Background
Born in East Prussia, Goldberg spent her early childhood in Russia, returning after the revolution with her family to their home in Kovno, Lithuania.
Born in East Prussia, Goldberg spent her early childhood in Russia, returning after the revolution with her family to their home in Kovno, Lithuania.
She was a precocious child who began to produce poetry at an early age. Some of her teachers report that to entertain herself during the dull and lengthy task of lacing her high shoes, the little girl used to compose poems out loud. She studied at the Hebrew Gymnasium (high school) of Kovno and at the universities of Berlin and Bonn, receiving her doctorate in Semitic languages.
In 1935, she went to Palestine, where she joined Abraham Shlonsky’s literary group, Yachdav, and began to publish her poetry in its literary forum. Shlonsky became her friend and colleague, in a friendship which was to last long after their political and literary interests took them in different directions.
Goldberg worked as a teacher of drama and as a literary critic for various newspapers. She wrote poetry, prose, drama, and literary criticism, and translated many classics into Hebrew, among them Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. She was well loved as a writer for children with whom she had a wonderful rapport, both in writing and in person.
She was most famous, however, for her poetry which is characterized by conversational style, simple though symbolic language, and almost complete disassociation from ideological or Jewish themes. She preferred traditional verse forms, concrete imagery, and familiar but refreshing language to write about universal matters such as childhood, nature, love, aging, and death.
Her best known poems include "Songs of the Stream", in which natural symbols represent the poet’s aesthetic concerns, and "After Twenty Years", about an encounter between two estranged lovers.
An invitation in 1952 to head the Department of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem paid tribute to her versatility as a writer, poet, and critic. She held the post until her death.