A biographical excavation of one of the world's great, troubled cities
A remarkable view of one of the world's most beloved and troubled cities, Adina Hoffman's Till We Have Built Jerusalem is a gripping and intimate journey into the very different lives of three architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem.
The book unfolds as an excavation. It opens with the 1934 arrival in Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn, a refugee from Hitler's Germany who must reckon with a complex new Middle Eastern reality. Next we meet Austen St. Barbe Harrison, Palestine's chief government architect from 1922 to 1937. Steeped in the traditions of Byzantine and Islamic building, this "most private of public servants" finds himself working under the often stifling and violent conditions of British rule. And in the riveting final section, Hoffman herself sets out through the battered streets of today's Jerusalem searching for traces of a possibly Greek, possibly Arab architect named Spyro Houris. Once a fixture on the local scene, Houris is now utterly forgotten, though his grand Armenian-tile-clad buildings still stand, a ghostly testimony to the cultural fluidity that has historically characterized Jerusalem at its best.
A beautifully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, Till We Have Built Jerusalem uncovers the ramifying layers of one great city's buried history as it asks what it means, everywhere, to be foreign and to belong.
- New eBook additions
- New eBook additions for Kids
- New eBook additions for Teens
- Most popular
- Most popular for Kids
- Most popular for Teens
- Available Now
- Available Now for Kids
- Available Now for Teens
- Book Club 2023-2024: Guaranteed Available : Karapu Pukapuka: Wātea Mārika 2023-2024
- Guaranteed Available: Book Club: Literature with a Big L
- Travel Club 2023-2024: Guaranteed Available
- Reese's Pieces
- See all
- New eAudiobook additions
- New eAudiobook additions for Kids
- New eAudiobook additions for Teens
- Most popular eAudiobooks
- Most popular eAudiobooks for Kids
- Most popular eAudiobooks for Teens
- Available now on eAudio
- Available Now on eAudio for Kids
- Available Now on eAudio for Teens
- AudioBook Club 2023-2024: Guaranteed Available
- Guaranteed Available: Book Club: eAudio Classic "Reads"
- Children's AudioBook Club 2023-2024: Guaranteed Available
- See all
- Ngā pukapuka i te reo Māori : Books in the Māori Language
- Tusi Samoa : Samoan Books
- Ngaahi tohi ʻi he lea faka-Tongá : Books in Tongan
- किताबें हिंदी में Kitaaben hindee mein : Books in Hindi
- 中文书籍 Zhōngwén shūjí : Books in Chinese
- 中文杂志 Zhōngwén zázhì : Magazines in Chinese
- Buugaag af-soomaali ku qoran : Books in Somali
- Livres en français : Books in French
- Magazines en français : Magazines in French
- Bücher in deutscher Sprache : Books in German
- Zeitschriften in deutscher Sprache : Magazines in German
- Mga libro ma Filipino : Books in Tagalog
- Boeke in Afrikaans : Books in Afrikaans
- See all