Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place

Abstract

Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, edited by Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VR: Ashgate, 2008. 365 pp. $99.95. In recent years there has been a heightened critical awareness of role of spatiality in imagination, reflected in numerous conferences such Lehigh University's 2007No Direction Home: Re-imagining Geography, textual productions such Barbara Mann's special Prooftexts issue devoted to Literary Mappings of City, Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu's Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse & Experience, or my own Israel in Exile: Writing & Desert, to name just a few recent exemplars. Topographies (whose genesis was University of Potsdam's Makom: Place and Places in Judaism program) is certainly most critically useful investigation to date if only for its breathtaking historical, geographical, and cultural scope. It is impossible to fully convey riches here; suffice to say that scope of this groundbreaking volume manages to encompass an extraordinary range of evocative milieus, even including virtual worlds and meta-places such Mini Israel, brilliantly structured around five evocative themes (Construction Sites; Jewish Quarters; Cityscapes & Landscapes; Exploring C and Enacted Spaces). Editors Brauch, Lipphardt, and Nocke seek to overcome tendency to privilege time over (p. 1) that they see pervasive norm of studies (aside from spaces connected to traditions or Holocaust memory) while affirming Diaspora as a touchstone for globalization process that illuminates its premises, conditions, and perils (p. 3). The editors' corrective aim (they express impatience that literary studies' dominant paradigms of Our Homeland, Text and People of Book overlook empirical notions of space and place) is to explore neglected topographies in some instances and, conversely, to bring new angles to bear on more traditionally explored locales. The research model that inspires editors is that of Bund's rigorous commitment to specific Diaspora communities and histories. Hence, for most part, eighteen essays assembled here (exceptions noted above) examine lived space, or the location of presence rather than construction and interpretation of spaces on textual or metaphorical level (p. 2). Particularly admirable is editors' success in gathering essays that demonstrate connections between different topoi (Morocco and Israeli development town of Netivot, former Soviet Union and Brooklyn) well subcultures such historical mellah oi Fez or even religious micro-spaces of contemporary Budapest and Toronto. Many essays traverse literal and symbolic, such Miriam Lipis' perspective on sukkah A Hybrid Place of Belonging. Identifying four symbiotic realms of belonging embodied in this ritualized and ephemeral commemorative space (Land of Israel, Bible portable homeland, God's presence, and local), she draws on an impressively international study of sites in Europe, Israel, and U.S. to consider sukkah's function in modern urban contexts (p. 28). In her beautifully lucid formulation, sukkah is quintessential artifact of Diaspora, it constructs and expresses a hybrid concept of of belonging, which overcomes dichotomy of having or not having a place of belonging, by superimposing . . . real and imagined places (p. 31). Another worthy essay that ventures into nexus of symbolism and communal life is German architect Manuel HerzEruv' Urbanism which posits that eruv shifts current notion and meaning of private and public andintraduces a different understanding of space and territory into urban space (p. …

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