Description
Book SynopsisExplores the metaphorical power of time and space in Jewish modernist poetry in Hebrew and Yiddish as a response to the experience of exile and landlessness, and as a means of furthering modernism's exploration of the self and its relation to community, nation, and the world.
Trade Review“An Inch or Two of Time sets forth a complex, elegant argument that recontextualizes eastern European modernist Yiddish and Hebrew poetry. Jordan Finkin’s book revisits concepts of Jewish collective memory and redefines the arc of Jewish history through the disruptive language and fragmented style and themes of interwar Jewish poetry. Finkin’s argument centers on the conjoined metaphors of time and space that are expressed and embedded in this poetry in the Jewish languages, Yiddish and Hebrew. Through them, Finkin addresses the broader issues of disrupted time and space, which informed all of modernist literature, art, and music during a period when these concepts were radically redefined in modernity at large. Finkin discovers the redefinition of ‘time and space, history and territory,’ which leads to new understandings of the idea of ‘nation’ and of literature. By reading key examples of Yiddish, Hebrew, and German modernist poetry through the conceptual prism of time and space, Finkin argues persuasively the degree to which these particular examples of Jewish modernist poetry can illuminate modernism in general.”
—Kathryn Hellerstein,University of Pennsylvania
“The book rewards a slow stroll through its dense pages, as Finkin brings enormous erudition in the primary and secondary sources to a patient, quiet reading of some well-known and many lesser-known texts.”
—Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi Modern Philology
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgements
Appendix
Introduction: The Aesthetics of Spatiotemporality
Chapter 1: A Brief Essay on Time, Space, Nation, and Metaphor
Chapter 2: “Heymen un Reymen:” Homelandscapes, Shtetlekh, and Other Creative Spaces
Chapter 3: Temporaesthesia
Chapter 4: The Revolutionary Principles of Time and Space
Chapter 5: Enclosed in Distances: The Poetic Experiments of Yocheved Bat-Miriam
Afterword
Bibliography
