"And Where Is Tur Malka?" On the Fate of a Book of Poems

In the mid-1920s, Uri Zvi Greenberg published chapters from a book of poems titled "Tur Malka." The book itself was never completed and was never published. This article asks why Greenberg wasn't able to complete the book. The article argues that even though the theological grounds of the book were clearly expressed in the poems themselves, the political aspect—already evident in Greenberg's poetry of that period—was not yet fully developed. This lacuna is visible also in Greenberg's two books of poems of that time. Greenberg had not managed to construct poetry based on political theology, and had to wait for the achievement of this goal until 1928, when he published Ÿazon aÿad haligyonot, a volume that in fact made use of the two previously published "Tur Malka" chapters. Poetry in Eretz Israel during this period went through a process of politicization, starting with an attack—from the right and from the left—on the Labor movement's leadership in Eretz Israel. It is only then that Greenberg managed to materialize the structure of political theology as a constitutive principle of his poetry.