Hayim Nahman Bialik - Works and Influence

Works and Influence

Bialik wrote several different modes of poetry. He is perhaps most famous for his long, nationalistic poems, which call for a reawakening of the Jewish people. However no less effective are his passionate love poems, his personal verse or his nature poems. Last but not least, Bialik's songs for children are a staple of Israeli nursery life. From 1908 onwards, he wrote mostly prose.

By writing his works in Hebrew, Bialik contributed significantly to the revival of the Hebrew language, which before his days existed primarily as an ancient, scholarly tongue. His influence is felt deeply in all modern Hebrew literature. The generation of Hebrew language poets who followed in Bialik's footsteps, including Jacob Steinberg and Jacob Fichman, are called "the Bialik generation".

To this day, Bialik is recognized as Israel's national poet. Bialik House, his former home at 22 Bialik Street in Tel Aviv, has been converted into a museum, and functions as a center for literary events. The municipality of Tel Aviv awards the Bialik Prize in his honor. Kiryat Bialik, a suburb of Haifa, and Givat Hen, a moshav bordering the city of Raanana, are named after him. He is the only person to have two streets named after him in the same Israeli city - Bialik Street and Hen Boulevard in Tel Aviv. There is also a High School in Montreal, Quebec named Bialik High School,and a cross communal Jewish Zionist school in Melbourne called Bialik College, both named after him. In Caracas, Venezuela, the largest Jewish community school is named Herzl-Bialik.

Bialik's poems have been translated into at least 30 languages, and set to music as popular songs. These poems, and the songs based on them, have become an essential part of the education and culture of modern Israel.

Bialik wrote most of his poems using "Ashkenazi" pronunciation, while modern Israeli Hebrew uses the Sephardi pronunciation. Consequently, Bialik's poems are rarely recited in the meter in which they were written.