Performing the City of Slaughter

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of H.N. Bialik’s famous narrative poem, “In the City of Slaughter” and proposes that, in writing it, Bialik worked through the tension between poetry as performed speech and prose as language that is severed from a given context and must make up for it within discourse. Using Bialik’s later essays as her point of departure, the author situates the poet’s thinking about prose in relation to his peers (such as Mendele and Ahad Ha-Am) but also points out its relation to other texts, such as Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics and Lukacs’s Theory of the Novel. Her reading of the poem makes extensive reference to the published drafts for a report on the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 prepared by Bialik before he wrote the famous poem.