Truly eye-opening, KATSCHEN & THE BOOK OF JOSEPH makes an amazing American debut for Israeli writer Yoel Hoffmann. THE BOOK OF JOSEPH tells the tragic story of a widowed Jewish tailor and his son in 1930's Berlin; KATSCHEN gives an astounding child's-eye-view of a boy orphaned in Palestine. These two intensely moving novellas display the poetry of Hoffmann's language, which one reviewer has called "utterly enchanting . . . like nothing else". Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

By creating a dialogue between Israeli and American Jewish authors, scholars, and intellectuals, this book examines how these two literatures, which traditionally do not address one another directly, nevertheless share some commonalities and affinities. The disinclination of Israeli and American Jewish fictional narratives to gravitate toward one another tells us much about the processes of Jewish self-definition as expressed in literary texts over the last fifty years. Through essays by prominent Israeli Americanists, American Hebraists, Israeli critics of Hebrew writing, and American specialists in the field of Jewish writing, the book shows how modern Jewish culture rewrites the Jewish tradition across quite different ideological imperatives, such as Zionist metanarrative, the urge of Jewish immigrants to find Israel in America, and socialism. The contributors also explore how that narrative turn away from religious tradition to secular identity has both enriched and impoverished Jewish modernity.

John Brinckerhoff Jackson theorized the vernacular landscape as one that reflects a way of life guided by tradition and custom, distanced from the larger world of politics and law. This quotidian space is shaped by the everyday culture of its inhabitants. In Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature, Grumberg sets anchor in this and other contemporary theories of space and place, then embarks on subtle close readings of recent Israeli fiction that demonstrate how literature in practice can complicate those discourses. Literature in Israel over the past twenty-five years tends to be set in ordinary spaces rather than in explicitly, ideologically charged locations such as contested borders and debated territories. Rarely taking place in settings of war and political violence, it depicts characters’ encounters with everyday places such as buses and cafés as central to their self-conception. Yet in academic discussions, the imaginative representations of these sites tend to be neglected in favor of spaces more overtly relevant to religious and political debates. To fill this gap, Grumberg proposes a new understanding of how Israeli identity is mapped onto the spaces it inhabits. She demonstrates that in the writing of many Israeli novelists even mundane sites often have significant ideological implications. Exploring a wide range of authors, from Amos Oz to Orly Castel-Bloom, Grumberg argues that literary depictions of vernacular places play a profound and often unidentified role in serving or resisting ideology.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.