This lecture focuses on a shelved early novel written by one of the most prominent Hebrew (female) writers, Lea Goldberg (1911-1970). Goldberg worked on her novel, Losses (Avedot), during the mid-late 1930s, but was first published only in 2010, forty years after her death. The lecture explores the queer potential of this early, marginalized, and "foundling" novel, highlighting not only its queer temporality and the dominance of the notion of "no future" (as defined by Lee Edelman) but also its queer moments and its subversive attitude toward gender, nationality, and hegemonic (heteronormative) norms.
Guy Ehrlich (Ph.D., Tel Aviv University, 2021) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern University.