In Three Landscapes

This book explores a cultural project pursued by Lea Goldberg in the first decade after her immigration to Eretz-Israel. It argues that during this formative period in her literary biography, Goldberg’s writings addressed issues of cultural memory and cultural translation. The reason for this epistemic and aesthetic focus in her early work, as the book demonstrates, is to be found in Goldberg’s experience of immigration as well as in her deep sense of responsibility for the preservation of European culture endangered by the outbreak of World War II. The significance of this constitutive chapter in Goldberg’s œvre had been almost entirely overlooked by researchers to date.

The book presents a first systematic account of all of the channels of Goldberg’s literary activity in the first decade, novelistic writing, poetry, publicist and essayist writings, as well as of her translations, thus offering a new understanding of Lea Goldberg not only as a poet but also as a public intellectual. Furthermore, by interpreting her writings through the comparative lens and concentrating on Goldberg’s multi-layered dialogue with Russian and German literatures, the book suggests viewing her literary work within the frame of European modernism, which she sought to translate into the space of Hebrew literature. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s view of genres as “organs of memory”, each of the chapters focuses on a different genre in Goldberg’s writing and presents it as a conscious effort to realize in her Hebrew literary works the potential of European cultural memory.