Adina Hoffman – “Till We Have Built Jerusalem Architects of a New City”

Cost:
Free USD

About the book: Equal parts biographical puzzle, architectural meditation, and probing detective story, Adina Hoffman’s “Till We Have Built Jerusalem” offers a prismatic view into one of the world’s most beloved and troubled cities. Panoramic yet intimate, this portrait of three architects who helped build modern Jerusalem is also a gripping exploration of the ways in which politics and aesthetics clash in a place of constant conflict.

The book opens with the arrival in 1930s Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn, who, as a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, hasto 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, he’s forced to work in the often stifling and violent context of British rule. And in the riveting final section, Hoffman herself sets out through the battered streets of today’s Jerusalem looking for traces of a possibly Greek, possibly Arab architect named Spyro Houris. Once renowned around town, Houris is now utterly forgotten, though his buildings still stand, a ghostly testimony to his presence.

A beautifully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, “Till We Have Built Jerusalem” uncovers ramifying levels of one great city’s buried history as it asks what it means, everywhere, to be foreign and to belong.

About the author: Adina Hoffman is the author of “House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood” and “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century,” named one of the best twenty-five books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review. She is also the author, with “Peter Cole, of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza,” the American Library Association’s Jewish Book of the Year. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, she was awarded one of the inaugural (2013) Windham Campbell Prizes. She divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven.

About the co-sponsor: UChicago Hillel is the center and catalyst for Jewish life at the University of Chicago. Part of Hillel International, UChicago Hillel’s mission is to enrich the lives of Jewish students so that they may enrich the Jewish people and the world. Hillel welcomes students of all backgrounds and hopes to foster an enduring commitment to Jewish life, learning and Israel.