out for the city of slaughter. It leads him, station after station, through Kishinev in the aftermath of the pogrom: the courtyards where blood has dried on the fences, the attics where a mother and her child were killed, the cellars where women were raped while the men, hiding, prayed, the latrines and pigsties where others died, the cemetery, the synagogue of the survivors. At each station the world's indifference returns: the sun shines, the acacia blossoms, and the slaughterer slaughters.
Context
After the pogrom of April 1903, a commission from Odessa, at the initiative of the historian Simon Dubnow, sent Bialik to Kishinev to collect the testimonies of the survivors; he stayed there for several weeks. The poem appeared in 1904 in Ha-Zman, in Saint Petersburg, under the title Massa Nemirov, to deceive the censor, and cut by a few lines. Jabotinsky translated it into Russian at once, and the text pushed young Jews to organise self-defence groups.
Who it is for
A long poem in biblical Hebrew, translated into French under the title Dans la ville du massacre. It helps to know about the violence of 1903 against the Jews of Bessarabia.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the most influential Hebrew poem of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential Jewish text of that century.
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