George Prochnik's most recent book, The Impossible Exile- Stefan Zweig at the End of the World,areceived the National Jewish Book Award for Biography/Memoir in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize in the UK. Prochnik is also the author of In Pursuit of Silence- Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (2010), and Putnam Camp- Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam and the Purpose of American Psychology (2006). He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bookforumaand theaLA Review of Books, and is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine.a
Praise for Stranger in a Strange Land
*SHORTLISTED FOR WINGATE PRIZE (UK)*
“A hunt through the crevices of one life in search of clues that
might unlock the mysteries—intellectual, religious, political and
psychological—of another…Prochnik sought out Jewish tradition
precisely because he understood it as a wellspring of energy—sparks
he could use to power up a life disconnected from an deeper source
of meaning…the last 20 pages beam with light—a radiant
justification of the preceding darkness that comes close to, well,
perfect.” —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REIVEW
"Harold Bloom considered Scholem 'not less than a prophet,'
declaring that for many contemporary Jewish intellectuals, 'the
Kabbalah of Gershom Scholem is now more normative than normative
Judaism itself.' And yet many people haven’t heard of him. George
Prochnik aims to change this with his book 'Stranger in a Strange
Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem.' Prochnik is the
author of several books, most recently ‘The Impossible Exile:
Stefan Zweig at the End of the World,’ which won the National
Jewish Book Award in 2014. In ‘Stranger in a Strange Land,’ he
again mixes biography and memoir, digging deep into Scholem’s life
and work while telling the story of his own relationship with
Judaism and Jerusalem, the adopted city of both author and
subject….[using] a colorful style…But it’s the way Prochnik weaves
memoir through this intellectual biography that shows how
thoroughly the author’s own life has twined with Scholem’s ideas.
Just as a mystic ascends from one palace to the next in Kabbalah
cosmology, Scholem’s life and work have led Prochnik from phase to
phase of his own.”—WASHINGTON POST
"Stranger in a Strange Land, by George Prochnik (Other). Gershom
Scholem, the renowned historian and theologian, was instrumental in
the formation of twentieth-century Zionism and played a crucial
role in revitalizing Jewish mysticism. He was also a fractious man
of “unrepentant multiplicity,” and once fancied himself the
Messiah. Entwining memoir with biography, Prochnik skillfully
chronicles Scholem’s intellectual and personal life, including his
passionate friendship with Walter Benjamin; his 1923 emigration
from Berlin to Jerusalem; and his ambivalent attitude toward the
evolution of Zionism, which eventually, he believed, “triumphed
itself to death.” Prochnik’s account of his own sojourn in
Jerusalem illuminates the ongoing struggle to reconcile Zionist
ideals with political realities and to envision possibilities for
breaking “the spell of hopelessness” in a divided land." —NEW
YORKER
“Prochnik (The Impossible Exile) effectively and movingly combines
a nuanced biography of Gershom Scholem, who ‘singlehandedly created
an academic discipline [Jewish Mysticism] out of an obscure
theological tradition [study of the Kabbalah],’ with a
warts-and-all autobiography that recounts Prochnik’s search for
meaning in his own life…This is a powerful must-read for anyone
interested in how people of faith struggle to live in the real
world.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY STARRED REVIEW
"...George Prochnik has produced a book of remarkable erudition and
emotional depth that plays the life and thinking of Gershom Scholem
against his own. This is at once a compelling intellectual
biography of the formidable Scholem and a piercing personal memoir.
The two threads together tell a story of Jews in Israel in a way
too often overlooked: not in sweeping terms of faith and nations
and history, but in the more intimate terms of what people do to
make their way in the world, and what they tell each other and
themselves as they do it." —LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
"In the wake of so much political turmoil, we’re hungry for books
that diagnose our broken world: books that lay out a grand ethical
program and claw back some hope for humanity...In Gershom Scholem,
the historian who popularized the study of Kabbalistic and
Messianic movements in Judaism, I’ve found a refreshing vision of
revolutionary change and justice, stimulating the utopian
imagination beyond the traditional touchstones of leftist
thought...Stranger in a Strange Land, an excellent new biography of
Scholem...If you’re interested in reading more about Scholem,
Prochnik’s Stranger is the best place to start—it
elegantly tracks Prochnik’s experiences in modern Jerusalem against
Scholem’s life." —THE PARIS REVIEW
“Ardent, beautifully written book.” —GUARDIAN
"George Prochnik blends history, philosophy, and memoir with
exemplary panache in this fascinating account of an intellectual
and spiritual journey. But he never loses sight of the essential
questions: How are we to live? And in what kind of world?"
—Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger: A History of the
Present
“What a wonderful book this is: gripping, illuminating, beautifully
constructed, and full of the communicative energy that comes from
things long in gestation but written with fire and speed. It does
so many things so well—the portrait of Scholem himself, the account
of his work, the study of friendship that comes about through the
sustained presence of Walter Benjamin, the evocations of Jerusalem
and New York, above all the paralleling of Prochnik’s own story
with Scholem’s. The extraordinary affinities between author and
subject give the book an emotional intensity that complements its
erudition and lends power to its final, audacious, inspiring claim
on the reader’s capacity for hope.”
—James Lasdun, author of The Fall Guy
“Melding biography and memoir, National Jewish Book Award
winner Prochnik (The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of
the World, 2014, etc.) examines the life and work of Gershom
Scholem (1897-1982), philological archaeologist of the mystical
roots of Judaism… Prochnik vividly renders his own journey to
define his relationship to Judaism… [a] candid testament of two men
passionately trying to revive and reimagine
Judaism.” —KIRKUS
“…an intriguing…dual-track biography of the author and the Jewish
writer, philosopher, and mystic Gershom Scholem. Like Scholem,
Prochnik (The Impossible Exile, 2014) has repeatedly been engaged
in an intellectual and spiritual quest, searching for a balance
between the physical and the ethereal and touching on the nature of
Jewish identity. Prochnik alternates between his own experiences
living in Israel in the 1990s and Scholem’s life and intellectual
evolution in the emerging Zionist state. Along with his deep
emotional attachment to Israel, Prochnik was troubled by the
dehumanizing aspects of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip. Scholem, born in Berlin, was a cultural rather than a
political Zionist. He hoped for a binational state in Palestine, an
idealistic aspiration frustrated by both Jewish and Arab
nationalism…a stimulating examination of the struggles of both men
to reconcile their idealism with reality.” —BOOKLIST
“On this spiritual journey, writer Prochnik...traces the
intellectual and mystical arc of Gershom Scholem, the German-born
Israeli philosopher who advanced theories of Kabbalah and Jewish
mysticism…complex and intricate…for readers drawn to Jewish
mysticism and Jewish messianism and those interested in Prochnik’s
peregrinations in the footsteps of Scholem, Sabbatai Zevi, and
Theodore Herzl.” —LIBRARY JOURNAL
“…Prochnik is possessed of an agile, probing mind, and in his
latest, he applies it to understanding the life of Gershom Sholem,
intellectual mystic and friend to Walter Benjamin, devotee of the
Kabbalah and devoted Zionist.”—LITERARY HUB
“Books by Jewish writers on Jewish topics usually carry a
heavy personal subtext...what does it mean to be a
Jew—for me to be a Jew?... The genius of George Prochnik,
in his new book Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for
Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem, is that he surfaces this subtext and
makes it his explicit subject. The result is an immersive,
passionate work that is really two books spliced together. The
first is a quasi-biography of Gershom Scholem, the pioneering
scholar of Jewish mysticism, whose life encompassed the greatest
Jewish quandaries of the twentieth century. The second is a
personal memoir, in which Prochnik describes his own experience of
moving from America to Israel, where he lived and raised a family
for more than a decade, and then moving back again. Sections of
these two tales alternate, creating a meaningful counterpoint, for
they are really variations on the same story. Prochnik loves
Scholem—and this is clearly a book written out of love, not mere
interest or duty—because he offers a role model for a soul in quest
of an authentic way to be Jewish…Prochnik performs impressive feats
of concise elucidation, taking the reader through Scholem’s life,
times, and work in under 500 pages…This book is worthy of the rich,
ambivalent, complex, and compelling stories it has to tell; more
than a work of history, it is a document of the living spirit of
Judaism.” –BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW
“In his previous book, George Prochnik gave us a moving portrait of
Stefan Zweig, the Viennese Jew who wrote tenderly of the ‘world of
yesterday’—the liberal Europe that collapsed with apocalyptic
consequences in the 1930s—and killed himself in his Brazilian exile
rather than die in its flames. In his powerful new book, Prochnik
offers us a portrait of a Berlin Jew, fifteen years Zweig’s junior,
who made a very different choice: to renounce the dream of a
liberal Europe and remake himself, and his people, in Palestine.
Gerhard Scholem, who would become the famous scholar of the
Kabbalah Gershom Scholem, upheld a cultural version of Zionism, and
spoke of the need for Arab–Jewish coexistence; yet over time he
accommodated himself to the often brutal practices of the Jewish
state, which turned Palestinians into strangers in their own land.
In the late 1980s, as Palestinians in the Occupied Territories
launched their first Intifada, Prochnik, an American Jew from the
suburbs, settled in Jerusalem with his family, inspired by
Scholem’s vision of a renewed Jewish cultural vitality, only to
discover that this vision lay in ruins, no match for the muscular,
expansionist Zionism with which it had made a marriage of
convenience. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Prochnik writes of
Scholem’s dream—and of his own—with a rare and affecting
combination of authority and vulnerability. This is a deeply felt
work of critique and elegy, a probing examination of the subject of
our time: the temptations, and the dangers, of belonging.”
—Adam Shatz, contributing editor at the London Review of Books
“Prochnik’s book presents an uneasy political–mystical tour
through Scholem’s writing and his own Jerusalem, now lost forever.
What makes it a unique and brilliant contribution to current
debates about Palestine is that in his reading of Scholem, Prochnik
finds simultaneously both the echoes of the
forces—messianic, national, and colonial—that keep tearing the
region apart, and also the kernel of something precious to be
salvaged. From the abyss of our despair, Prochnik manages to do
what so few others can: imagine a future of living
together.”
—Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of
Occupation and director of the Centre for Research
Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London
“George Prochnik is a great practitioner of the art of
auto-nonfiction, the writing of intellectual history in which a
past life is quickened again by the keen presence of the author.
Yet Prochnik never obtrudes; rather, his beautiful sentences guide
us, gently but surely, through both the often-complex thinking of
his subjects and the often-traumatic events of their lives. As in
his biography of the mercurial Stefan Zweig, alienation is
foregrounded in this account of the scholarly Gershom Scholem (who
inscribed it in his adopted name, Gershom, meaning “stranger in a
strange land”). But loss is lightened here by the Scholemian
conviction that the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of biblical
interpretation of which he was the world expert, offers not only a
key to the broken past but also a call to its healing. If the
Kabbalah appeared to Scholem as an allegory of Jewish exile,
Zionism was his way to bring this wandering to an end. As a young
man Prochnik was fired by similar hopes, and in what he describes
elsewhere as a ‘shadow-arc’ of his subject, he too emigrated to
Jerusalem—only, like Scholem, to be disillusioned by the state
politics he encountered there. Yet even that loss is lightened
somewhat, for Prochnik came to discover what Scholem had also
learned: how we are then mandated to ‘live responsibly, inside
history.’ That ethical invitation is heard in every sentence of
this inspiring book.”
—Hal Foster, author of Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency
“Reading this utterly absorbing book, I felt like the stranger in
the title, led by the hand through the complementary landscapes of
two lives: Gershom Scholem’s and the author’s. Moving between them
with deftness and artistry, Prochnik holds the reader’s attention
at every turn. In the process, he casts new light on Kabbalah and
develops a critique of Zionism that is as thought-provoking as any
I have read.”
—Brian Klug, author of Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing
Argument to Life
“Gershom Scholem…a scholar of Judaism has become an inspiration to
those yearning to find a religious center in their lives…Enter
George Prochnik, born in 1961, the author of “The Impossible Exile:
Stefan Zweig at the End of the World” (2014) and himself something
of a specialist in exile.” —WALL STREET JOURNAL
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