The Life, Work, and Legacy of Israel’s Most Beloved Poet

This is the ninth essay by Hillel Halkin in his series on seminal Hebrew writers of the 19th and early-20th centuries. The preceding eight essays have dealt with the novelists Joseph Perl, Avraham Mapu, Peretz Smolenskin, and Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner, the poets Yehudah Leib Gordon and Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, the essayists and Zionist thinkers Ahad Ha’am and A.D. Gordon, and the writer, journalist, and intellectual Micha Yosef Berdichevsky.

Bearing a dedication to the Zionist thinker A.D. Gordon and entitled “State of Mind,” it was Raḥél Bluvshtayn’s first published Hebrew poem:

The day grew dark
And faded from on high.
A dull gold ringed
The mountains and the sky.

Black stretched the fields around me,
Black and still.
Far ran my dreary,
Solitary trail.

And yet I would not challenge fate,
Tyrant though it is.
Whatever comes I’ll greet with joy,
With thankfulness.