“Eshkor! <<Autograph Manuscript Signed>> Birthday poem in honor of Bertha Rabinowitz-Kreidman.

This poem, called Eshkor! (Tribute!), written in Smolenskin’s fine hand, is addressed to the Hebrew writer Bertha Rabinowitz-Kreidman. It begins: “When you were born/ blessings were spawned…" . “[In her writings, Bertha] describes with painful cynicism the accepted feminine ideal of a pretty woman with no brains and the expected scornful reaction to her writings because she is a woman.” See Tova Cohen, Maskilot, Nineteenth Century, in: The Encyclopedia of Jewish Woman, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/maskilot-nineteenth-century. Bertha Rabinowitz-Kreidman died at just 22 years of age. Peretz Smolenskin (1840-85) the leading exponent of the Haskalah in Eastern Europe and an early advocate of Jewish nationalism, is best known for the important Hebrew monthly “HaShachar” which he founded in 1868 and edited until his death. In great measure, Smolenskin laid the foundations for the Zionist movement which gradually took shape in the following two decades. At the same time he anticipated the concept of a spiritual center, which was later to be argued so forcibly by Achad Ha’Am. Smolenskin’s percipience may be discerned in the repeated warnings expressed, in both his articles and stories, that the pogroms in Russia and the anti-Semitism in Germany were no temporary aberrations, but merely the first manifestations of worse horrors to come. He foresaw danger threatening the entire people, and maintained that only Eretz Israel could offer a real refuge, where all the peoples of the Jewish Exile could be gathered into a single nation.