The poem in question pictures the tragedy of a woman who remained unhappy the rest of her life because the Hebrew bill of divorce which she had obtained from her husband was declared void on account of a trifling error in spelling.] [Footnote 3: The author alludes to Gordon's poem "_Tzidkiyyahu be-bet hapekuddot_" ("Zedekiah in Prison"), in which the defeated and blinded Judean ruler (see Jer.52.

11) bitterly complains of the evil effects of the prophetic doctrine.] The implication is obvious: the power of orthodoxy must be broken and Jewish life must be secularized.

But while unmasking the old, Gordon could not fail to perceive the sore spots in the new, "enlightened" generation.

He saw the flight of the educated youth from the Jewish camp, its ever-growing estrangement from the national tongue in which the poet uttered his songs, and a cry of anguish burst from his lips: "For Whom Do I Labor ?" [1] It seemed to him that the rising generation, detached from the fountain-head of Jewish culture, would no more be able to read the "Songs of Zion," and that the poet's rhymes were limited in their appeal to the last handful of the worshippers of the Hebrew Muse: [Footnote 1: Title of a poem by Gordon, _Lemi ani 'amel!_] Who knows, but I am the last singer of Zion, And you are the last who my songs understand.
These lines were penned on the threshold of the new era of the eighties.
The exponent of Jewish self-criticism lived to see not only the horrors of the pogroms but also the misty dawn of the national movement, and he could comfort himself with the conviction that he was destined to be the singer for more than one generation.
The question "For whom do I labor ?" was approached and solved in a different way by another writer, whose genius expanded with the increasing years of his long life.

During the first years of his activity, Shalom Jacob Abramovich (born in 1836) tried his strength in various fields.