Booking Passage

Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520206458
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520918214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

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'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 ide

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Poetics of Exile and Return
• CHAPTER ONE The Poetics of Pilgrimage: Yehuda Halevi and the Uncompleted Journey
• CHAPTER TWO Lost in Space: S. Y. Abramovitsh and the Skeptical Voyage
• CHAPTER THREE In the Heart of the Seas: S. Y. Agnon and the Epic of Return
• CHAPTER FOUR By Train, by Ship, by Subway: Sholem Aleichem and the
• CHAPTER FIVE Writing Poetry after Auschwitz: Paul Celan as the Last Barbarian
• CHAPTER SIX Reclaiming a Plot in Radautz: Dan Pagis and the Prosaics of Memory
• CHAPTER SEVEN Between Bukovina and Jerusalem: Aharon Appelfeld and Pilgrimage to the Ruined Shrine
• CHAPTER EIGHT (Re)Imagining Europe: The Anachronistic Tales of I. B. Singer
• CHAPTER NINE The Grapes of Roth: Diasporism from Portnoy to Shylock
• Conclusion: The Imagination of Return and the Return of Imagination
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index