The Russians Have Pushkin, the Jews Have Bialik

A boy walks with his mother at night. Behind them looms the moon, impossibly huge. Trees stream by as if beamed from the headlights of passing cars, followed by the humps of shtetl houses and Jews at prayer in fur hats. As violins swell, the boy is borne forward upon a forest of Hebrew words.

With this animated sequence we enter “Bialik, King of the Jews,” a Hebrew-language film that can now be viewed with English subtitles. It is the third installment in a planned series of twelve documentaries by the Israeli director Yair Qedar, each devoted to a different figure in the history of Israeli literature. The first, a luminous treatment of the writer Lea Goldberg (1911-1970), was released in 2011, followed by a somber exploration of Yona Wallach (1944-1985), Israel’s favorite poetic rebel and lost soul. All three blend animation and music with commentary and archival footage to create powerful, distinct portraits.

Qedar’s broader project is to dramatize the fashioning of a national Jewish literature from its 19th-century East European roots to its flowering in the land and state of Israel, a literature rooted in the Hebrew tradition yet also secular and modern. And in this story, the towering inaugural figure is indisputably Haim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), both a pivotal force in the creation of modern Hebrew culture and himself one of its myths. In the words of the scholar (and Knesset member) Ruth Calderon in the film: “The British have Shakespeare, the Germans have Goethe, the Russians have Pushkin. The Jews have Bialik.”