A moving inquiry into the dramatic life, epic success, and ultimate tragedy of the great Hebrew poet By the time he was twenty-eight, Hayim Nahman Bialik was already considered the National Hebrew Poet. He had only published a single collection, but his deeply personal poetry established a profound link between the secular and the traditional that would become paramount to a national Jewish identity in the twentieth century. When he died unexpectedly in 1934, the outpouring of grief was unprecedented, confirming him as a father figure for the Zionist movement in Palestine, and around the world. Using extensive research and elegant readings of Bialik’s poems, Avner Holtzman investigates the poet’s dramatic life, complex personality, beloved verse, and continued popularity. This clear-eyed and thorough biography explores how Bialik overcame intense personal struggles to become a charismatic literary leader at the core of modern Hebrew culture.

Chaim Nachman Bialik's epic response to the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom roars with with fresh urgency and rage in this dynamic literary translation by Jeffrey Burghauser, one of America's premier formalist poets.

"A mere forty poems, published in journals over the course of [a] decade and not yet assembled in a book, established [Bialik's] reputation in the community of Hebrew literature readers and spontaneously crowned him as the Hebrew national poet, all before he reached thirty..."--Cover.

Not in the Heavens traces the rise of Jewish secularism through the visionary writers and thinkers who led its development. Spanning the rich history of Judaism from the Bible to today, David Biale shows how the secular tradition these visionaries created is a uniquely Jewish one, and how the emergence of Jewish secularism was not merely a response to modernity but arose from forces long at play within Judaism itself. Biale explores how ancient Hebrew books like Job, Song of Songs, and Esther downplay or even exclude God altogether, and how Spinoza, inspired by medieval Jewish philosophy, recast the biblical God in the role of nature and stripped the Torah of its revelatory status to instead read scripture as a historical and cultural text. Biale examines the influential Jewish thinkers who followed in Spinoza's secularizing footsteps, such as Salomon Maimon, Heinrich Heine, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. He tells the stories of those who also took their cues from medieval Jewish mysticism in their revolts against tradition, including Hayim Nahman Bialik, Gershom Scholem, and Franz Kafka. And he looks at Zionists like David Ben-Gurion and other secular political thinkers who recast Israel and the Bible in modern terms of race, nationalism, and the state. Not in the Heavens demonstrates how these many Jewish paths to secularism were dependent, in complex and paradoxical ways, on the very religious traditions they were rejecting, and examines the legacy and meaning of Jewish secularism today.

Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934) is considered Israel's national poet and one of the greatest Hebrew poets of all time. Several of his poems, particularly his immensely popular children's verse, were set to music and proved to be among the most popular twentieth-century Hebrew songs. An essayist, storyteller, translator, and editor, he had a unique ability to use fully the entire linguistic and conceptual inventory of the Hebrew language. Bialik's career was a turning point in Hebrew literature, bringing Biblical Hebrew into a contemporary usage and forming the basis of its renewed vigor. His legacy remains embedded in modern Hebrew literature like an immovable foundation stone. Atar Hadari's new translation of Bialik's major poetry fills a long-standing gap in English letters.