PIJ.ORG: Illuminations By Leah Goldberg

Leah Goldberg
Lea Goldberg (1911-1970) was one of the most significant Israeli poets of the twentieth century, and the first woman to be admitted into the canon of modern Hebrew poetry. Born in Königsberg, raised in Kaunas, Lithuania, she learned Hebrew at the Hebrew gymnasium of the city. She completed a PhD degree at the University of Bonn with a dissertation on the Samaritan translation of the Hebrew Bible and arrived in Mandatory Palestine in 1935. She belonged to the leading group of modernist poets that flocked in Tel-Aviv in the 1930s and 1940s and worked as a drama and literature critic for socialist newspapers. In 1952 she was invited to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to teach comparative literature. Goldberg published poetry, prose, drama, essays, translations from several European languages and children’s literature, and has also been translated into many languages. This biography is based on The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present, Edited by S. Kaufman, G. Hasan-Rokem, and T. S. Hess, The Feminist Press 1999, p. 246.

The title of the poem is in English also in the original Hebrew poem. In the poem Goldberg expresses her feelings as a stranger to the country, occurring also in some of her other poems, here demonstrated by her ignorance of the name of the local bird, whereas she acknowledges the indigeneity of the Arab girl.

Above one of the hills
Flies an orange colored bird
Whose name I do not know.
But the olive trees know it,
The wind follows it and sings:
Here is your home.

In the eyes of an Arab girl
At the entrance to the demolished village
Dives an orange colored bird
Whose name I do not know.