Hayim Nahman Bailik was born in Russia to a traditional Jewish Family. When he was seventeen years old, he was sent to an academy in Lithuania called the Talmudic academy. There, he joined an Enlightenment movement and became a member of the Hovevei Zion group. He slowly began drifting away from his previous yeshiva (orthodox Jewish) life. At eighteen, Bailik left for Odessa, a city in modern-day Ukraine. There he began his involvement in Jewish literary. Bailik met a man by the name of Ahad Ha'am, who greatly influenced Bailik's Zionist views. Before becoming a full-time author and poet, Bailik worked as a bookkeeper in his father-in-law's business, a teacher, a publisher and translator, and finally was the literary editor a weekly publishing
