The British historian Eric Hobsbawm defined the short twentieth century as the period that begins with the First World War and ends with the collapse of the Soviet Union and named it “the age of extremes”. it was an age in which millions of people were persecuted, murdered and made homeless. Exceptionally atrocious was the fate of European Jewry at this time. The poets considered in this research, Lea Goldberg and Nathan Alterman, like other Jews who were to immigrate to Palestine in the following years, saw from afar the final eradication of the Eastern European Jewish civilization in the years of the Holocaust, detached from their families and folks who stayed behind. The work of these poets in the years of the Second World War and during the preceding years, I claim, reflects the reoccurrence of traumatic events they went through during the First World War. In this lesson the wartime works of Lea Goldberg and Nathan Alterman will be read as bearers of testimony in order to portray the complex affinities of history, trauma and the act of creation in general, and particularly in the case of these two major poets.

Attending the classes is obligatory, as is reading the prescribed texts according to the syllabus. There will be a take–home essay exam at the end of the semester.