Description

Book Synopsis

Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century''s most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationship—which was to remain crucial for both men—is both a celebration of his friend''s spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin''s suicide in 1940.

 

At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend''s spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life.

Walter Benjamin

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    A Paperback / softback by Gershom Scholem

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      Book details

      Publisher The New York Review of Books, Inc
      Published 30 April 2003
      ISBN-13 9781590170328
      978-1590170328
      ISBN-10 1590170326
      Also in:
      Biography Biography: general ELT & Literary Studies Literature: history and criticism Politics, Philosophy & Society Western philosophy from c 1800

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century''s most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationship—which was to remain crucial for both men—is both a celebration of his friend''s spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin''s suicide in 1940.

       

      At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend''s spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life.

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