Tamar Wolf-Monzon, Bahir vegavohah kezemer: Ya’akov Orland: poetikah, historiyah, tarbut (Ya’acov Orland: Poetics, History, Culture). Sdeh Boker: The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, 2016. 512 pp. + audio disc.

Ya’acov Orland (1914–2002), a young contemporary of the Israeli poets Avraham Shlonsky, Nathan Alterman, and Leah Goldberg, was a prolific and versatile poet, playwright, and translator, one among the first generation of creative artists whose entire output was produced in Mandatory Palestine and later, the state of Israel. Many of Orland’s highly musical poems were popular with those composers who created the magnificent repertory of popular Hebrew songs known as ...

The Tradition of no Tradition

This chapter explores the origins of Israeli comics, with a particular focus on three early women comics creators: Leah Goldberg, Friedel Stern, and Elisheva Nadal. It then explores the work of three influential artists from the 1970s-1980s: Dudu Geva, Uri Fink, and Michel Kichka. It then describes Modan's entry into comics, including her army service, her training at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, her first newspaper comics, and her short-lived editorship of Israeli Mad magazine.

The Return of Uri Cadduri and the Future of Israeli Comics

This chapter describes the establishment of Noah Books, a publishing imprint co-founded by Rutu Modan and Yirmi Pinkus to revivify classic Hebrew comics characters through new illustrations. It examines the imprint's first offering, Modan's new version of Uri Cadduri, one of the earliest Hebrew comics characters. It explores the history of Uri Cadduri, created by Arieh Navon and Leah Goldberg, and how Modan's version updates the character while preserving the 1930s Hebrew of the original.

Goldberg, Leah (1911–1970)

Leah Goldberg (1911–70) was a prolific modernist poet, novelist, playwright, translator, and literary critic. Born in Königsberg, Germany, Goldberg grew up in the Russian-speaking milieu of Kovno. Her early education was in Russian and German and she read widely in both languages. During World War I the family fled Kovno. Upon their return in 1918 Goldberg’s parents enrolled her in the Hebrew gymnasium and there she studied Hebrew and language and literature. In 1931 she traveled to Germany to begin graduate work in Semitic Studies in Berlin and later in Bonn, where she completed her doctorate. In Germany, Goldberg witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi rise to power—two historical events that haunt her work. In 1935, Goldberg immigrated to Mandatory Palestine and found a place for herself as a prominent member of the Moderna, a group of Hebrew modernist poets that included Avraham Shlonsky and Nathan Alterman, quickly establishing herself as an important intellectual and cultural figure of her generation. She played this role not only as a poet and writer, but also as a scholar. Goldberg taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she founded the Department of Comparative Literature.

Natasha Gordinsky, Bishloshah nofim: yetziratah hamukdemet shel Leah Goldberg (In Three Landscapes: Leah Goldberg’s Early Writings). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2016. 222 pp.

This chapter reviews the books Bishloshah nofim: yetziratah hamukdemet shel Leah Goldberg (In Three Landscapes: Leah Goldberg’s Early Writings) (2016), by Natasha Gordinsky, and Nesi’ah venesi’ah medumah: Leah Goldberg begermanyah 1930–1933 (Journey and Imaginary Journey: Leah Goldberg in Germany, 1930–1933) (2014), by Yfaat Weiss. Both In Three Landscapes and Journey and Imaginary Journey focus on the career of Leah Goldberg, a modernist poet, novelist, playwright, and literary critic, and the role she played in Hebrew culture from the 1940s onward. The books explore how Goldberg was shaped by her firsthand witnessing of the Nazi rise to power and how she grappled with the scope of Nazi genocide in its aftermath. They highlight Goldberg’s importance as a European and Hebrew intellectual, whose modernist and humanist commitments shaped the direction of Israeli letters in the second half of the twentieth century.

Anna Herman and the Goldberg Variations

The capacious first issue of ho! (), a prominent Israeli literary journal that debuted in 2005, included a seven-page questionnaire titled “Goldberg Variations” (), a pun on Bach's Goldberg Variations, a composition for the harpsichord. The purpose of the questionnaire was—and still is, if you choose to do it—to answer the question “Are you Leah Goldberg?” (), Goldberg being one of the major Hebrew poets of the twentieth century. The short epigraph that followed this question was two lines from the opening poem of her debut collection Smoke Rings (1935; ):