Leah Goldberg: A Life in 10 Facts

Leah Goldberg (1911–1970) was born in Königsberg, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia) and began writing Hebrew poetry as a child. She immigrated to Israel in 1935 – the same year her debut poetry collection, “Smoke Rings,” was published in Tel Aviv.

Goldberg’s childhood was marked by trauma. During World War I, her family fled the Lithuanian city of Kaunas into Russia, and upon their return, her father Abraham – a senior economist accused of communism – was tortured by Lithuanian White Army soldiers for some ten days. He never recovered, suffering a mental breakdown that left him estranged from his family. For the young Goldberg, this was a defining experience. It has been suggested she feared the hereditary mental illness that had claimed her father.

Goldberg earned her doctorate in Semitic linguistics from the University of Bonn, Germany, at just 22, writing her dissertation on the Samaritan dialect. In Israel, she joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the early 1950s and in 1960 she founded its Department of General and Comparative Literature, which she chaired until her death.

Goldberg played a key role in shaping Hebrew children’s literature, editing the weekly Davar LeYeladim children’s magazine and later serving as children’s books editor at the Sifriat HaPoalim publishing house. Though her diaries show she had written for children in her youth, she set aside works for that age group until her immigration in 1935, after which that became her central pursuit. She worked across fiction, poetry, and drama for children, and also wrote theoretical essays on the genre.

Goldberg was a member of Yachdav (“Together”), a Tel Aviv literary circle active from 1926 to 1939, whose ranks included Avraham Shlonsky (1900–1973), Nathan Alterman (1910–1970), Alexander Penn (1906–1972), and others. The group positioned itself as part of the European modernist movement, challenging what they saw as the outdated poetic establishment of Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) and Shaul Tchernichovsky (1875–1943). Their work combined elevated, Biblically inflected Hebrew with everyday imagery and was marked by strict formal attention to rhyme, meter, and structure. Many members, Goldberg among them, also had strong ties to theater and wrote for the stage.

Goldberg never married and had no children, living with her mother Tsila until her death. Her poetry is deeply personal, suffused with loneliness, sorrow, and longing for unattainable love – themes she also explored in her semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel “And This is the Light.” In 2011, The Toby Press released an English version of the novel, translated by Barbara Harshav.

Beyond her poetry, Goldberg wrote three novels for adults: “Letters from an Imaginary Journey” (1937), an autobiographical epistolary novel about parting from Europe and unrequited love; “And This is the Light” (1946), which draws on the trauma of her father's mental illness; and “Losses,” set in Berlin on the eve of the Nazi rise to power, which she hid during her lifetime and which was published posthumously in 2010, forty years after her death. She also wrote short stories, nonfiction, essays, and plays, among them “The Lady of the Castle,” which deals with the Holocaust.

A fluent polyglot, Goldberg translated poetry, plays and prose into Hebrew from Russian, Lithuanian, German, Italian, French, and English. She translated Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” as well as works by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Maxim Gorky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Rosa Luxemburg’s letters from jail, and numerous children’s books and reference works.

Though Goldberg came to see literature as her calling, her love of visual art ran just as deep. As a child, she showed a strong affinity for drawing, and her teenage diaries record a desire to become a painter – she even began studying at an art academy in Kaunas before family pressure steered her toward literature. Late in life, the old passion resurfaced: from 1964 onward, she painted and drew daily, later expanding into collage, and found in art a form of therapy during difficult periods, including her battle with cancer. In her final days the walls of her home became a canvas, covered in drawings that stretched to the far end of the room.

Goldberg, a lifelong smoker, died of lung cancer at the beginning of 1970, aged 58. The Israel Prize for Literature was awarded to her posthumously, accepted on her behalf by her mother Tsila – who outlived her by eleven years, and asked that her gravestone read: “Mother of the poet Leah Goldberg.”

For more, see Beit Avi Chai’s original production for kids, “The Girl Who Laughed in Her Sleep: A musical inspired by Leah Goldberg’s children’s poems.”

Main Photo: Leah Goldberg 1946\ Wikipedia