The poetics of place: Unraveling home and exile in Jewish literature from Israel and the United States

This dissertation examines the multiple place narratives in modern Jewish literature from Israel and the United States, showing that the standard tropes of exile and home insufficiently express the Jewish perception of place.; Recently, some scholars have overturned the conventional Zionist model of Jewish place that privileges Israel as the Jewish home and the Diaspora as the place of exile. They articulate an alternative model that posits the sacred text in exile as the Jewish homeland. Despite these resistant readings, however, the paradigm of Israel as home and the Diaspora as exile remains the dominant one. Furthermore, while the alternative model insists on redefining exile as home, it continues to utilize the vocabulary of nationalism. By exploring the diverse possibilities of home in Jewishness, I try to unravel the exile/home dichotomy rather than simply reverse it. This dissertation expands the scholarly resistance against the dominant nationalist narrative of place, by analyzing the variety of alternatives found in fiction.; Scholarly dialogue on place among the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, the philosopher Edward Casey, and the literary critic Roberto Dainotto, among others, grounds my study. I also explore themes that remain largely unacknowledged in the discourse on the Jewish notion of place but inextricably linked to it, such as gender and race, widening the relevance of the study beyond Jewish literature.; The dissertation reveals the complexity of place in various contexts represented by Philip Roth, Allegra Goodman, Amos Oz, and Orly Castel-Bloom. Hovering between Israel and America, Jewish men question the relationship between "authentic" Jewishness and place. American women discover sites of Jewish spirituality that allow them to position themselves in textual homelands in subversively feminine configurations. In Israel, the opposition between the mythologized desert and the Zionist place parallels the tension between a primeval pre-Zionist state and the nationalist construction of boundaries that attempts to erase it. Imaginary literary worlds characterized by grotesque injustice reflect the flaws of the homeland that cannot function as a home for all its inhabitants, and which necessitates the invention of fantastic worlds at which to direct critical wrath.