Figuring Jerusalem
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-78746-6 (ISBN)
For two thousand years, Hebrew writers used their exile from the Holy Land as a license for invention. The question at the heart of Figuring Jerusalem is this: how did these writers bring their imagination “home” in the Zionist century? Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi finds that the same diasporic conventions that Hebrew writers practiced in exile were maintained throughout the first half of the twentieth century. And even after 1948, when the state of Israel was founded but East Jerusalem and its holy sites remained under Arab control, Jerusalem continued to figure in the Hebrew imagination as mediated space. It was only in the aftermath of the Six Day War that the temptations and dilemmas of proximity to the sacred would become acute in every area of Hebrew politics and culture.
Figuring Jerusalem ranges from classical texts, biblical and medieval, to the post-1967 writings of S. Y. Agnon and Yehuda Amichai. Ultimately, DeKoven Ezrahi shows that the wisdom Jews acquired through two thousand years of exile, as inscribed in their literary imagination, must be rediscovered if the diverse inhabitants of Jerusalem are to coexist.
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi is professor emerita of comparative literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is the author of By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination, and two books in Hebrew.
List of Illustrations
Prologue Why Jerusalem? The Politics of Poetry
Introduction “This House, which is called by My Name”
Part 1 Literary Archaeologies
1 “Yes, you did laugh!”: The Secret of the Akeda
2 “You are as majestic as Jerusalem”: The Song and the City
3 “Apples of gold in ornaments of silver”: Maimonides’s Guide to the Poetic Imagination
Part 2 Agnon’s Dilemma
4 “What may this be likened to?”: Agnon and the Poetics of Space
5 “Every day I have regretted not having stood in the breach”: Agnon in Jerusalem
Part 3 Amichai in the Breach
6 “He comes out of a swimming pool or the sea . . . and he laughs and blesses”: Yehuda Amichai, Poet of the Sacred Quotidian
7 “Visit my tears and the east wind, which is the true Western Wall”: Amichai in Jerusalem
Coda
Acknowledgments: Ancient Debts and Ongoing Gratitude
Notes
Bibliography
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 26.04.2022 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | 11 halftones |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Gewicht | 454 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-226-78746-X / 022678746X |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-226-78746-6 / 9780226787466 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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