“‘The Little Girl and the Ma’aborah (Transit Camp)’ : Leah Goldberg and Anna Riwkin-Brick’s Accounting of the Kibbutz Galuyot ‘for Children’

• In Event: Hidden Gems: Lesser Known Works by Major Modern Hebrew Writers

Abstract

My paper critically examines Dr. Leah Goldberg’s (1911-1970) use of the Mizrahi child immigrant’s voice and its subversive potential to shed light on cultural axioms prevalent in the Yishuv. Goldberg was a prolific poet as well as an author of children’s picturebooks, comics, verse, prose, and plays for children, who sought to strike a balance between the ideological and the apolitical factions of her generation in her writing and in the presses she managed. During this time, Goldberg led a “quiet revolution” in the hegemonic labor movement children's literature of her time, though subtle acts of ideological resistance to the aims and goals of nationalist collectivist ideology. (Darr 2012) I argue we see Goldberg’s ideological resistance most clearly through her treatment of the issue of immigration to Israel, specifically her reworking of archetypes such as ha-talush (“the uprooted one”), ha-helech or ha-noded (“the wanderer”), ha-meshulach (roughly, the “homeless/holy messenger”) gleaned from Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian literature in her work for and about immigrant children. This is most evident in Goldberg’s representations of the Mizrahi child olim, or new immigrant to Israel, whom she portrays through the lens of the Kibbutz Galuyot, a period of mass immigration to Israel in the mid-20th century. In this paper I examine how Goldberg’s work in the children’s periodical Davar Li-Yeladim and her ‘ethnographic’ collaborations with photojournalist Anna Riwkin-Brick collapse the borders between the apolitical and ideological, as well as between literary and geographical landscapes in their desire to highlight the experiences of Mizrahi immigrant children. By comparatively exploring the liminal spaces of the ma’aborot, or migrant camps, and children’s communities on the kibbutzim, Goldberg comments upon the powerful effects of collectivist geographical space upon child characters and the rupture that occurs in the face of communal exclusion – the childhood drama that unfolds in the children’s villiage of the kibbutz becomes a microcosm of the pressing issues of inequality in the ma’aborot (transit camps for new immigrants).

Author

• Rachel Dwight Feldman, UC Santa Barbara