The Ashkenazi Revolution

122We find the contradictions not only in the poems of Bialik, which werewritten in succession one after the other, but even in different sections ofthe same poem. In his most important political poem, “In the City ofSlaughter" Bialik utters the famous words “And as you stretched yourhand, so will you stretch it, and as you have been wretched, so are youwretched” (translation from Israel Efros, ed. New York, 1948 translator).In these words, the poet is separated from the congregation of Israel andannounces under oath: “And now what do you have here son of man? Goflee to the wilderness….” Yet Bialik did not turn his back on thecongregation of the Jews and did not flee to the wilderness. At most, hefled to business, to the business of books and brokering loans. This greatpoem did not obligate Bialik to do anything. This great poem did not directany responsibility toward Bialik himself; he continued his life as if he hadnot written it. Moreover: There is the impression that all the great poetryof Bialik was for him, first and foremost, to free himself from theenchantment that the rabbinical world had planted within him and fromwhich he sought to liberate himself. These words of “The City ofSlaughter” were, for Bialik, words that he had a psychological need to writeduring certain days. After they were written, they had, for Bialik,transformed into a literary document that somebody else had written, andthat did not obligate Bialik himself at all. These were words that Bialikpassed over as an agenda of the day, that is to say, an agenda of his day.The fact that Bialik changed nothing at all in his own mundane life after hewrote “The City of Slaughter” is what elevated his fame among thereactionaries and the moderates in the Jewish street. He was the ideal“national poet” for them. The Ashkenazi People did not understand, andthe literary criticism even hid from it, that “The City of Slaughter” is not apoem of identity with the suffering of the people, but a poem ofdisassociation from this suffering. It should be noted that the Canaanitetrend that is present in Hebrew Literature is a direct continuation of paralleltrends that were expressed by the Enlightenment, and “Renaissance”authors of that period, first and foremost, this Canaanite trend nourisheditself from the thread of estrangement and the diabolical thread that isfound in the poems of Bialik.