Abstract:

The poems of the Hebrew woman poet Lea Goldberg (1911-1970) are usually considered as symbolist and therefore detached from their time. Goldberg's poem book Al ha-Prikha (On Blossom, 1948) serves as a test-case to identify its references to history: the Second World War, the Holocaust and the independence of the state of Israel. By discovering the different 'urtexts' of the poems — their Russian, German and Italian sources of influence — the reader can understand Goldberg's own representation of her time. For example, she tends to read WW2 through the impressions of the Russian poets Alexander Blok and Osip Mandelstam from WW1 and the Russian revolutions. The different layers of Goldberg's palimpsest also portray her inclination towards two opposite mentors: the Hebrew poet Avraham Ben-Yitzhak (Sonne), who represented to her the German symbolistic poetry ('art for art's sake'), and on the other hand, another Avraham — the Hebrew poet Avraham Shlonsky, who believed in a more engaged poetry and was an ardent follower of the dominant modernist Russian poets. The 'Palimpsestical effect' of On Blossom poems is not only retrospective but also prospective: in their turn, the poems of this book were interwoven into Israeli culture and were integrated into some popular and literary works which correspond with them.