Till We Have Built Jerusalem Paperback – 11 April 2017

Adina Hoffman . Farrar Straus and Giroux . English

A biographical excavation of one of the world’s great, troubled cities A remarkable view of one of the world’s most beloved and troubled cities, Adina Hoffman’s Till We Have Built Jerusalem is a gripping and intimate journey into the very different lives of three architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem. The book unfolds as an excavation. It opens with the 1934 arrival in Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who must reckon with a complex new Middle Eastern reality. Next we meet Austen St. Barbe Harrison, Palestine’s chief government architect from 1922 to 1937. Steeped in the traditions of Byzantine and Islamic building, this “most private of public servants” finds himself working under the often stifling and violent conditions of British rule. And in the riveting final section, Hoffman herself sets out through the battered streets of today’s Jerusalem searching for traces of a possibly Greek, possibly Arab architect named Spyro Houris. Once a fixture on the local scene, Houris is now utterly forgotten, though his grand Armenian-tile-clad buildings still stand, a ghostly testimony to the cultural fluidity that has historically characterized Jerusalem at its best. A beautifully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, Till We Have Built Jerusalem uncovers the ramifying layers of one great city’s buried history as it asks what it means, everywhere, to be foreign and to belong.

Categories: Action & Adventure

About the Author

Essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman's books include House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. A biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, My Happiness was named one of the best twenty books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review and won 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 awarded the American Library Association’s Brody Medal for the Jewish Book of the Year. In 2016, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published her Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, which the Los Angeles Times called “brave and often beautiful” and Haaretz described as “a passionate, lyrical defense of a Jerusalem that could still be.” Her Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures appeared in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series and was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Prize for Biography. Writing in the New Yorker, David Denby called it "superb," and said that Hoffman "writes with enormous flair," while Booklist, in a starred review, dubbed it "electrifying." Hoffman’s essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, the TLS, Raritan, Bookforum, the New York Times, Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Tin House, and on the World Service of the BBC. She is formerly a film critic for the American Prospect and the Jerusalem Post. The recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the Windham Campbell prize, she lives in Jerusalem and New Haven. Author website: http://ibiseditions.com/adinahoffman

Books from Similar Categories

Books from the Same Genre

Download BookR now and choose mindful reading!

Download Now!