Bialik

During his lifetime, Chaim Nachman Bialik was hailed and the poet larueate of Jewish nationalism and was regarded as one of the major Jewish cultural influences of his age. He was seen as the poet of hope and revival in an age which witnessed the Russian Pale of Settlement, pogroms, the Russian Revoltuion, the rise of Zionim and of Hebrew as a living language. David Aberbach explores the historical, social and literary background to Bialik's rise a a Romantic-nationalist poet, his ambivalence to this national role, his obsession with intensely private themes and the interplay between the public figure and the confessional lyric poet. Aberbach shows how Bialik's poetry reveals a profoundly tortured inner life and how strongly he felt the inseparble links between his art and his life.

David Aberbach is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Studies at McGill University and Honorary Research Associate at the Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University. He took his D.Phil. at Oxford University and has held visiting fellowships at the Kennedy Centre for International Development, Harvard University, and the Department of International Development, London School of Economics. In addition to his books on leading modern Hebrew writers, including Bialik, Agnon, and Mendele Mocher Sefarim, David specialises in literature and social sciences and teaches courses in these areas at McGill. His other books include: 'Surviving Trauma: loss, literature and psychoanalysis'; 'Charisma in Politics', 'Religion and the Media'; 'National Poetry', 'Empires and War'; and, most recently, 'Literature and Poverty: from the Hebrew Bible to modern times'.