1. A classic study of the nostalgic turn in autobiography is Richard Coe's When the Grass Was Taller, which describes childhood's paradise lost as a closed or sheltered world, an alternative dimension that becomes particularly compelling when something in the present intensifies the normal sense of loss and nostalgia. When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

2. In the high holiday liturgy, kedem refers to primordial time: “ḥadesh yamenu ke-kedem”; in the wedding blessings recited under the marriage canopy, kedem appears as a place/time or chronotope: “Sameaḥ tesamaḥ re‘im ’ahuvim ke-sameḥekha yeẓirkha be-gan ‘eden mi-kedem,” suggesting the primordial harmony of lovers fresh with the joy of their divine manufacture in the Garden of Eden “from kedem.” See on this the work of Elior, Rachel, ed., Gan be-‘eden mi-kedem: Masorot gan ‘eden bi-Yisra'el u-va-‘amim (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2010)Google Scholar. But see also Genesis 3:24, where a slight change of wording turns “gan ‘eden mi-kedem,” the primordial Garden of Eden, into “mi-kedem le-gan ‘eden” or East of Eden, the place to which Adam and Eve are banished after sinning in the Garden—suggesting that kedem can be both time and place, and that the place of exile is the very inverse of the Garden. See also Jonah 4:5, Micah 5:1.

3. Agnon, S. Y., In the Heart of the Seas, trans. Lask, I. M. (New York: Schocken, 1947), 20Google Scholar; Hebrew: “Bi-levav yamim,” in ’Elu ve-’elu (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1971), 492Google Scholar.

4. “In Agnon's [version],” writes Miron, “the two Hebrew words reach the convoy of exiles on a piece of parchment that falls directly from heaven, the decision having been made by God Himself.” Dan Miron, “The Literary Image of the Shtetl,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 1, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 36. Here is Agnon, from his “Legends of Poland”: הכי קרא שמה פולין?  אמרה כנסת ישראל לפני הקדוש .ברוך הוא ריבונו של עולם אם עדיין לא הגיעה שעתי להגאל פה לין בלילה של גלות זו עמנו עד שתעלינו לארץ ישראל Agnon, “Kedumot,” “Polin/sippure aggadot,” in ’Elu ve-’elu, 353.

5. Miron, “Literary Image,” 36.

6. http://www.polin.pl/en.

7. Koestler, Arthur, Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine 1917–1949 (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 331Google Scholar. On this see Avishai, Bernard, Promiscuous: Portnoy's Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012)Google Scholar. And, for a more scholarly iteration of the same impulse, see theorist Yi-Fu Tuan's notion of “topophilia” as the “affective bond between people and place or setting.” Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974), 4Google Scholar.

8. Miron, “Literary Image,” 2–3. And see David Roskies's claim that “the shtetl, or Jewish market town of Eastern Europe, is arguably the greatest single invention of Yiddish literature … a symbolic landscape so stable and internally coherent that it could register and absorb whatever tremors that history had in store. [And in America, the shtetl became] a covenantal landscape.” Roskies, David G., “The Shtetl in Jewish Collective Memory,” in The Jewish Search for a Useable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 40Google Scholar, 52, 57.

9. That this subject is more complex is demonstrated in stories and scholarship in which the Ashkenazic Jewish town is acknowledged as encompassing Christian as well as Jewish landmarks. See for example, the “church that looked out from afar” during Chmielnicki's raids of the mid-eighteenth century in Barash's, Asher Hebrew story, “At Heaven's Gate,” in Modern Hebrew Literature, ed. Alter, Robert (West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1975), 168Google Scholar. As Alter points out in his introduction to the narrative, the synagogue and church are in a kind of dialogue here and the Jewish martyr even takes on a Christ-like mien. Ibid, 160–64. See also Neta Stahl on the image of Jesus in Hebrew and Yiddish writing: Other and Brother: Jesus in the 20^th-Century Jewish Literary Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

10. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, introduction to the reissued edition of Zborowski, Mark and Herzog, Elizabeth, Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl (New York: Schocken, 1995), 62Google Scholar. See https:// www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/web/liwp.pdf. As Jonathan Boyarin pointed out in comments on an earlier draft of the present essay, “there's a real ambiguity here. Does Kirschenblatt-Gimblett mean that for the interviewees/informants, ‘the shtetl lacked material reality,’ or only for Zborowski and Herzog? Moreover, this is an interesting ambiguity that is subject to research, since the Life Is with People interview transcripts are available at the Museum of Natural History.”

11. See, for example, Samuel Kassow, “Shtetl,” in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/shtetl#author. And see Shandler, Jeffrey, Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History, vol. 5 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. On urban Jewish spaces in eastern Europe, especially in Russia, see the ongoing work of Steven Zipperstein; on the Jewish beneficiaries of the imperial arrangements in eastern and central Europe, see the ongoing work of Dimitry Shumsky. For an exploration of the “shtetl” and other spaces as “homelandscapes” that belong to a peculiar brand of modernism, see Finkin, Jordan D., An Inch or Two of Time: Time and Space in Jewish Modernisms (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)Google Scholar, especially 44–92.

12. For a longer exploration of this story, see Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 116–30Google Scholar.

13. Lawrence Rosenwald, “New York and Motl's New York or the Rhetorical Geography of the Immigrant City” (Paper presented at conference on “Sholem Aleichem 1916–2016: Writing Place,” Tel Aviv University, May 5, 2016).

14. “Die kleyne Shusterlich,” Tsukumft 50, no. 4 (April 1945): 232–41. The story appeared in English as “The Little Shoemakers,” trans. Rosenfeld, Isaac, in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Howe, Irving and Greenberg, Eliezer (New York: Viking, 1953), 523–44Google Scholar.

15. 2 Samuel 20:19. See Robert Alter's translation of this phrase, which appears only once in the Bible, as “a mother city” and his gloss on this phrase as signifying a “principal town.” The David Story, translation of Samuel 1 and 2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 326Google Scholar. Again, the eliding of small town and city is not uncommon in the memorialization of the shtetl as of the various metropolises of eastern Europe.

16. Soja, Edward, “Writing the City Spatially,” City 7, no. 3 (2003): 273–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The misunderstanding of Marx comes from a mistranslation into English, argues Hal Draper. The Greek term idiotismus designates a person “withdrawn from public concerns.” Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 344–45Google Scholar.

17. “Human society, indeed all forms of social relations and social life, originate, evolve, develop and change in the materially real and socially imagined context of cities.” Soja, “Writing the City Spatially,” 275.

18. See Habermas, Jurgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

19. Sandburg, Carl, “Chicago,” in Chicago Poems (New York: Holt, 1916)Google Scholar. http://www.bartleby.com/165/1.html. Even before what has been called the “spatial” turn in sociology and cultural studies, there were many influential studies of linguistic and cultural polyphony in urban literature and specifically urban Jewish literature, including Baumgarten, Murray, City Scriptures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wirth-Nesher's, Hana City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, followed by her Call It English: The Languages of American Jewish Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. Kazin's, Alfred memoir, A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951)Google Scholar, generated, among other studies, a fascinating essay by Cowan, Michael, “Walkers in the Street: American Writers and the Modern City,” Prospects 6 (Fall 1981): 281–311 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Appelfeld's, novel Mayim ’adirim (Great waters, 2011)Google Scholar is quite explicitly a “village story, with the fragrance of the soil, and To the Land of the Cattails (1986) is a novel that traces the return from city to village,” writes Elhanan Diler, who wrote a master's thesis on the complex relation between autobiography and fiction in two of Appelfeld's narratives (private communication). See Diler, “Ha-sippur ve-ha-ḥayim: Layish ve-Sippur ḥayim ke-’oto/’otobiographiyah/graphiyah” (MA thesis, Hebrew University, 2009).

21. Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 29–31 Google Scholar.

22. Israeli writer Yitzhak Ben-Ner writes with full nostalgia and pathos about the work of Elie Shamir, while hinting at the lurking darkness and revealing the constructed nature of the enterprise and its dystopic realities: “For me, Elie's work on and about our village preserves, beyond the sense of doom, or fear of it, everything that I seek in a homeland village: beauty, peacefulness, different scents, arms open to embrace and a shady green path leading me, the old man and the child, even in my contemporary writing, into the depths of the meaningful, exciting experience of homecoming, after so many generations.… I keep asking myself in desperation: how will this goodness be preserved? I want to protect this green tranquil island of industry, justice, understanding, companionship, and quiet love, which does not erupt in tedious words like I do in my love. How shall I protect it from the wickedness of the world beyond its circle—from insidious intrigues, incipient evil, and dissatisfied, irritable, and perverse bad temper? I see our sons returning from the army; the serenity that once veiled their eyes slowly becomes doubt, disquiet, tremors of confusion and uncertainty. The world is breaking through the flimsy defenses of village life. They are no longer the same boys; they are no longer boys at all. They mature too quickly and no longer have confidence in what was or what will be. The world outside has planted doubt, anxiety and unease in them. Tel Aviv, February 2009.” http://english.elieshamir.co.il/Articles/2009-06-29-19-53-40 (From Rustic Sunset & Other Stories, trans. Whitehill, Robert [Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998]Google Scholar); http://english.elieshamir.co.il/Articles/2009-06-29-13-16-37.

23. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 7, 6.

24. I am fully aware of the Ashkenazic bias in my remarks, and can easily imagine an alternative trajectory using a Mizrahi model of village life, and writers like Dan Benaya-Seri to illustrate it. Or, in the words of Jonathan Boyarin, “is rhetorical yearning for lost Cordoba (very much a heterogeneous late-medieval city!) ‘political’? Perhaps yes, and the argument would be well-served by contrasting nostalgia for conceived wholly-Jewish places (whether in Ashkenaz or elsewhere) to nostalgia for conceived past places of heterogeneity (Cordoba, Salonika).” And, to expand this reach even further, we might recall how a Palestinian Israeli writer like Anton Shammas demonstrates in Arabesques (Hebrew, 1986) a more complex, or in Boym's terms “hybrid,” form of nostalgia for village life along with the heterogeneous encounters within the city, with its like-minded inhabitants as well as its inimical others. Arabesques, trans. Eden, Vivian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar. What is important to me here is the template.

25. Dublin might be the closest to Jerusalem in terms of size, intimacy, ancient/modern linguistic surges, and political strife—if not the same historical depth—but in The Dubliners and Ulysses, Joyce manages to preserve the intimacy while foregrounding the urban cacophony of the “public square.” For a discussion of the poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, see Bloch, Chana and Kronfeld, Chana, Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009)Google Scholar. For a study of the prose of Yaakov Shabtai, see Soker-Shwager, Hana, Maḥashef ha-shevet mi-me‘onot ‘ovdim: Yaakov Shabtai ba-tarbut ha-yisra'elit (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me'uḥad, 2007)Google Scholar; for a study of the fiction of Yehoshua Kenaz, see Tsaal, Naama, Hem dibru bi-leshonam: Ha-po'etikah shel Yehoshua Kenaz (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2016)Google Scholar. For an analysis of the wild prose of Orly Castel-Blum, see Karen Grumbach, who focuses on the urban setting in Castel-Blum's novel, Dolly City: “Violence reigns in her city. And a strange city it is: dystopic, fantastic, phantasmagoric, nightmarish—Dolly City is unlike any other setting in Hebrew literature. At once Tel Aviv and every other city in the world, Dolly City recalls the alienating metropolis that is by now a familiar setting of modernist writing, at the same time adding terrifying new features to this landscape.” http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100218840&extrasfile=424FD8D9-1D09-67E0-43146B2D3595C513.html.

26. From its inception, Tel Aviv was not Jerusalem. Much interesting work has been done in the past few decades on the spatial divide between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, dating back to the time when what came to be known as the “White City” wasn't more than a few sand dunes outside Jaffa and a dream of something radically new. For an overview of the “spatial turn” and its effect on scholarship around Tel Aviv, see Mann, Barbara, “Tel Aviv after 100: Notes toward a New Cultural History,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 16, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 93–110 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also her A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, as well as her Space and Place in Jewish Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

27. Follis, Elaine, “The Holy City as Daughter,” in Directions in Biblical Poetry (Sheffield, UK: ISOT, 1987), 173–84Google Scholar.

28. It is important not to forget that between 1948 and 1967, when East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount were out of sight and out of grasp, the messianic fervor that would take hold of Israeli politics after the Six Day War was dormant. See on this DeKoven Ezrahi, https://profession. commons.mla.org/2016/07/13/literary-archaeology-at-the-temple-mount-recovering-the-comic-version- of-the-sacrifice-of-isaac/.

29. See Grossman, David, See Under: Love (Hebrew, 1986)Google Scholar, The Zigzag Kid (Hebrew, 1994)Google Scholar, and Someone to Run With (Hebrew, 2000)Google Scholar. And see Beer, Haim, Feathers (Hebrew, 1979)Google Scholar, and The Time of Trimming (Hebrew, 1987)Google Scholar.

30. “Ha-yareaḥ melamed Torah” or, in Falk's, Marcia translation, “The Moon Is Teaching Bible.” The Specular Difference: Selected Poems of Zelda (Jerusalem: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004), 80–1Google Scholar.

31. “Ba-laylah ha-hu,” in Shire Zelda (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me'uḥad, 1979), 13–14 Google Scholar, my translation. See also Leah Goldberg's iconic poem, “Tel Aviv: 1935,” for a version of Tel Aviv as cosmopolitan and open to the horizon of metropolitan memories. http://www.kibutz-poalim.co.il/tel_aviv1935.

32. The most revealing and exhaustive exploration of Amichai's poetics is Kronfeld, Chana, The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; for a study of Amichai's poetics in relation to Jerusalem and the sacred center, see Ezrahi, DeKoven, “Yehuda Amichai: Paytan shel ha-yomyom” (Yehuda Amichai: Poet of the quotidian), Mikan 14 (Spring 2014): 143–67Google Scholar. For a performance of Blumenfeld at a poetry slam, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBDF-IfNBuA. And see also the Jerusalem poetry of Admiel Kosman.

33. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1966/agnon-speech.html.

34. For a more detailed exploration of these subjects, see Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, “Sentient Dogs, Liberated Rams, and Talking Asses: Agnon's Biblical Zoo—or Rereading Tmol shilshom ,” AJS Review 28, no. 1 (April 2004): 105–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Only Yesterday, trans. Harshav, Barbara (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 557Google Scholar.

36. “Ha-siman,” trans. Arthur Green as “The Sign,” rprt. in Agnon, , A City in Its Fullness, ed. Mintz, Alan and Saks, Jeffrey (New Milford, CT: Toby, 2016), 20–21 Google Scholar. For an analysis of “A Guest for the Night,” “The Sign,” and the posthumously published story “Kisuy ha-dam” (Covering the blood), see Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, “Agnon before and after,” Prooftexts 2, no. 1 (January 1982): 78–94 Google Scholar.

37. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, “S. Y. Agnon's Jerusalem: Before and after 1948,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, n.s., 18, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2012): 140CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In many respects the present essay is a continuation of that discussion. And for more general discussions of “diasporic” vs. sacred space, see DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage.

38. “Li-fenim min ha-ḥomah,” in Li-fenim min ha-ḥomah (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1975), 49Google Scholar, my translation.

39. As I argued in “S. Y. Agnon's Jerusalem,” “although Agnon agreed to write the official prayer for peace (‘Tefilah li-shelom ha-medina’) for the newly constituted State, one suspects that he did it more for the satisfaction of being inducted as one of Israel's paytanim, those poets who grace the prayer books of the generations, than for any political relevance” (140). For an account of Agnon's contacts with various religious and political leaders about this text, see Laor, Dan, Ḥaye Agnon: Biyographiyah (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1998), 406–8Google Scholar. And see Laor's report that Agnon “deliberately refrained from approaching the stones of the Kotel” after 1967, which could be understood either as reverence for or ambivalence about proximity to the sacred. Ibid., 611. Hillel Cohen points out that Agnon's ambivalence towards political claims to the Temple Mount came as early as the riots of 1929: “The writer S. Y. Agnon, who was close to Rabbi Kook, was not one of those who inflamed the situation, although he certainly did not try to calm things down. After the riots erupted, Agnon felt he had made a terrible mistake” in not trying to assuage the nationalist fervor. “‘When I attended the Va'ad Leumi (Jewish National Council) plenum for the first and last time in my life,’ he wrote to prominent Reform Rabbi Judah Leon Magnes, ‘and I observed the heroism bug that had infected the heroic speakers, I wanted to yell out: lay your hands off this. But by nature I am the reticent type and every day I have regretted not having stood in the breach.’” http://972mag.com/what-the-1929-palestine-riots-teach-us-about-todays-violence/112830/. I have edited the English translation somewhat. For the source of Agnon's ambivalence and even remorse, see his letter to Magnes in Me-‘aẓmi ’el ‘aẓmi (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1976), 144Google Scholar.

40. Mintz, foreword to S. Y. Agnon, A City in Its Fullness, xvi.

41. Mintz, foreword to A City in Its Fullness, xx.

42. See http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/city/buczacz . See the elision between city and shtetl in Y. L. Peretz's Hebrew poem “Shtetl,” or “Ho-ʿir ha-ketanoh.” Translated in Finkin, An Inch or Two of Time, 185–194. For comprehensive studies of Buczacz, see Bartov, Omer, “The Voice of Your Brother's Blood: Buczacz, Biography of a Town,” in Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches, ed. Goda, N. (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 105–34Google Scholar; and his forthcoming volume by the same title, The Voice of Your Brother's Blood: Buczacz, Biography of a Town (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017)Google Scholar.

43. Mintz, foreword to A City in Its Fullness, xx.

44. It is telling that Saks and Mintz decided to introduce the volume A City in Its Fullness with the story “The Sign” which had, as we noted, already appeared first in 1944 and then in the 1962 collection Ha-’esh ve-ha-‘eẓim (A City in Its Fullness, 1–30). The story not only reinforces the anachronistic, elegiac version of the town/city of his birth, which characterizes so many of Agnon's stories of Buczacz, and of Jerusalem—but, like Guest for the Night, presupposes the resurrection of the one in the other.

45. Samukh ve-nireh, first published in 1950 (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1971), 250–89Google Scholar. English: The Orange Peel and Other Satires (including all the stories from Perakim le-sefer ha-medinah), trans. and foreword by Saks, Jeffrey (New Milford, CT: Toby, 2016)Google Scholar.

46. Laor relates that Agnon was accused of “nihilism” vis-à-vis the new state in his Perakim le-sefer ha-medinah. Laor, Ḥaye Agnon, 433. It is possible, therefore, that the Kaddish for the fallen at the end of the text was added to make some amends, so close to the War of 1948, for the satiric texture of the prose. The Orange Peel and Other Satires, 171–73.

47. See Hever, Hannan, “‘Perakim le-sefer ha-medinah’ me-’et Shay Agnon,” Mikan 14 (March 2014): 168–99Google Scholar.

48. Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman call “‘Agunot” Agnon's “signature story.” Introduction to A Book That Was Lost and Other Stories, by Agnon, S. Y. (New York: Knopf, 1995), 3–34 Google Scholar.

49. Arguably the most dramatic instance of the elegiac version of the world under the protection of Franz Josef comes in Tmol shilshom, as Isaac Kumer is on the train traveling through the imperial realm en route to Palestine: “And so Isaac sits and rides through the realm of Austria, that same Austria that rules over eighteen states, and twelve nations are subject to it. One and the same law for the Jews and for the people of the land, their well-being is our well-being, for the Emperor is a Gracious King, he protects all who take shelter with him, Jew and non-Jew alike. Her earth is lush and fertile and the produce of her land is greater than the needs of her inhabitants. …” Only Yesterday, 20.

And see Agnon's “Apologia” at the end of the volume Ha-’esh ve-ha-‘eẓim (which includes the story “Ha-siman”)—where the author recalls the benign Galician world under the protection of the “Austrian Empire” and before “Tisha be-av tar'ad [August, 1914], when the Great War began,” out of which have come all our “subsequent disasters”: ספר תכלית המעשים מיועד היה לספר מעשי אחינו שבגליציה בזמן שהיו שרוים בצלה של מלכות אוסטריך ומעין מנוחת שלום היתה שם עד לאותו תשעה באב שנת תרע׳ד שהתחילה בו המלחמה הגדולה שממנה התחילה הפורענות שמהלכת על כל הדורות ובכל הארצות עד שירחם המרחם על עולמו ויאמר לצרותינו די. Ha-’esh ve-ha-‘eẓim (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1962), 336Google Scholar.

What is significant here, of course, is that Agnon doesn't locate the beginning of the apocalyptic era in the Shoah or in World War II, nor does he see a utopia in any blueprint of Jewish sovereignty; it is the reign of Franz Josef that comes close to the heavenly blueprint whose emblem in his oeuvre is the divine prayer shawl, and it is the tsar's death that constitutes the loose thread.