Leah Goldberg

Goldberg was born on May 29, 1911, in Königsberg, then in East Prussia and now called Kaliningrad, to Tzila and Abraham Goldberg.[6] Her parents moved with her to Kovno, Lithuania, where her father worked as an economist for an insurance company.[6] Kovno, also known as Kaunas, became the principal setting of her upbringing before her university studies in Germany and eventual immigration to the Land of Israel.[3][7]

During World War I, Goldberg’s family was exiled to Russia and returned to Lithuania after the war.[1] On the journey home, her father was arrested and subsequently suffered an emotional breakdown. He later left the family home and was hospitalized intermittently, leaving Goldberg and her mother to continue their lives without him.[1]

She attended a Jewish high school in Kaunas and subsequently studied German and Russian literature and Semitics at Kaunas University.[1] Poetry began early in her life: she wrote in both Russian and Hebrew as a young person and was publishing Hebrew poems before adulthood.[3][1] Her first published poem appeared in the periodical Hed Lita in 1926.[7] Her education thus brought together Hebrew literary activity, Russian and German literature, and the study of Semitic languages before she established herself as a professional writer.[1]

Goldberg went to Berlin and Bonn in 1930 and earned her doctorate at Bonn in 1933.[1][4] Her German-language dissertation compared medieval manuscript sources for Onkelos’s Aramaic translation of the Jewish Torah with Aramaic translations of the Samaritan Torah.[8] Her supervisor, Paul Kahle, selected the subject, and during her studies at Bonn in 1932–1933 she worked with photocopies of Samaritan manuscripts obtained from Cambridge and other collections.[8] The dissertation’s textual and linguistic research preceded the comparative-literature teaching and scholarship that later became a major part of her career.[8][4]

In the early 1930s, Goldberg became a leading member of Petaḥ, also rendered P’tach, a circle of young Lithuanian Hebrew poets.[3][7] The group established a publishing house and the literary journals Petaḥ in 1932 and Pa‘am in 1933.[7] Its members opposed what they regarded as an established nationalist, patriotic, and positivist literary line and maintained contact with the Ketuvim group in Palestine, led by Abraham Shlonsky.[7] Goldberg published poems in magazines and in Pa‘am before leaving Europe.[3]

After her studies, she returned to Lithuania, taught literature, and continued writing.[9] Her teaching included work at the Hebrew gymnasium in Raseiniai.[9] An early prose story appeared in a Hebrew periodical in Kovno in 1934, and she wrote the novella Letters from an Imaginary Journey while awaiting permission to immigrate.[10] She moved to Tel Aviv in 1935, and her mother joined her the following year.[3]

Goldberg’s first poetry collection, Smoke Rings (Taba’ot Ashan), appeared in Tel Aviv in 1935, the year of her immigration.[3][11] She had written its poems during her student years in Europe and sent the manuscript to Abraham Shlonsky for editing while she was still abroad.[11] Shlonsky surprised her by publishing the collection as a book to mark her arrival in the country.[11] In the same year, she joined Yahdav, the literary group associated with Shlonsky and Nathan Alterman.[9]

The poems of Smoke Rings used urban European settings and explored loneliness, melancholy, and longing for love that proved unfulfilled or fleeting.[11] Their personal emotional world also carried a universal dimension, although the book initially received a cool critical response because it differed from prevailing Hebrew literary taste.[11] Several poems, including “White Days” and “To Mother’s Portrait,” subsequently became widely known and loved.[11] “White Days” had been written in Bonn in 1932, when Goldberg was twenty-one, and first appeared in Petaḥ.[5]

Her early poetry was lyrical and modernist, but her subject matter and style changed over time.[3] In her next collection, commonly translated as Green-Eyed Spike or A Green-Eyed Ear of Grain, attention shifted toward nature and away from the self.[3] Her poetry of the 1930s and 1940s developed a poetics of everyday experience and was closer to Russian Acmeism than to the Russian-symbolist influence shared by some of her associates.[7] Precision, familiar language, and traditional verse forms remained important features of her work, alongside a resistance to ornate rhetoric and bombast.[7][4]

Goldberg’s writing during World War II repeatedly returned to the Eastern European Jewish world being destroyed by the Nazis.[3] From My Old Home (1942) presented autobiographical vignettes of rural Lithuanian life before the Holocaust.[4] Her poems of the 1940s paid tribute to the Eastern Europe of her childhood, while those of the following decade increasingly explored creativity, love, and silence.[1] These concerns were particularly prominent in the 1955 collection Morning Lightning.[1] Other collections included Song in the Villages, On the Blossoming, and With This Night.[9]

After arriving in the country, Goldberg joined the newspaper Davar and became deputy editor of its children’s publication, Davar la-Yeladim, a role she held for about a decade.[12] Her work as associate editor began in 1936.[13] The weekly was published by the Histadrut’s official newspaper and was a leading Hebrew publication for children.[13] At an editor’s request, Goldberg wrote her first children’s poem for the paper, “Pili ha-katan” (“Little Pili”), during her first week there.[12]

Her contributions to children’s periodicals extended beyond poems and stories to translations, essays, literary criticism for young readers, and comic strips.[13] Seasons, nature, and everyday life in the developing Hebrew community supplied subjects for her children’s verse.[12] This work took shape amid the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, the outbreak of World War II, and the 1939 MacDonald White Paper, events that affected Jewish communal life and the educational and literary fields.[13] Goldberg emphasized aesthetic and humanistic values, seeing poetry as a means of reminding readers what was important and beautiful; her children’s writing gradually changed as the European war intensified.[13]

One of her best-known children’s books, Dira LeHaskir (A Flat for Rent), contains three stories.[10] Its central story first appeared in Mishmar la-Yeladim in October 1948, and the book was subsequently translated into several languages.[10] Her other children’s titles included Ayeh Pluto, Nisim ve-Nifla’ot (Miracles and Wonders), The Magic Hat, and My Friends from Arnon Street, identified as her first children’s book.[10][9] She also wrote What Do the Does Do? and The Absent-Minded Man from Kfar Azar.[9]

Goldberg collaborated with photographer Anna Riwkin-Brick on children’s books including The Little Queen of Sheba, Adventure in the Desert, and Eli Lives in Israel.[4] Her engagement with young readers also included visits to kindergartens and schools.[14] She preserved letters sent to her by children and teachers, alongside the extensive correspondence generated by her other literary and professional relationships.[14] Her work for children therefore included original writing, editorial activity, collaboration, and direct contact with its audience.[12][14]

Her prose developed alongside her poetry and journalism rather than replacing them.[10] About two months after World War II began, Davar la-Yeladim published “Eretz ha-Pla’ot” (“Wonderland”), a story drawing on a childhood experience during World War I.[10] Around the same time, she wrote “Ve-eleh yemei Stefan Gert,” an early artistic response to World War II that remained unpublished for decades and first appeared in 2009.[10] Another work, the novel Avedot, was written in the second half of the 1930s and reflected developments preceding the war, but did not appear in print until 2010.[10]

Her partly autobiographical novel Ve-hu ha-or, translated as It Is the Light or And This Is the Light, appeared in 1946.[10][4] Set in a Lithuanian town during the summer of 1931, it follows Nora Krieger, who returns home from studies in Berlin and confronts a frightening adult world.[4] The protagonist faces a choice between confronting reality and seeking escape through madness.[4] Goldberg later wrote the personal book Meeting a Poet about Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, also known as Soné.[10]

Theater formed another substantial part of her working life.[4][1] She served as a literary adviser to Habimah, lectured on theater history at its theater school, and advised the troupe.[4][1] She also worked as a drama and literary critic for Davar and later joined Ha-Mishmar.[4] Her newspaper work included contributions to Davar, Mishmar, and Mishmar la-Yeladim.[9] In addition to her work for Davar la-Yeladim, she edited Orim Ketan’im, a periodical for children in the Diaspora.[9]

Her play Lady of the Castle premiered at the Cameri Theater in September 1955.[8] Set in a castle in a European forest, it brings together two Zionist emissaries from the Land of Israel: a Youth Aliyah representative seeking children who survived the Holocaust and a librarian charged with recovering books stolen by the Nazis.[8] They encounter a young Jewish girl and try to persuade her to come to Israel.[8] A long-forgotten children’s song helps the young protagonist face reality, linking the play’s treatment of recovery to the emotional struggle also present in It Is the Light.[4]

Goldberg devoted substantial time to translating European literature into Hebrew, especially from German, French, and Russian.[9] Her translations included Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Molière’s The School for Wives, and Aucassin and Nicolette.[9] She also translated works by Chekhov, Dante, Petrarch, and Pushkin.[4][1] Alongside translation, she worked with Shlonsky as an editor and served as an editor for the publishing house Sifriyat Poalim.[1] Literary criticism, interpretation, and comparative-literature scholarship accompanied these activities throughout her career.[9]

In 1950, Goldberg moved to Jerusalem with her mother after receiving an offer to teach at the Hebrew University.[6] She became a lecturer and researcher there during the 1950s and later headed its Department of General and Comparative Literature.[15][6] Her university work combined teaching and research with continued poetry, fiction, translation, and visual art.[6] Painting was another of her artistic practices, extending a creative life otherwise dominated by language and literature.[6][9]

Her early dissertation also had an unusual history after her departure from Germany.[8] Bonn’s Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies printed and distributed the study after her immigration in 1935.[8] A surviving copy bears stamps and the serial number T552 from the Nazi Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Munich, whose library incorporated books looted from Jewish collections.[8] American forces transferred the institute’s looted books to the Offenbach warehouse in 1947, where the thesis received another stamp.[8]

In 1949, Jewish Cultural Reconstruction representatives helped distribute books remaining from the postwar recovery effort.[8] The Hebrew University’s committee for salvaging Diaspora treasures participated in selecting materials, and the dissertation copy eventually reached the National Library through that process.[8] The surviving object thus connects Goldberg’s prewar scholarship with the recovery of Jewish books after the Holocaust, a subject also present in the librarian’s mission in Lady of the Castle.[8]

Goldberg’s correspondence with the poet Tuvia Rübner extended for roughly twenty years, from the late 1940s until 1969.[16] About eighty previously unpublished letters were made public in 2014.[16] They discuss current affairs, her own writing, and cultural figures including S. Y. Agnon and Marc Chagall, and contain drawings, greetings, and invitations.[16] In one letter, she recounted that shrapnel damaged the Jerusalem home she shared with her mother during the 1967 war; neither woman had gone to a shelter.[16]

In her final years and even her last days, Goldberg continued writing the poems later published posthumously as On the Surface of Silence.[17] These poems are formally bold and lyrically distilled, often fragmentary, with the unspoken playing an important role.[17] The original volume was edited by Tuvia Rübner and interspersed with Goldberg’s drawings.[17] A review in the Jewish Review of Books interprets these final poems as a movement away from traditional forms toward a pared-down style that made her persistent theme of existential solitude especially stark.[18]

Goldberg never married or had children and continued to share her life with her mother.[1][14] She died of cancer in Jerusalem on January 15, 1970.[4][14] Her mother accepted the Israel Prize for literature awarded to her posthumously that year.[14] Her death followed decades in which poetry, children’s literature, scholarship, translation, editing, and teaching had remained concurrent rather than separate pursuits.[1]

Goldberg received the Israel Prize for literature posthumously in 1970, following New York University’s Irving and Bertha Neuman Literary Prize in 1969.[1][4] The Israel Prize jury praised the craftsmanship with which her poetry expressed states of mind and visual experience, placing it among the finest lyrical and artistic achievements of its generation.[19] Her poems were collected in three volumes in 1973.[9]

Her literary estate reflects both the scale of her production and the variety of her working methods.[15][2] Approximately 700 lyrical poems and 250 children’s poems sit alongside three novels, around thirty short stories, plays, translations, hundreds of articles and research notes, literary criticism, and scholarship.[2] She published dozens of books across different genres.[2] The archival collection contains manuscripts, correspondence, drawings, and other materials, with holdings covering 1929–1989 in Hebrew, German, English, and Russian.[15]

Goldberg belonged to a small group of women who began writing Hebrew poetry after World War I, during the period when the Zionist revolution was beginning to materialize.[1] Their emergence introduced women’s poetic voices into a modern Hebrew literary tradition that had been composed by men since the late eighteenth century.[1] Her influence extended beyond her own writing to her role in the lives of younger poets.[20] A recording made at Shlonsky’s home on February 14, 1970, brought together Shlonsky, Dan Pagis, T. Carmi, and Tuvia Rübner to discuss her work about a month after her death.[20] Their recollections describe encouragement coupled with demanding, candid criticism of younger writers’ work.[20]

Many of Goldberg’s poems were set to music and became popular songs, extending their circulation beyond printed collections.[1] Her mature poetry combined a conversational style and familiar language with traditional forms and intimate subjects.[4][18] Memories of European life and the Holocaust’s impact on her generation remained important parts of her work.[3][1] The Jewish Review of Books reads her poetic voice as intimate and conversational rather than modeled on the public, prophetic stance favored by many male contemporaries.[18]

Her recognition in Israeli public life includes her selection in 2011 as one of four poets to appear on the country’s currency.[3] Lines from “White Days” appear on Israel’s 100-new-shekel banknote.[5] The original handwritten manuscript of “White Days” was located in the Gnazim Institute archive and displayed in an exhibition.[5] A line from her poem “The Tree” is engraved on the central stone of David Palombo’s Eternal Flame monument at the entrance to the Knesset building.[9]

In September 1939, a week after World War II began, Goldberg published an essay in Ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir arguing that poets must not forget life’s real values during wartime and that writing a love poem was not merely permissible but necessary.[20] Shlonsky, Alterman, and other members of Yahdav criticized her position, producing a dispute intense enough to divide the group.[20] The disagreement concerned poetry’s obligations during war and the relationship between immediate public events and the preservation of human values.[20]

Her intimate subject matter also attracted criticism from influential contemporaries.[1] Nathan Zach’s 1959 criticism focused on what he regarded as a repeated preoccupation with the torment of unrequited love, while some critics dismissed her as a “poet of the broken heart.”[1] The Jewish Review of Books recounts Dan Miron’s 1960 criticisms of her poems’ conceptual and structural limitations, while arguing for a different appreciation of her conversational voice.[18] These judgments represent disagreements over her poetic achievement rather than descriptions of the full range of her work.[1][18]