ALLISON SCHACHTER Orientalism, Secularism, and the Crisis of Hebrew Modernism: Reading Leah Goldberg’s Avedot L EAH GOLDBERG’S modernist Hebrew novel Avedot ( Losses) narrates the tra- vails of Elhanan Yehuda Kron, a Hebrew poet and Russian Jewish emigrant to Palestine who travels to Berlin in 1932 to research the Islamic origins of Jewish mysticism. 1 During his time in Berlin, Kron completes what he deems to be a poetic masterpiece, a Hebrew poem cycle entitled Brichat elohim ( God’s Abandonment) that he transcribes in pseudo thirteenth-century Hebrew script on antique parchment from Palestine. Unfortunately, just after completing the poems, Kron misplaces them while attending a lecture at the Oriental Institute in Berlin. At the end of the novel, following the burning of the Reichstag and the Nazi rise to power, Kron is reunited with his poems, which two Nazi sympathizers have published in a well- respected orientalist journal as evidence of early Jewish anti-Christian sentiment in Germany. Kron’s modernist Hebrew poems become the orientalist object par excel- lence. Kron responds to this situation by deciding to return to Mandatory Palestine and declaring himself “an Oriental,” a decision that represents the failure to situate Hebrew both within the contours of European culture and outside the view of a I would like to thank Natasha Gordinsky, Ari Joskowicz, Jordan Finkin, Samira Sheikh, Jay Clayton, Martina Urban, Ben Tran, Michael Allan, and the journal’s anonymous readers for their insightful comments on this essay. 1 Leah Goldberg played a critical role in Hebrew literature as a prolific modernist poet, novelist, playwright, translator, and literary critic. Born in Königsberg in 1911, she grew up in the Russian- speaking milieu of Kovno and was exposed to both Russian and German literature. During World War I her family fled Kovno. Upon their return in 1918 Goldberg was enrolled in the Hebrew gym- nasium, where she experienced Hebrew culture for the first time. In 1931 she began graduate work in Berlin, completing her doctorate in Semitic studies in Bonn. In 1935 Goldberg immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, where she became a prominent member of Moderna, a group of Hebrew mod- ernist poets that included Avraham Shlonsky and Nathan Alterman. Goldberg quickly established herself as an important intellectual and cultural figure of her generation, teaching courses at Hebrew University and founding the Department of Comparative Literature there. Goldberg began writing Avedot in 1936, shortly after she immigrated to Palestine. She published sections of it in various literary journals in Palestine between 1937 and 1938 before abandoning the novel in 1939. A version of the novel was published in 2010, edited and with an afterword by Giddon Ticotsky that includes a detailed history of the manuscript (331–34). Comparative Literature 65:3 DOI 10.1215/00104124-2325131 © 2013 by University of Oregon