We left Yeshu

At the end of Lea Goldberg’s poem “Tel Aviv 1935,” she writes, “And it seems – if you would only turn your head – in the sea, your city’s church is floating.” ¹ Goldberg writes about longing for her old homeland and associates it with the figure of Jesus and Christianity. In Goldberg’s poetry – as in the poetry of Avot Yeshurun and Yocheved Bat-Miriam – we find what is absent in the literature of many of their contemporaries: their longing for the cultural world they left behind after immigrating – both mentally and physically – to a new land. In this chapter, I will argue that these three poets enjoyed the freedom to write about the world of Christianity with intimacy and affection and without the ambivalence found in the works of many of their contemporaries. I will argue that this freedom derives from the exclusion of these three poets from the main canon of Modern Hebrew poetry, thereby affording them the ability to lament their old world and associate it with the figure of Jesus and Christianity.