This interesting book of English translations of the great Hebrew Poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik was published in London in 1924.
Chaim Nachman Bialik was born in Radi, in the Russian Empire in 1873. He wrote mainly in Hebrew and also in Yiddish, and is regarded as Israel’s national poet. He was brought up in Zhytomyr (Ukraine), where he received a traditional Jewish religious education, and at the age of 15 he convinced his grandfather to send him to the Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania, to study under Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin. However, attracted to the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) movement, Bialik drifted away from yeshiva life.
His first collection of poetry was published in Warsaw in 1901 and in 1903 Bialik was in Odessa to write a report after interviewing survivors of the Kishinev pogroms. Bialik’s literary career continued to grow as he moved from Odessa to Germany, to Tel Aviv and then he died in 1934 of a sudden heart attack (which I have written about here).
Two things caught my eye about this book. The first is that the introduction is an essay by none other than Vladimir Jabotinsky. He was the Revisionist Zionist leader, author, poet, orator, soldier, founder of the Jewish self-defence organization in Odessa and a major in the British army in the First World War. This introduction is reproduced in full below.
The second is that the editor is L. V. Snowman. Dr. Leonard Victor Snowman was a physician and mohel (Jewish ritual circumciser). He served the Initiation Society as medical officer for some 45 years and trained large numbers of future mohelim in their sacred calling. I have previously written about an early report of the activities of the Initiation Society, which lists Dr. Snowman’s grandfather as a subscriber. Dr. Snowman was surgeon-mohel to the London Jewish Hospital and Bearsted Memorial Hospital from 1931 to 1970. When I was born at the Bearsted, he was my mohel.
Jewish Miscellanies 