City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing

Baumgarten, Murray

ISBN 10: 0674132785 / ISBN 13: 9780674132788

Published by Harvard University Press, 1982

About this Item

This is a damaged book. May be ex-library, water-damaged, or spine creased/broken. Acceptable, Reading copy only, with writing/markings and heavy wear. Standard-sized.

Seller Inventory # mon0000196797

Bibliographic Details

• Title: City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication Date: 1982
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674132785
• ISBN 13: 9780674132788
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Acceptable

About this title

Synopsis

This richly suggestive book examines the common bonds of thought and shared manner of expression that unite Jewish writers working in America, Eastern Europe, and Israel. Murray Baumgarten shows how Jewish traditions are reflected in the themes and narrative style of a diverse group of writers, including Saul Bellow, Henry Roth, Sholom Aleichen, Isaac Babel, and S.Y. Agnon.

Baumgarten finds in these writers a distinctive and symbolic use of the urban scene arid style of life—whether the city is Brooklyn, Chicago, Vienna, Warsaw, Odessa, or Jerusalem. He examines the pariah stance, and the different kinds of tension between freedom from communal ties and the pull of traditional culture. He demonstrates how Yiddish can flavor and inflect the syntax, how scripture can permeate the thinking and narrative devices, in writers of various nationalities.

About the Author

Murray Baumgarten is Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz.