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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
| Original language | |
| English | |
TILL WE HAVE BUILT JERUSALEM
Architects of a New City
A cultural history of Jerusalem focusing on the tensions between its architecture and its political divisions.
Equal parts biographical puzzle, architectural meditation, and probing detective hunt, Adina Hoffman's Till We Have Built Jerusalem offers a prismatic view onto one of the world's most beloved and troubled cities. Panoramic yet intimate, this portrait of three architects who helped build modern Jerusalem is also a gripping exploration of the ways in which politics and aesthetics clash in a place of constant conflict.
The book opens with the arrival in 1930s Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn who, as a refugee from Hitler's Germany, has to reckon with a complex new Middle Eastern reality. Next we meet Austen St. Barbe Harrison, Palestine's chief government architect from 1922-1937. Steeped in the traditions of Byzantine and Islamic building, he’s forced to work in the often stifling and violent context of British rule. And in the riveting final section, Hoffman herself sets out through the battered streets of today’s Jerusalem looking for traces of a possibly Greek, possibly Arab architect named Spyro Houris. Once renowned around town, Houris is now utterly forgotten, though his buildings still stand, a ghostly testimony to his presence.
A beautifully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, Till We Have Built Jerusalem uncovers ramifying levels of one great city's buried history as it asks what it means, everywhere, to be foreign and to belong.
Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, winner of the UK's 2010 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. She is also the author, with Peter Cole, of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which was named the American Library Association's Jewish Book of the Year. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, she was awarded one of the inaugural (2013) Windham Campbell prizes. She divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven.
The book opens with the arrival in 1930s Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn who, as a refugee from Hitler's Germany, has to reckon with a complex new Middle Eastern reality. Next we meet Austen St. Barbe Harrison, Palestine's chief government architect from 1922-1937. Steeped in the traditions of Byzantine and Islamic building, he’s forced to work in the often stifling and violent context of British rule. And in the riveting final section, Hoffman herself sets out through the battered streets of today’s Jerusalem looking for traces of a possibly Greek, possibly Arab architect named Spyro Houris. Once renowned around town, Houris is now utterly forgotten, though his buildings still stand, a ghostly testimony to his presence.
A beautifully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, Till We Have Built Jerusalem uncovers ramifying levels of one great city's buried history as it asks what it means, everywhere, to be foreign and to belong.
Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, winner of the UK's 2010 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. She is also the author, with Peter Cole, of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which was named the American Library Association's Jewish Book of the Year. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, she was awarded one of the inaugural (2013) Windham Campbell prizes. She divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven.
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Book
Published 2016-04-01 by Farrar, Straus, Giroux |
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Book
Published 2016-04-01 by Farrar, Straus, Giroux |