MICHAL GOVRIN /
LITERATURE
'How is one to tell? How is one to hold on to the shreds of our story?’ The question is asked by Ilana Tzuriel, a rebellious left-wing architect who has left Israel and returned years later, of her father, an ardent dreamer from the pioneering years of the State. In the year following her father’s death Ilana writes snapshots of confession to him; of things that they would never have dared to say to one another out loud – of betrayal and faithfulness to the father and his legacy, to the land and to the Jewish story – of a stormy love- and creative life, tossed about among the capitals of the world.
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Within months of its publication in Israel, The Name was heralded by critics and scholars alike, who compared its author to such writers as Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gide, and Beckett. The novel – a story of one woman's embrace of mystical Judaism and parallel descent into madness – was later awarded one of the country's most prestigious literary prizes, establishing Michal Govrin as a singular new voice in world literature.
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Body of Prayer
Jacques Derrida, Michal Govrin, David Shapiro
The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, New York, 2001
Jacques Derrida, Michal Govrin, David Shapiro
The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, New York, 2001
The "Advanced Concepts" course has been an integral component of the education of architects within The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Uniun, researching the parallel disciplines of writing, art, sound, and their relations to architecture. Poet and professor David Shapiro, invited Michal Govrin, Israel’s great writer and theater director, to lecture on certain spatial problems of the sacred. She, in turn, invited Jacque Derrida, the celebrated French philosopher, to elaborate questions. Their visit coincided with the English publication of The Name, a novel "voiced" as a prayer, which became the starting point for this meditation on prayer.
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A series of fractures in the flow of reality suddenly leaves the heroes of Hold On to the Sun utterly exposed: a weekend vacation shakes the fragile routine of Holocaust survivors and evokes in them the harsh memory that was allegedly dimmed; a sudden change in timetable leaves an interval in the business schedule of a traveler, who finds himself experiencing, perhaps for the first time, the taste of passion; a fantastic breaking of the laws of nature engenders a fascinating blossom of a growing-old body, or the burning outbreak of the desire to “hold on to the sun”.
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"The Making of the Sea" is a journal, a chronicle. During the journey, which starts on the seashore at Rio-De-Janeiro and arrives at Jerusalem, the gaze meets the sights of the road and the sights of the soul, among them are memories, thoughts and experiences of death and love.
The "journal" is written in a column at the center of the page and around it, as the paging of a Talmud sheet, interpretations of the central column are arranged.
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We Were as Dreamers by Pinchas Govrin (1904-1985) reveals, through the story of a single family, the drama of Jewish life in Eastern Europe from the beginning of the 20th Century to the days of the third wave of immigration to Israel (‘Ha’alia Hashlishit’ 1921-3). The book presents a colorful and delicate picture of the towns Shpikov and Braslev, in which JEW/S and Gentiles, Hasidim, beggars, house lords (ba’alei batim? If so, perhaps householders would be a little closer? Or simply ‘balebassim’?), secular intellectuals and Zionists – all live side by side.
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