The Complex Greatness of the Jewish National Poet, Part One

This essay is the seventh in a series by Hillel Halkin on seminal Hebrew writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The first six dealt with the novelists Joseph Perl, Avraham Mapu, and Peretz Smolenskin, the poet Yehudah Leib Gordon, the essayist and Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am, and the writer, journalist, and intellectual Micha Yosef Berdichevsky.

We present this essay in three consecutive parts. The second part appeared Wednesday, August 30, and the third and final part was published on Thursday, August 31.

In April 1903 a pogrom erupted in the city of Kishinev—today the Moldovan capital of Chişinău and then a largely Romanian-speaking town in the Russian province of Bessarabia, northwest of Odessa. When two days of rioting and pillage were ended by a tardy military intervention, 49 Jews had been murdered and many hundreds injured. Over a thousand Jewish homes and stores were looted and destroyed.