On Packing My Library

Away go the books on the Hapsburgs. The Baedekers for Austria and France, the sale catalogues for auctions in Paris, marked up with the prices realised for family furniture, the books on fashion, on post-war Tokyo, the stack    of Gazette de Beaux Arts. The section of books on Freud and the shelves of Musil, Zweig, Roth will stay,of course, but may have to move up. Some things—Grossman, Benjamin, Babel—are needed here at eyeline, but surely the de Goncourt journals can be banished. I won’t need to go through them again. I wasn’t sure if I could bear those brothers once. The proofs have gone back to the publisher and it is time to pack up.

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Runner

From a short story appearing here for the first time in English

Translated by Jessica Cohen

More than half a kilometer lies behind you and still you show no physical signs, your pulse holds steady at a moderate rate, you sweat only lightly, and although you are wearing heavy army boots instead of your running shoes, and the cold and hunger will doubtless take their toll further down the road, you will probably keep running like this, without stopping even for a moment, and your footsteps will be audible on the asphalt throughout the night from here all the way to the lights of Jerusalem, Read more

On the Track of Family History

There are some documents that, as a conscientious writer, I am glad to have read only after the publication of a novel, even though they are extremely interesting and contain potentially useful information. In the first part of this decade, when I was researching the first half of the twentieth- century for the history of the time and of my family, and reading the literature of the period, I did not know that my maternal grandmother had an uncle called Carl Ludwig Franck. Read more

From Judaeophobia to Islamophobia

Many books have been written on anti-Semitism. The past decade has seen the publication, in today’s Europe, of a flood of writings on hostility to Arabs and Islam. And yet, very few researchers have located the Judaeophobia which appeared during the second half of the 19th century at the root of contemporary European nation-building. Similarly, very few research proposals have examined the role of Islamophobia in today’s effort to construct European unity. Of course, works have been published on the emergence of hostility to Islam, but the issue has not been investigated in depth, on the cultural level, for Europe as a whole. Read more

Brno

Why Brno? A place, many would say, distinguished only by its lack of distinction, set at the very heart of Europe but always in the shadow of its mighty neighbour Vienna or its more distant cousin, Prague. A capital of course, but only a regional capital, of South Moravia. The writer Jirí Kratochvil, a native of the place, makes it clear in his prose poem ‘How to Paint a Picture of Brno’: ‘Brno is a city on which there lies the curse of provincialism.’
And yet in a curious way — I’ve never lived there, and visited only a handful of times — Brno has occupied a large part of my life ever since the day, four years after the Iron Curtain came down, I first crept cautiously into the city. Read more

Postcards from the Edge

Hello, there,

After a long, weirdly warm Jerusalem winter spent in the presence of heavily armed soldiers and suspicious security guards — many Fridays a large white surveillance zeppelin hovered over town, staring down on noontime prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque and making a macabre mockery of the festive atmosphere that usually attends the launch of a hot-air balloon — I was eager to get away. Read more