“Memory of a vague longing”: reflective nostalgia in Lea Goldberg’s wartime poetry

^†In Memory of Svetlana Boym

ABSTRACT

Among the modern Hebrew poets, Lea Goldberg is perhaps one of the few who not only wrote nostalgic poems about the homeland that was left behind and destroyed in the Second World War and the Holocaust, but was also aware of the historicity of her own nostalgic discourse. While explicitly acknowledging the permanence of the absence of the past, she reflected on the meaning and even the legitimacy of nostalgia in her writing. Building on contemporary theories of nostalgia, this essay traces the development of a nostalgic discourse in Lea Goldberg’s lesser known poems written between the years 1939 and 1945. It argues that Goldberg’s nostalgic poems composed during the Second World War should be divided into two periods: from 1940 to 1942 and from 1943 to 1945. It suggests understanding the crucial poetic difference between the nostalgic modes present in each period through the prism of recent theories of nostalgia. Such a hermeneutic approach enables us to reveal the moulding of nostalgia as a “regime of seeing” in Goldberg’s wartime poetry.

KEYWORDS:

• Lea Goldberg
• Hebrew poetry
• memory and nostalgia
• Second World War
• representation of holocaust

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Glenda Abramson for her careful reading of my manuscript and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Natasha Gordinsky is a Lecturer in the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature and co-head of the Programme for Philosophy and Literature at the University of Haifa. In 2009 she published a book together with Susanne Zepp on Jewish belonging in contemporary European fiction with the title: Kanon und Diskurs.Über Literarisierung jüdischer Erfahrungswelten. Her book In Three Landscapes: Lea Goldberg’s Early Writings is in print with Magnes University Press

Notes

^†In Memory of Svetlana Boym

1. On the reasons for her self-censorship of the early poems which were heavily underrepresented in this collection, see Miron (2004, 334–354).

2. For a well-informed summary of the different perspectives on nostalgia, see Arnold-de Simine (2013, 54–61).

3. On the development of the nostalgic discourse in her novel Vehu ha’or, see Gordinsky (2012, 455–464).

4. Unless otherwise indicated all translations are mine, and they should be viewed merely as “working translations.”

5. It seems that at the same time Goldberg is also evoking the tradition of Yizkor literature written in the 1920s in Eastern Europe under the impact of the pogroms, on the subject, see (Mintz 1984, 109–154).

6. By choosing a poetic form that echoes in a certain way the generic conventions of romantic verse tales as well as Kunstvolkslied, that of Pushkin on the one hand and of Bialik on the other, Goldberg also evokes on a poetic level the vanishing of a whole literary world.

7. See, for example, the first letter in Goldberg’s epistolary novel Mikhtavim minesi`ah meduma (1937) (Letters from an Imaginary Journey) written by the extra-diagetic narrator L. which declares that her main protagonist, Ruth, is not a sentimental young woman, whereas, Ruth inserts in her letters sentimental passages. On Goldberg’s usage of sentimental discourse in her literary and public writings, see Gordinsky, Ben Zmanim (forthcoming).

8. On the influence of this traumatic experience on Goldberg’s literary world and her cultural standpoint, see Hirschfeld (2000).

9. See Weiss (2007).

10. Quoted in Starobinski and Kemp (1966, 94).

11. Quoted from the translation of Rabi David Mevorach Seidenberg https://Neow.Hasid.org/

12. In the seminal study of responses to catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, Alan Mintz devotes a whole chapter to the rhetoric of Lamentations, see Mintz (1984, 17–48).

13. On the history of the identification of nostalgia with amnesia, see Dames (2001, 3–20).

14. On Goldberg’s dialogue with Avraham Ben-Yitzhak in this cycle, see Gordinsky (2013, 81–88).

15. On the symbolist elements in “Al hapriha” and Goldberg’s dialogue with Dante, see Bar-Yosef (2000, 98–116).

16. On the lyrical rapture in Goldberg’s poetry, see Gordinsky (2016).

17. The other poem that was written even later, in 1944, and was included in the same cycle depicts the suffering of the Jewish girls in the ghetto. See VL. II, p.236.

18. The Jews of Kaunas were enclosed in a ghetto in August 1941. Already in the first month of its existence, about 3500 Jews were killed. For further information, see Arad (2009, 141–143).

19. Compare to Arad (2009, 319).

20. Weiss (2009, 359) was the first scholar to address Goldberg’s loss of her father during the Holocaust in her research on the poet.

21. On the difference between liturgical and historical times, see Spiegel (2002, 149–162).

22. Weisman (2014, 239) interprets these lines in the frame of Goldberg’s “dialectic non-decisiveness”: “Was the past loved or wasn’t it? It was and it wasn’t, and also: it was neither one nor the other.”

23. On the epistemic rapture caused by the Holocaust, see Diner (2006, 33–48).