On the Slaughter

Bialik wrote “On the Slaughter” as an immediate reaction to news of the unprecedentedly brutal pogrom that erupted in April 1903 in Kishinev, a provincial city in imperial Russia’s Bessarabian reaches. He then traveled to Kishinev and spent five weeks taking detailed testimonies about the events from dozens of survivors, many of whom had witnessed the murder of family members and themselves been subjected to brutal physical and, often, sexual assault. In the summer of 1903, Bialik wrote his second and immediately famous poetic response to the Kishinev pogrom and what he had heard from the victims, “City of Killings.”