In the City of Slaughter
"In the City of Slaughter" is a Hebrew poem written in 1904 by Hayim Nahman Bialik about the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. Bialik had previously written the poem "On the Slaughter" in the direct aftermath of the pogrom.
History
The poem was first published under the title "Massa Nemirov" in the newspaper HaZman, edited by Ben-Tzion Katz, in the city of Petersburg. The change of title and the omission of several lines in the poem were necessary in order to gain the approval of the censor, the converted Jew Landau, for the publication of the poem. The change of the poem's title caused it to sound as if it were written about the pogrom in Nemirov that occurred during Khmelnytsky uprising in the 17th century, thereby disconnecting it from the specific historical context. The poem was translated into Russian by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, thus reaching a wider audience, including the Jewish public that does not read Hebrew.Poem
Excerpt from the poem "In the City of Slaughter", translated by Vladimir Jabotinsky.Impact
wrote that "Bialik's poem caused thousands of Jewish youths to cast off their pacifism and join the Russian underground to fight Czar and tyranny." Steven Zipperstein wrote that the poem is considered "the most influential" if not "the finest" "Jewish poem written since medieval times." Avner Holtzman believes that no other poem by Bialik made such an impression on his readers, whats "making it possibly the most important poem he ever composed".Michael Gluzman conducts a psychological analysis of the poem and shows how Bialik's past trauma erupted when he interviewed one of the rape victims in the pogrom, Rivka Schiff. This experience led him to write the harsh lines against Jewish men in his poem.