'One of the most beautiful portraits ever written of Jerusalem'Jerusalem: City of the Book

8 November 2022

Photo: Frédéric Brenner

On 18 December, Benjamin Balint presents his ‘Jerusalem: City of the Book’ at CSMC and Jüdischer Salon. In a conversation with Sebastian Schirrmeister, he will share his forays into the city's libraries and archives and his encounters with the custodians who safeguard Jerusalem’s literary legacies.

What might it look like to read Jerusalem, with its cross-hatched encounters between people of diverse faiths and cultures, as a city of the book? There are many books about Jerusalem. Jerusalem: City of the Book (Yale UP 2019), by Benjamin Balint and Merav Mack, tells the story of books in Jerusalem. Professor Moshe Halbertal has called their book 'one of the most intimate and beautiful portraits ever written of Jerusalem.' By showing how Jerusalem has been imagined by its writers and made legible by its librarians, Mack and Balint tell the untold history of how the peoples of the book have populated the city with texts. In their hands, Jerusalem itself — perched between East and West, antiquity and modernity, violence and piety — comes alive as a kind of labyrinthine library.

Accompanied by Frédéric Brenner’s impressive photographs for the book, Balint will share with us his forays into the city's libraries and archives — accessible and inaccessible — and his encounters with the custodians who safeguard Jerusalem's literary legacies.

Benjamin Balint is a writer living in Jerusalem. He is the author of Kafka’s Last Trial (2018), awarded the Sami Rohr prize for Jewish literature. His next book, on Bruno Schulz, will be published in April 2023. His reviews and essays appear in Die Zeit, the Wall Street Journal, Haaretz, and the Jewish Review of Books, and his translations from Hebrew have appeared in the New Yorker.

The event takes place in cooperation with Jüdischer Salon Grindel e.V. and is hosted by Sebastian Schirrmeister, a Research Associate at CSMC working at the project 'Wandering Artefacts: The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives'.

Participation is free of charge but registration is required. Please email info"AT"salonamgrindel.de.