Lea Goldberg
Authors: Yeglin Ofra 
Published: August 2024

The reputation of Lea Goldberg (b. 1911–d. 1970), in produced a wide-ranging literary corpus of over one hundred books published and republished, has long preceded the prominence of the first canonical female Hebrew poet, Rachel Blowstein (b. 1890–d. 1931), and challenges the centrality and standing of Israel`s national poet, Hayim Nahman Bialik (b. 1873–d. 1934). Lea Goldberg`s earliest Hebrew poems, diary notes, stories, and translations into Hebrew were produced in Kaunas, Lithuania, where she was raised. The ninety-eight books published during her short life span (poetry [9]; novels [2]; memoir [1]; theater plays [1]; poetry, stories, and a novel for children [25]; literary criticism [15]; translations of novels and collections of stories [12]; translations of theater plays [12]; and translations of literature for children [21]), and over seven hundred essays and articles, all date from the time she left Lithuania for Mandatory Palestine in 1935, at the age of twenty-four. From then, first, in Mandatory Palestine and, then, Israel, she led the life of an exceptionally talented and productive literary figure, roaming through an extremely wide variety of literary expressions and several professions (journalist, critic, editor, translator, and a professor of literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem). One supplementary book of poetry (2019), prose (2009, 2010) and drama (2011) were published long after her death, in addition to the publication of her complete diary (2005), letters (2009, 2016), journalistic articles (2017), unpublished poems (2019), and the collected children’s poems (2023). Official recognition of Goldberg’s contribution to Israeli culture was solidified by awarding her posthumously the state’s highest honor, the Israel Prize (1970), and with the issuing of postage stamps (Israel Postal Authority, 1984, 1991, 2012) as well as a banknote with her image (2017), adorned by a flowering almond tree and female rams in reference to some of her famous poems. Lea Goldberg’s oeuvre may be understood as the very embodiment of a trend in which a large group of Central and Eastern European Jewish writers born at the dawn of the twentieth century, or a decade or two later, abandoned the languages of their birth places (including Yiddish) and adopted Hebrew to take on the task of a national revival in the Middle East. In this context, Lea Goldberg represents an exceptional case: whereas there was a general tendency for identification with Socialist Zionism and with the cultural project of modernism (as an attempt to remove the chains of tradition), we have in Lea Goldberg the case of a cosmopolitan intellectual humanist imbued with European culture who delivers in Hebrew a more personal and classical expression of the cultural luggage she had amassed during her youth in Kaunas and adolescence in Berlin and Bonn (1930–1933). Her independent expression embedded in Hebrew poetry styles structures and echoes drown from the works of Francesco Petrarch, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Rainer Maria Rilke and her translations enriched the Hebrew reader with works written in Lithuanian, Russian, German, French, Italian, English, Greek, Latin, and Yiddish.