Imagine for a moment that you’ve committed yourself to writing in the highest form of literary expression – poetry – in a language that isn’t your mother tongue. Not just speaking it, not just writing grocery lists or letters in it, but rhyming in it, expressing the deepest and most universal feelings of the human experience. Imagine committing to this out of a sense of mission, knowing that an entire generation of children is growing up in a new land without books, without lullabies, without stories in their language. They’re learning this ancient language as their mother tongue, but they have nothing to read in it.

This isn’t the story of one poet. This is the story of all of them.

“HaIvrim” (“The Hebrews”), a documentary film series initiated by director Yair Kedar, tells the story of the greatest Hebrew writers and poets, those figures who created the canon we grew up on, who wrote the poems our teachers taught us to recite and the stories our parents read to us before bed. And the astonishing truth is that almost none of them spoke Hebrew as their native language.

Leah Goldberg: The Woman Who Chose Hebrew, and Hebrew Chose Her

Leah Goldberg was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, in 1911 and grew up in Kovno, Lithuania. She began writing poems in Russian at the age of five. But before she even turned sixteen, she was already publishing poems in Hebrew.

When she arrived in the Land of Israel in 1935, she already held a doctorate in philosophy and Semitic languages and knew seven languages. But she chose Hebrew and made it her home.

In her poem “Pine,” Goldberg describes the transition from the landscape of her Russian childhood to her new homeland: the pine tree, which appears in both landscapes, becomes a metaphor for her dual identity, for roots planted in two places. This is a poem that could only have been written by someone who knows the pain and reconciliation of immigration, and who chose to write it in an acquired language.

In her lifetime, Goldberg wrote hundreds of lyric poems, about two hundred and fifty children’s poems, three novels, masterful translations from Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Shakespeare – all in a second language. Her legacy lives on, including on our 100 shekel bill.

Rachel the Poetess: On the Banks of the Kinneret

Rachel Bluwstein was born in Saratov, Russia, in 1890. At fifteen, she began writing poems – in Russian, of course. She dreamed of becoming a painter, not a poet. When she arrived in the Land of Israel in 1909 with her sister Shoshana, she barely knew any Hebrew.

The story of the Bluwstein sisters in Rehovot is a story of absolute commitment: they decided to speak Russian only one hour per day, before sunset, to say what they couldn’t express in their new language. The rest of the day – only Hebrew.

Rachel fell in love with the Kinneret, with agricultural work, and with the land. She wrote personal poetry, simple and remarkably precise, poetry that entered Israeli consciousness immediately. “Only about myself I knew how to tell,” she wrote, and this modesty only amplified the power of her voice.

Rachel died at forty from tuberculosis – not by her beloved Kinneret, but in a small Tel Aviv apartment, far from the romantic image her poetry evokes. But her beautiful poems live on. They’ve been set to music dozens of times, sung by generations, taught in schools and universities. Personally, she is my favorite Hebrew poet.

Hayim Nahman Bialik: Our National Poet

Bialik, “King of the Jews” as he was called during his lifetime, was born in the village of Radi in Ukraine in 1873. Like many Hebrew writers of his generation, he grew up speaking Yiddish and learned Hebrew through religious study. He wrote in both Hebrew and Yiddish, but Hebrew became the language of his great creative work, the tool through which he expressed the pain of his people and their hopes. 

He believed that language is “a deed to our heritage and all our national assets”, noting that: “One who uses a foreign tongue, one who knows Judaism only in translation – it is as if he kisses his mother through a handkerchief.” 

Bialik didn’t just write in Hebrew – he built it. He invented words, renewed expressions, translated masterpieces, and founded publishing houses to spread Hebrew literature. By age thirty, he was crowned “the national poet,” and when he died in 1934, over 100,000 people attended his funeral in Tel Aviv. His poems – from children’s verses to fierce protest poems – became the backbone of Hebrew literary education.

Filling the Void

What connects all these stories – Goldberg, Rachel, and Bialik, and so many others – is a sense of mission. They arrived in a land where children were growing up with Hebrew as their mother tongue, but had nothing to read. No children’s books, no bedtime stories. Everything needed to be written from scratch.

So they wrote. They took a language they had to learn as adults and transformed it into one in which children could dream. And in doing so, they laid the foundation for every Hebrew writer who came after them.

The series “HaIvrim” brings their stories to life: the biographies, the works, and the personal price each of them paid for choosing Hebrew. It’s a series about remarkable people who dared to create in a language they believed in, so younger generations could have the words to see and understand the world.

You can watch the “HaIvrim” series here: https://ivrim.co.il/ or on YouTube.