'On the edge of an abyss of blood'

"And we will not forget you, the wounds of the lover and the wounds of the hater - we will not forget. Until the day we die we will carry it within us this immense hurt whose name is Europe, 'your Europe,' 'their Europe,' but apparently ... not 'our Europe,' even though we were hers, very much hers."

- from "Your Europe," by Lea Goldberg, published in Al Hamishmar, April 30, 1945

A few hundred meters separate the building at 17 Nollendorf Street in Berlin, where Christopher Isherwood lived during most of the time he spent in the city, from 1929-33, and the rear building at 99 Motz Street, where writer and poet Lea Goldberg stayed when she was a student in the German capital from 1930-32. As a result, the very same view was often visible from the windows of the British writer and of the Jewish writer, both of whom were then at the outset of their artistic careers.

"From my window, the deep solemn massive street" - this is how Isherwood begins his acclaimed work "Goodbye to Berlin" (1939), which is based in part on his life in the city. In contrast, Goldberg's novel "Losses," which is set in the same place and the same period, and also contains numerous biographical elements, opens with the protagonist leaning on the windowsill in the room he is renting. In a later version of the first chapter, the protagonist sees himself reflected in the window as evening begins to fall in the metropolis.

Like Isherwood's book, which offered a comic and also melancholic portrait of Berlin at a critical turning point in its history - the eve of the Nazis' rise to power - Goldberg's work, written in the second half of the 1930s, albeit in Palestine, also looks through the eyes of a foreign artist at the rollicking, hedonistic city just before its fall. In her words, it was a "solid city suspended over the void, the city of peace and freedom, perched on the edge of an abyss of blood."

The resemblances between Isherwood's and Goldberg's Berlin-based books extend beyond content, to the circumstances in which each was written. "Goodbye to Berlin" contained only fragments of what Isherwood had planned, in his words, "as a huge episodic novel of pre-Hitler Berlin," which he intended to call "The Lost." That task proved beyond his powers and he abandoned the project in favor of a more modest work, which he described as a "loosely connected sequence of diaries and sketches." Goldberg, who labored long and hard on "Losses" and apparently completed it shortly before the outbreak of the world war, shelved the novel and never published it, though some of its characters and episodes found their way into her other works.

About 70 years after Goldberg completed the book - and exactly 40 years after her death on January 15, 1970 - "Losses (A Novel's Draft)" has been published for the first time (by Sifriat Hapoalim). Literary scholar Giddon Ticotsky from Tel Aviv University found the manuscript in Goldberg's papers and edited it, enabling Hebrew readers to acquaint themselves with this panoramic novel, written by Goldberg in her first years in Palestine. The book sheds light on her experiences in the three years she spent in Germany before immigrating to Palestine, her attitude toward the prominent ideologies of that period and her uncertainties about her identity as a creative artist and an intellectual.

The protagonist of "Losses" is Elhanan Yehuda Kron, a 34-year-old Jewish poet of Russian origin, who writes in Hebrew. After immigrating to Palestine, he lives for a time on a kibbutz, but does not feel he fits in there and goes to Berlin to research the connection between early Arab mysticism and Jewish religious sources. Kron, who in many senses is the literary mirror-image of Goldberg, falls in love with Antonia, a young Christian-German student. In Berlin he loses the poem cycle he wrote, entitled "God's Escape," which he considers his finest work.

Goldberg uses these story lines, which intertwine at the end of the novel, to bring the plot to life and also to inject it with weighty ideological, social, cultural, political and religious themes. She set out to write a social-historical work of fiction, and its pages resonate with the great upheavals of the 20th century: from World War I, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Zionism and the cultural transformations in Europe, to the growth of anti-Semitism and the advent of fascism and Nazism. Ironically, the "losses" to which the book's title refers are not only the hero's missing manuscript or the lost souls he meets in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany, which is on the brink of losing its humanistic and enlightened image: The book itself represents a sort of loss.

According to Ticotsky, Goldberg published a few chapters from the novel in the Hebrew press in Palestine in 1937 and 1938, while she was still working on it. However, in the end she decided not to publish the book.

"The shelving of 'Losses' is thus, in a sense, not only Goldberg's failure but that of the literary milieu in the Yishuv [the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine], where the cultural climate was not expansive enough to contain a novel like this. From this point of view, 'Losses' joins David Vogel's 'Married Life,' and 'Alleys' by Elisheva [Bichovsky] - two other novels from the same period, which also demonstratively moved away from the Zionist hubbub and therefore were not well received then. In 'Losses,' Goldberg may have inadvertently written not only the story of the manuscript which Elhanan Kron loses, but also the story of her own manuscript. Goldberg and her creation Kron know very well that the texts they have produced are very alien to their milieu, and both are fearful of the consequences of exposure."

German connection

"I am in Berlin ... I have been in Berlin for a month already. That encapsulates so much: namely that I have left Kovno, namely that the dull boredom is gone, namely that one can already believe in the transformation of life and also breathe easily. Easily - because for so many years I prayed for a little ease, a little simple joy, for days on which one might smile for no reason, and now finally such days are here. Are here."

- from "Lea Goldberg's Diaries," December 6, 1930

Lea Goldberg was 19 when she left Kovno for Berlin in the fall of 1930, in order to study for a magister (i.e., master's) degree in philology at Friedrich Wilhelm University (now Humboldt University). Born in Koenigsberg, East Prussia, she grew up in Kovno, wandered about Russia with her family during World War I, and after her return to Lithuania attended a Hebrew school in Kovno and enrolled in the humanities faculty of the local university. She took her first steps as a Hebrew-language writer while still an adolescent, publishing poems and articles in journals in Lithuania and Palestine, though her family showed no interest in Hebrew culture.

A generous scholarship allowed Goldberg to realize her dream of acquiring higher education. Like many Eastern European Jews, since the end of the 19th century, she was drawn to the centers of culture, art and academia in Central and Western Europe. In Berlin, and in Kovno, a fellow student was Mina Landau, a close childhood friend (their friendship is a major theme in a collection of Goldberg's letters to Landau from 1923 to 1935, which was published in Israel last year).

In her diary during this period, Goldberg expresses her longings for Moshe (Misha) Frank, her teacher at the Hebrew school in Kovno and the object of her (unrequited) love in her youth, although at the same time she is apparently thrilled by life in Berlin and by the cultural treasures to which she has access. In addition to Landau, she had other Jewish friends in Berlin, among them students from Palestine such as Ephraim Broide (later a writer, translator and editor). Goldberg also forged ties then with Jewish-Russian artists and intellectuals, for whom Berlin was a magnet in this period. The influence of these emigres is very discernible in "Losses," as much of its plot involves that social circle.

An exceptional figure among Goldberg's acquaintances was Ilsabe Deneke, who was probably her only non-Jewish friend, and with whom she lost contact after completing her studies in Germany: Indeed Goldberg seems to have based the character of Antonia in "Losses" - the young German woman with whom the hero falls in love - on Deneke. In one of the novel's high points, Kron goes to visit Antonia during the Christmas vacation at her parents' home in a town located in the Harz Mountains in central Germany. In December 1931, Goldberg herself stayed at the home of her German girlfriend's parents in the same region. Just like the protagonist in the book, she too was very warmly received by the Christian family.

Drawing on Goldberg's letters (in German) to Deneke - who donated them to the National Library in Jerusalem at the end of the 1980s - Prof. Yfaat Weiss, head of the School of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, deduces that Goldberg's friendship with the young German woman was a salient reflection of her attitude toward Germany in particular and toward European culture as a whole. According to Weiss, the German student was the basis not only for Antonia in "Losses," but also for a character in Goldberg's later novel, "There Comes the Light" (1946). There, the historian notes, "Antonia is the German girlfriend of the book's protagonist, the young Jewish woman Nora. For Goldberg, she serves to represent the charged contradistinction between the East European Jewish world from which Nora comes, and German culture."

In an article Weiss published in the journal Zmanim in 2007, she describes the surprising renewal of the ties between the two friends years later and discusses its contribution to understanding the significance of Germany in Goldberg's work. When her play "The Lady of the Castle" was performed in the southern German city of Konstanz in 1962, Goldberg's old friend - now Ilsabe Huenke von Podewils, after her marriage - was in the audience. Von Podewils obtained Goldberg's address from the theater management and wrote to her in Jerusalem. After the friendship was renewed, they corresponded until Goldberg's death and also met several times at different places in Europe.

"Goldberg's letters reveal how the encounters with her friend from youth restore her lost European experience, [with respect to] German language and culture, and at the same time the sights, smells and flavors she knew from that period," Weiss explains.

Goldberg renewed the relationship after ascertaining that her old friend and her husband were "unique people who were not swept up in the current" during the Nazi period (as the writer put it in a newspaper interview). "She differentiated between her desire to restore to herself 'her Europe,' and the fracture which occurred in the wake of Nazism," Weiss says. "Renewing the ties restored Germany to her without her actually going back there."

Indeed, Goldberg refused to set foot on German soil and met with von Podewils in neighboring countries. "To be frank, I will not go to Germany as long as I can avoid doing so," she wrote von Podewils. "This is not a political approach or hatred, only a feeling that there are things one does not do - [a feeling] which tells me: Don't go to Germany. Why should I visit a place where I would have to think every moment: 'Maybe the man who just passed by in the street cremated my father'?"

This approach indeed reflected the general attitude of the Israeli public toward Germany after the war, but there is also a biographical element here: It is one of her few direct references in writing to the fate of her father, Avraham Goldberg, who perished in the Holocaust. He was tortured in World War I by Lithuanian soldiers, an experience which left him mentally disabled. His condition deteriorated and he was compelled to leave home and to divorce Goldberg's mother, Tsila. Goldberg and her mother immigrated to Palestine - in 1935 and 1936, respectively - but the father and husband remained in Lithuania. Literary scholars who emphasize the autobiographical aspects of Goldberg's work believe that traces of the abuse undergone by her father, and of the breakdown he suffered, can be found in her writings, and implicitly in "Losses" as well.

Goldberg herself never married and had no children. She lived with her mother in Tel Aviv and afterward in Jerusalem, until her death from cancer at age 58 in 1970. Of course, she was not only one of the finest Hebrew poets of the modern era, but also a beloved children's writer. Many of her books for children have become classics, and generations of youngsters here - from the 1930s to the present - have been raised on them. She also wrote fiction for adults, publishing short stories and two novels, but in this sphere was not very successful during her lifetime. In addition, she was a highly regarded theater critic, playwright, literary scholar and editor. In 1955, she moved to Jerusalem to teach at the Hebrew University, where she founded the department of comparative literature, which she headed for a time and where she taught until her death.

A few months later, she was posthumously awarded the Israel Prize for Literature, which her mother accepted in her name. Her mother outlived her by almost 13 years and asked that on her own headstone the words "Lea Goldberg's mother" be added.

Adviser-student ties

"Outside the home, in the chemical laboratory, there is now, in addition to the smell of the gases, a far worse smell: the smell of Jew hatred."

- from "Losses," by Lea Goldberg

Just as the character of Antonia was based on a real person whom Goldberg knew in Berlin, others in "Losses" recall people she met after leaving the city. In the spring of 1932, after successfully completing her studies in Semitic languages and pedagogy in Berlin, she moved to Bonn, where she registered at the local university to do a doctorate in Semitic linguistics. This is the period in which "Losses" is set, and according to Ticotsky it is the basis of one of the cardinal fictional elements of the novel.

"Even though Goldberg based a considerable part of the novel on characters and events from her life," Ticotsky notes, "she accedes to the Aristotelian imperative, which demands that literature describe not only what was, but also what might have been. As though she herself, through the character of Kron, continued to live in Berlin, in the heart of the historical developments, and not in sleepy Bonn, until the spring of 1933."

In Bonn, Goldberg lived in the home of Selma Winter, mother-in-law of Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz. (The famed philosopher and scientist was also studying in Germany at the time and met Goldberg there, and their friendship continued in Israel.) The Oriental Seminar, which she attended at the university in Bonn, was a leading institution in the study of Semitic languages. Goldberg's doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Prof. Paul Ernst Kahle, a prominent scholar in the field, analyzed the Samaritan translation of the Torah.

According to Ticotsky, one of the leading characters in "Losses" - the charismatic expert in oriental studies Klaus Peter Bracke - was modeled after Kahle: "Both Bracke and Kahle are brilliant scholars, who are fiercely opposed to Nazism and pay a steep personal price for it." Indeed, Kahle was forced into exile in London in 1939 in the wake of Nazi harassment and lost his impressive academic status.

"Similarly," Ticotsky adds, "Bracke's wife in the novel, whose views are far more left wing than her husband's, is reminiscent of Marie Kahle, Prof. Kahle's wife, who herself did not hesitate to clash with the Nazis, despite the clear risks involved."

Kahle protected Goldberg in the few remaining months of her stay in Germany after the Nazis' rise to power, as he also sheltered other Jewish students and researchers. While the universities in Germany emitted "a smell of Jew hatred" (as a Jewish chemist in the novel puts it) and underwent a rapid process of "Aryanization" - the professor helped Goldberg complete her studies (cum laude) a very short time before Jews were forbidden to receive doctoral degrees. He also oversaw publication of her dissertation in 1935.

The relations between student and adviser continued after Goldberg left Germany and returned to Lithuania, and also after she settled in Palestine, as Weiss writes in an article in Yad Vashem Studies (No. 37:1, 2009; in English). Weiss explains that, in this article, she sought to examine Kahle's attitude toward the Nazi regime and to show how "his professional deportment and humaneness - as she perceived and internalized them, and as they became etched in her memory - guided Goldberg in formulating her principles with regard to the moral commitment of the individual living in a tyrannical regime." Kahle, Weiss concludes, did not consider himself an opponent of the regime.

"He remained oblivious to the new principle of race and continued to adhere to and recognize only scientific talent and professional qualities. In contrast to the usual perception, which holds than an intellectual in a dictatorial regime or in a time of crisis must speak out on the issues of the day - Goldberg took from Kahle a different principled position in regard to the intellectual's moral commitment.

"This was the 'courage for the mundane,' which was also the title of a well-known article she wrote in 1938, in which she dealt in the same breath with artists and academics," Weiss continues. "She emphasizes the laborious aspect of intellectual work while complaining about some academics' addiction to ideologies. This is what constitutes their betrayal of their beliefs. Like Kahle, with whom she corresponded until 1935, and then renewed her ties after the war, Goldberg too believed that the true significance of artistic and intellectual creativity lay in devotion to hard work, the work of the intellect."

A prophecy fulfilled

"The train is approaching Berlin ... The little joker who was riding in my heart, his long legs kicking on the walls of my chest, said mockingly, 'You have to recite 'Blessed be the True Judge' [said upon receiving news of a death] for this city.' But there was sadness in it, too."

- from "Letters from an Imaginary Journey," by Lea Goldberg, 1937

Every publication of a work that the author initially shelved raises questions about its quality, as well as various ethical dilemmas. In an afterword to "Losses," Ticotsky explains why in his opinion the novel merits publication. It is clear from Goldberg's diaries and letters, he notes, that she spent much time and effort on the book, the fulfillment of a youthful dream to write a panoramic novel.

Ticotsky: "It appears that the great self-expectation was in a certain sense frustrating, and during the writing of the novel she had moments of transcendence but also hesitation and uncertainty - both about the historical accuracy of the events she described and about the quality of the book and how it would be received.

"Not long before the outbreak of World War II, she decided to rewrite the entire book - although she abandoned that project when the war started - apparently because of a change in perspective. A central element in the novel is the looming disaster, the all-engulfing war that is about to erupt, ahead of which the book constitutes a kind of warning. When the war broke out, reality outdid even the pessimistic imagination reflected in the book. The prophecy was fulfilled, and that, paradoxically, is what made it irrelevant."

Asked why the novel is being published now, Ticotsky says: "It is a kind of amber in which air from a different era is imprisoned and enables us to understand better the mood in Palestine and in Germany at the time, and in Goldberg's case, the European dream and how it was shattered. It is important to emphasize that alongside the novel's historic and documentary aspect, it has salient literary value. Goldberg aimed very high here, seeking to write a novel in the style of Dostoevsky. By the way, there are surprising connections between 'Losses' and 'The Devils' [the Dostoevsky novel, also known as 'The Possessed'].

"In my view," he continues, "the novel is the culmination of a one-time period in Goldberg's work and life - the most daring and adventurous period in her work, in the first years after her arrival in Palestine, at the age of 26 to 28. Later, the war broke out and she had to adapt her writing to the demands of the literary milieu and the public. In this sense, the publication of the novel is a dream that Goldberg harbored for many years, but forsook because of various pressures, both real and imagined. And above all, it is a beautiful love story, with a quasi-detective plot. Even if one does not know the circumstances in which the novel was written, it succeeds in moving the reader and stands on its own as an integral work of art."

From a different angle, "Losses" can perhaps be said to belong not only to the period when it was written, but also to the period of its publication: The past decade has seen far-reaching changes in the attitude of many Israelis toward Germany in general and Berlin in particular, and this has also been reflected in Israeli literature. Many leading Israeli writers and intellectuals - including Yoram Kaniuk, Haim Be'er, Ruth Almog, Benny Ziffer, Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger - have published novels or nonfiction, centering on the same idea that underlies "Losses": an Israeli artist or intellectual who takes a journey to Germany (usually to its capital) and confronts the roots of his personal and collective identity there. From this point of view, Goldberg anticipated the current literary wave, which redefines the status of Berlin as a realm of longing and enchantment for Hebrew culture.

"Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: It is my own skeleton aching," Isherwood wrote in the final chapter of "Goodbye to Berlin." Like him, Goldberg used the body of Berlin as a window and a mirror from and through which to observe herself.

Toward the end of "Losses," Kron's lost manuscript turns up unexpectedly and is published, though under circumstances radically different from those he had hoped for. Goldberg describes his response to the newly found work in these words: "He stood opposite his poem and was ashamed before it, as though the poem were a living being, older than him by far, and wiser, too."