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AS THE ACCUMULATED BODY of research on "In the City of Slaughter" demonstrates, and as the deliberations of the 2003 conference "Kishinev and the Twentieth Century" tended to confirm, it is by now quite a matter of fact to conceive of Bialik's poem as an unreliable and, to a certain extent, invalid testimony to the Jewish response to the Kishinev pogrom (see, for example, Goren 1991: 36-47). Whether attributed to the voice of an omnipotent furious God, profoundly disappointed by His people's alleged disgraceful passivity, or to a self-annihilating God, testifying to His own collapse of power, Bialik's narrative avoids any reference to the acts of heroism and self-defense that apparently did take place during the 1903 riots and chooses to blur the circumstances that possibly worked against any chances of such acts bearing significant outcomes.1
The frequent references to this aspect of the poem attempt to explain it in terms of the political and psychological dynamics to which the poet is assumed to have been subjected during his mission to Kishinev. It has been suggested that Bialik was particularly influenced by the openly declared activist agenda of the Odessa Historical Committee, which sent him to the site of the atrocities: namely, to use the pogrom and its grave outcome as a trigger for change in the reaction of Eastern European Jewry to its deteriorating political position (Goren 1991: 16-44; Gluzman 2003: 113). Indeed, as Anita Shapira has shown, the historical appraisal of the poem's outstanding influence on Jewish public discourse demonstrates such an effect to have been obviously produced (Shapira 2005, in present issue). In terms of the poet's own emotional stance, it may well be assumed that the humiliating situations recounted by the victims aroused in him deep and possibly unconscious anxieties, which may also account for his poetic response to it.
Read from this twofold interpretive perspective, "In the City of Slaughter" may thus be conceived of as a representation of a contexture of interests and motivations: the aggressive response of the poem's narrator, who becomes a "hostile witness" to the victims' conduct during the events of the pogrom, is both a political manipulation and an expression of an eruption of threatening effects. Michael Gluzman provides evidence to such an eruption by...