Whoever said that silence is the only proper response to Jewish catastrophe knew little about the power of poetry. Theodor Adorno, who wrote that "After Auschwitz writing poetry is barbaric," subsequently admitted that "perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream."

If we are to judge by the century-long "success"-both poetic and psychological-of Chaim Nachman Bialik's poem, Al ha-Shehitah, written in reaction to the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, then the truly great response to such calamity is much more controlled than screaming; it is organized anger, an anger that does not shy from esthetics to indict the divine, the human, and creation itself.

Exactly one hundred years ago this Easter, the populace of the Russian town of Kishinev, with the tacit approval of the government, acting on a conventional blood libel rumor having to do with murdering a Christian child for blood for baking matzot, carried on a barbaric pogrom involving killing, wounding, and destroying. Bialik was sent to Kishinev to write a report. Instead, he came back with this haunting poem.

The poem is divided into four stanzas of seven verses each. Each stanza has the rhyme scheme of a truncated sonnet: abbacdc. Each stanza has neither more nor less than two exclamation points.

In the first stanza, the poet turns to Heaven-not to pray but to be prayed for. (1) Heavens, You ask for pity for me! (2) If there is a God among you and if that God has a path-(3) and I haven't found it-(4) You pray for me! Blasphemy is the least of the poet's controlled but uncontrollable impulses here. Not only has the poet lost his faith in the existence of a God who can permit such a slaughter, but, unlike countless Jewish non-believers, he is even unable to pray to the God in whom in he no longer believes. (5) I √ my heart is dead and there is no longer any prayer left on my lips. (6) and already utter helplessness, there is no hope any longer. (7) How long? How far? How long? Notice how, in this first stanza, the poet, despite his inability to pray, achieves the lyricism of prayer with the repetition of the sounds of the Hebrew letters mem and nun, sounds that express both anger and despair and that are repeated throughout the poem.

If the first stanza strikes a personal note, the second stanza seems to be speaking for the Jewish people as a whole-those who have given themselves up for slaughter, who have resigned themselves to their fate. (8) Hey, executioner! Here's a neck √Just come on up for the slaughter! (9) Slaughter me like a dog, you have the strong arm attached to the axe. (10) For me the whole world is a gallows. (11) And we-we are a small minority! The anger here is not directed at the murderer. Rather, moving from the "I" to the "We," (even when saying "I" the poet here means "We") Bialik laments that Jewish vulnerability is the way things are. (12) Our blood is allowable-smash our skull, and the blood of the murdered will spurt out, (13) the blood of children at the breast and breastless old women will spurt onto your shirt, (14) and it will never be eradicated, never.

And because Bialik finally realizes that the murderer has a price to pay-an eternal stain that thanks to his poem the world will never be able to launder away, the poet finally has something to ask for, if not to pray for: Justice. And yet, his "prayer," not at all certain of the existence of Justice, comes accompanied by a further blasphemy: a curse of God. (15) And if there is justice-let it appear immediately! (16) Even if, as soon as I will be made to disappear from the horizon, (17) Justice does appear, (18) may His throne be destroyed forever! (19) and in eternal evil may the Heavens rot (20) and may You, Wicked Ones, even You, in this your violence, (21) may You wallow in your blood till it cleanse you.

And the poet closes with a curse good for all times and all places. No, it is not a curse of God, or even of Satan (even though it ascribes to Satan a surprisingly creative power, using the word bara, usually reserved for God), It is a curse of the person in the street. There are those who think that human vengeance is somehow enough to wipe away the evil done by the perpetrators of the pogrom at Kishinev. By extension, this stanza addresses all of the murderous actions taken at any time in the past or in the future (and therefore also in today's present) against the Jews. (22) And cursed be he who says "Avenge!" (23) A vengeance like this, revenge for the blood of a little child, (24) Satan himself has not yet created. It is not here a question of God being able to create such a vengeance. This is relegated only to the Devil because if we adopt this vengeance, Satan has succeeded in making us like "them."

And since there is no role for vengeance in reaction to the pogrom at Kishinev, there is left only the elemental darkness, the darkness (and with it the chaos) that preceded the creation of the world. To express this, Bialik, in the final stanze, has to go back to the Book of Genesis to find the appropriate vocabulary, the primordial tehom. (25) And let the blood break through the bottomless depths! (26) Let the blood break through the dark of the depths, (27) and let it eat away the dark and let it undermine there (28) all the rotten foundations of the earth. And so we see that the return to Genesis, to the beginning of the world, is the same as the destruction of the world. That is all that is left to the poet who refuses human vengeance.

Is this a tortured man's scream? Or is it the hopelessness of a poet who, using his art, has transcended despair?