Building a City: Writings on Agnon's Buczacz in Memory of Alan Mintz

Building a City: Writings on Agnon's Buczacz in Memory of Alan Mintz

Sheila E. Jelen (Editor), Jeffrey Saks (Editor), Wendy Zierler (Editor)
$40.00
Publication Date: August 15th, 2023
Publisher:
Indiana University Press
ISBN:
9780253065407
Pages:
376
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Description

The fiction of Nobel Laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon is the foundation of the array of scholarly essays as seen through the career of Alan Mintz, visionary scholar and professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Mintz introduced Agnon's posthumously published Ir Umeloah (A City in Its Fullness)--a series of linked stories set in the 17th century and focused on Agnon's hometown, Buczacz, a town in what is currently western Ukraine--to an English reading audience, and argued that Agnon's unique treatment of Buczacz in A City in its Fullness, navigating the sometimes tenuous boundary of the modernist and the mythical, was a full-throated, self-conscious literary response to the Holocaust. This volume is an extension of a memorial dedicated to Mintz's memory (who died suddenly in 2017) which combines selections of Alan's work from the beginning, middle and end of his career, with autobiographical tributes from older and younger scholars alike. The essays dealing with Agnon and Buczacz remember the career of Alan Mintz and his contribution to the world of Jewish studies and within the world of Jewish communal life.

About the Author

Sheila Jelen, Zantker Professor in Jewish Literature, Culture, and History, is an associate professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky. Jelen has published a variety of monographs and edited volumes including, most recently, Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies. Jeffrey Saks is the founding director of The Academy for Torah Initiatives and Directions in Jewish Education, in Jerusalem, and its WebYeshiva.org program. He is the editor of the journal Tradition, series editor of The S.Y. Agnon Library at The Toby Press, and Director of Research at the Agnon House in Jerusalem.Wendy Zierler is Sigmund Falk Professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at Hebrew Union CollegeJewish Institute of Religion in New York. She is the author of Movies and Midrash: Popular Film and Jewish Religious Conversation. In 2017 she became coeditor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.