Early life Shapiro was born to a religious
Jewish family in
Grodno, where he received a traditional
yeshiva education. Among his teachers was the Hebrew writer
Menahem Manus Bendetsohn. He began writing secular poetry in his youth, much to the consternation of his father, who used all means to prevent him from following the path of the
Haskalah. His parents married him off at the age of 15, but the marriage was shortly annulled. He eventually left his hometown for
Białystok and
Vienna, and from there to
St. Petersburg in 1868 to enter the
Academy of Art, which he left after a short time to learn photography. Shapiro fell gravely ill with
typhus, at which time he found out that his Russian girlfriend was pregnant. Fearing his imminent passing, he married her and was
baptised so that she and her baby would not be tainted. His deep sense of guilt for
converting to Christianity would later feature prominently in his writing.
Photography Shapiro became the personal photographer of many prominent Russian officials, including members of the royal family. He was a close friend of
Fyodor Dostoevsky, and also photographed
Leo Tolstoy,
Anton Chekhov,
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky,
Ivan Turgenev,
Ivan Goncharov, and other leading Russian writers. Shapiro recorded performances by Vasilii Andreev-Burlak for a photo series devoted to
Nikolai Gogol's short story
Diary of a Madman, published as an album in 1883. An early attempt to capture a performance sequence, each photograph corresponded to a moment in the context of the monologue. Shapiro's exhibitions at the
All-Russia Exhibitions of 1870 and 1882 were met with great approbation, and in 1880 his work appeared in the St. Petersburg Portrait Gallery of Russian Writers, Scientists and Actors. He was awarded a silver medal by Emperor
Alexander II in 1883.
Literary career In the 1870s, Shapiro began holding a regular
literary salon at his home and writing poetry for the
Hebrew papers and magazines. His first published poem, "Me-Ḥezyonot Bat 'Ammi" ("From the Visions of the Daughter of My People", 1884–1898), garnered him a place in the foremost rank of Hebrew poets. His poem, "David Melekh Yisrael Ḥay ve-Kayam" ("David, King of Israel Still Lives", 1884) is considered the first Hebrew poem to present popular traditions in a
folk ballad form. This type of poem was subsequently taken up by
David Frischmann,
Jacob Kahan, and
David Shimoni. Following the
1881–82 pogroms across the
Russian Empire, Shapiro became an avowed
Zionist and dreamed of going to
Eretz Israel. Shapiro's anthology
Mi-Shire Yeshurun ('From the Songs of Jeshurun', collected in 1911) contains his most famous poem, "" ('In the Fields of Bethlehem'), in which
Rachel grieves for her sons as she walks up from her grave toward a silent
Jordan River. It contains a section in which
Abraham,
Isaac,
Jacob and his sons, led by Rachel, all rise from their graves and urge God to end the
exile. The poem, set to music by
Hanina Karchevsky, became a popular anthem of
labour Zionism and the basis for a well-known
Israeli folk dance. Other poems of Shapiro include "Amarti Yesh Li Tikvah," a translation of
Friedrich Schiller's "
Resignation", and "Sodom", an allegorical description of the
Dreyfus affair. He also published "Turgenev ve-Sippuro
Ha-Yehudi", a critical essay on
Ivan Turgenev's story
The Jew, in
Ha-Melitz (1883).
Death and legacy Shapiro died in 1900 in St. Petersburg, leaving several tens of thousands of rubles to the
Odessa Committee, which supported Jewish settlements in
Palestine of the
First Aliyah. His poetry was collected in one volume and published posthumously in 1911 by Ya'akov Fichmann under the title
Shirim Nivḥarim. ==References==