‘Sparr … is an engaging guide, with a fine eye for detail. Ably translated by Stephen Brown, he walks us through apartments, schools and cafes and takes us into the lives of Rehavia’s former luminaries and visitors. German Jerusalem is a sparkling introduction with a dazzling cast.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘An elegiac, anecdotal study’
Literary Review
‘This engagingly written history brings a significant neighborhood to life as it narrates the story of its residents, enticing those who may not be familiar with this part of Jerusalem to further explore its historical roots as well as its modern joys.’
Jewish Book Council
REVIEWS
Displaced by the rising tide of Nazism across Europe, a generation of German-speaking Jewish poets, thinkers, writers and architects left their homes and emigrated to Palestine.
They settled in Rehavia, a garden suburb of Jerusalem planned in the early 1920s and brought to life by cultural and intellectual influences ranging from Bauhaus to Kabbalah.
With Thomas Sparr as our guide, we encounter the people whose German-Jewish identity – unique to that time and place – gave Rehavia its character: from the poet and playwright Else Lasker-Schüler to the historian Gershom Scholem and the philosopher and scholar Martin Buber. Though them, German Jerusalem reveals the trauma of exile from not only a country but a language and a culture. The result is a group portrait of this extraordinary neighbourhood and of a vanished world.
THOMAS SPARR worked at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem’s Leo Baeck Institute from 1986 to 1989. Today he lives in Berlin where he works as an editor-at-large for Suhrkamp and as an independent writer and scholar. He is the author of Todesfuge, a biography of the poet Paul Celan.
STEPHEN BROWN is a playwright, translator, and cultural critic.
| Category | |
|---|---|
| Format | |
| Published Date | |
| ISBN | 9781912208616 |
| Pages | 207 |
