In the City of Slaughter

"In the City of Slaughter" (Hebrew: בעיר ההרגה) is a Hebrew poem written in 1904 by Hayim Nahman Bialik about the 1903 Kishinev pogrom.^[1]

In the City of Slaughter
by Hayim Nahman Bialik
Original title	בעיר ההרגה
Written	1904

Max Dimont 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."^[2] Steven Zipperstein wrote that the poem is considered "the most influential" if not "the finest" "Jewish poem written since medieval times."^[3]

…Get up and walk through the city of the massacre,
And with your hand touch and lock your eyes
On the cooled brain and clots of blood
Dried on tree trunks, rocks, and fences; it is they.
Go to the ruins, to the gaping breaches,
To walls and hearths, shattered as though by thunder:
Concealing the blackness of a naked brick,
A crowbar has embedded itself deeply, like a crushing crowbar,
And those holes are like black wounds,
For which there is no healing or doctor.
Take a step, and your footstep will sink: you have placed your foot in fluff,
Into fragments of utensils, into rags, into shreds of books:
Bit by bit they were amassed through arduous labor—and in a flash,
Everything is destroyed…
And you will come out into the road—
Acacias are blooming and pouring their aroma,
And their blooms are like fluff, and they smell as though of blood.
And their sweet fumes will enter your breast, as though deliberately,
Beckoning you to springtime, and to life, and to health;
And the dear little sun warms and, teasing your grief,
Splinters of broken glass burn with a diamond fire—
God sent everything at once, everyone feasted together:
The sun, and the spring, and the red massacre!

Excerpt from the poem "In the City of Slaughter", translated by Vladimir Jabotinsky^[4]

References

1. "Dependence days: In the shadow of Kishinev". The Jerusalem Post. May 4, 2014.
2. Max Dimont, Jews, God, and History, Simon and Schuster, 7th printing, 1962, p. 347
3. Zipperstein, Steven J. (2018). Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. Liveright. ISBN 9781631492709.
4. "Hayim Nahman Bialik—the National Jewish poet who spent his childhood in Zhytomyr". UJE - Ukrainian Jewish Encounter. 13 March 2018. Retrieved 5 June 2022.