Research Catalog

Title

Booking passage : exile and homecoming in the modern Jewish imagination / Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi.

Author

Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven.

Publication

Berkeley : University of California Press, [2000], ©2000.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xii, 358 pages : facsimiles; 24 cm.

Summary

• "In a wide-ranging exploration of the poetics of exile and homecoming as they have been created and reflected in modern Hebrew and Jewish literature, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi shows how all of this has changed during the past hundred years. The Holy Land, represented for so many centuries as the ruined shrine and object of deferred desire, has since become the site of a political drama of return.
• At the same time, mass migration westward provided space for writers like Sholem Aleichem to explore new satisfactions of diasporic desire: storytelling in claustrophobic third-class railway cars in the Pale of Settlement could be released into the comic theater of an expanding American frontier, and wandering as the Jewish curse could be exchanged for mobility as American opportunity."--BOOK JACKET.
• "And then, Jewish Europe was destroyed in an apocalypse as great as that which had destroyed ancient Israel. Ezrahi argues that, after two millennia, a lost center once again haunts Jewish writing, providing a new ruined shrine for acts of recall or homage from writers as different as Celan, Pagis, Appelfeld, Singer, and Roth."--BOOK JACKET.

Series Statement

• Contraversions ; 12
• The S. Mark Taper Foundation imprint in Jewish studies

Uniform Title

• S. Mark Taper Foundation imprint in Jewish studies.
• Contraversions ; 12.

Subjects

• Jewish literature and criticism > History and criticism
• Palestine > In literature
• Jewish diaspora in literature
• Israel > In literature
• Jewish literature > History and criticism
• Exiles in literature > History
• Zionism in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 321-345) and index.

Contents

Introduction: A Poetics of Exile and Return -- Pt. 1. Jewish Journeys. 1. The Poetics of Pilgrimage: Yehuda Halevi and the Uncompleted Journey. 2. Lost in Space: S. Y. Abramovitsh and the Skeptical Voyage. 3. In the Heart of the Seas: S. Y. Agnon and the Epic of Return. 4. By Train, by Ship, by Subway: Sholem Aleichem and the American Voyage of Self-Invention -- Pt. 2. Jewish Geographies. 5. Writing Poetry after Auschwitz: Paul Celan as the Last Barbarian. 6. Reclaiming a Plot in Radautz: Dan Pagis and the Prosaics of Memory. 7. Between Bukovina and Jerusalem: Aharon Appelfeld and Pilgrimage to the Ruined Shrine. 8. (Re)Imagining Europe: The Anachronistic Tales of I. B. Singer. 9. The Grapes of Roth: Diasporism from Portnoy to Shylock. Conclusion: The Imagination of Return and the Return of Imagination.

ISBN

0520206452 (alk. paper)

LCCN

99014018

OCLC

• ocm40776782
• SCSB-3747236

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries