19th century
A01=Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi
Author_Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi
Category=DSB
Category=DSK
Category=JBSR
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
exiles
hebrew
holy land
jerusalem
jewish
jewish culture
jewish literary criticism
jews
judaism
literary theory
middle eastern history
poet
poetic imagination
poetics of exile and return
political drama
post holocaust
religious
reterritorialization
s y abramovitsh
s y agnon
sholem aleichem
sublime realignment
thematics of geography
wanderers
yehuda halevi
zion
Product details
- ISBN 9780520206458
- Weight: 771g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 02 Feb 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern Jewish writing is in many ways a long meditation on the thematics of geography in Jewish culture, what she calls the 'poetics of exile and return'. Until the late nineteenth century, Jews were identified in their own religious and poetic imagination as wanderers and exiles, their sacred center-Jerusalem, Zion-fatefully out of reach. Opening the book with "Jewish Journeys", Ezrahi begins by examining the work of medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi to chart a journey whose end was envisioned as the sublime realignment of the people with their original center. When the Holy Land became the site of a political drama of return in the nineteenth century, Jewish writing reflected the shift, traced here in the travel fictions of S.Y. Abramovitsh, S.Y. Agnon, and Sholem Aleichem. In "Jewish Geographies" Ezrahi explores aspects of reterritorialization through memory in the post-Holocaust writing of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Aharon Appelfeld, I.B. Singer and Philip Roth.
Europe, where Jews had dreamed of return, has become the new ruined shrine: The literary pilgrimages of these writers recall familiar patterns of grieving and representation and a tentative reinvention of the diasporic imagination - in America, of course, but, paradoxically, even in Zion.
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi is Senior Lecturer in comparative Jewish literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is the author of By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (1980).
