Lea Goldberg began writing poetry at twelve, profoundly shaped by her family’s exile from Russia to Lithuania and her father’s imprisonment and subsequent breakdown. Goldberg studied at the Universities of Kovno, Berlin, and Bonn. She made Aliyah to Palestine in 1935 and published her first collection of poetry, Smoke Rings, later that year. Throughout the 1940s her poems paid tribute to the Eastern Europe of her childhood, but in the 1950s she explored themes of creativity, love, and silence, particularly in her 1955 collection Morning Lightning. She began teaching literature at Hebrew University in the 1950s, focusing on Russian literature. She also published several plays, children’s books, and novels, and translated Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Chekhov into Hebrew. She was awarded the Israel Prize posthumously in 1970.
