A Small Town in Germany: Leah Goldberg and German Orientalism in 1932

Lea Goldberg, (1911–1970) who was and still is one of the best-known literary figures in Israel, spent the years between 1930 and 1933 studying in Germany. These years of Goldberg's apprenticeship, however, do not constitute an important period in her creative career, and have thus not received scholarly attention. Moreover, during the years she spent in Germany she specialized in a field that she abandoned totally upon immigrating to Palestine, namely that of Semitic philology. This was an area regarded as irrelevant to Goldberg's work in general and to her literary endeavor in particular. This article seeks to shed light on the traces of these years to be found in Leah Goldberg's writing in general, and to reveal the stamp of her experiences while studying Semitic philology in Germany on her creative writing in particular. The article does not claim that these years influenced Goldberg's entire literary opus, and focuses primarily on works written in the 1930s. Its focus on the first decade of Goldberg's writing serves to illuminate the origins of Goldberg's dissident individualistic approach within the collectivist discourse of contemporary Hebrew literature. Seeking to go beyond a mere additional, primarily biographical layer in the study of Goldberg's work, this article employs representatio