Reviews for My Residence at the Court of the Amir

The average rating for My Residence at the Court of the Amir based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-07-16 00:00:00 Junichi Uenohata 'My heart is in the East and I am in the depths of the West.' Living out here in south Wales as I do, on the western edge of Europe, and in Israel as I once did, the mediaeval Jewish poet Yehuda HaLevi's words struck a chord as I picked this book up in a reflective and I suppose 'Jew-ish' mood this last Yom Kippur. London-born Jerusalemite Jeremy Leigh is a guide and educator of Jewish history and literature. This well-written and thoughtfully compiled anthology is his own personal take on the subject of Jewish journeys through the ages. It was first published in 2006 and is nicely presented in a small hardback format, with a nice fold out map in the front pages. Divided into three sections the book examines the subject that is at the heart of the Jewish experience. Those sections are "Self: Personal Reflections on Jewish Journeys", "Context: The Idea of Journey in Jewish Experience", and "Voices and Places: Literary Jewish Journeys Through the Ages". The first of these dragged a little, with a few too many pages given to autobiographic recollections; though it does serve in giving the reader a good idea of the type of man the author is, and perhaps a sense of where he's coming from and what he wants to express with this book. In the second section - the book definitely picks up as the author explores a variety of themes that emerge in common across the years: 'One can only speculate what was going through the minds of those Jews leaving Roman Palestine. Did they know that this journey would define the character of Jewish life for the next 1900 years? Did they have any conception that the notion of 'home' was changing forever and cultural readjustment, by no means new to Jewish experience, was soon to become a permanent feature of life?' As the book progresses in small nicely digestible chunks of text, convenient for slow readers such as myself to dip in and out of, Leigh uses a wide selection of sources (there is a concise though thorough section of 'Endnotes' at the rear) to illustrate his themes: 'In a different and more widely-known legend, the wandering Jew finds Poland as the antidote to wandering. There are numerous versions of this story, including three renditions by Nobel Prize winning writer S. Y. Agnon, one by the great Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz and others. All are variants of an oral folk tale {this is circa 17th century} that present Poland as [a] type of promised land for Jews: "If you want to know how it suddenly occurred to these Jews in Germany to seek refuge in Poland, legend has it that after the Jews had decreed a fast and beseeched God to save them from the murderers, a slip of paper fell from heaven. On it was written: 'Go to Poland, for there you will find rest...' The Jews set out for Poland. When they reached it, the birds in the forest chirped to greet them 'Po lin! Po lin!' [which means 'rest here' in Hebrew] The travellers translated this into Hebrew, as if the birds were saying: 'Here you should lodge...' Afterwards, when they looked closely at the trees, it seemed to them that a leaf from the Gemara was hanging on every branch. At once they understood that here a place had been revealed to them, where they could settle and continue to develop the Jewish spirit and the age-old Jewish learning."' The book's final and third section was the most enjoyable one for me, coming as it does replete with great examples and excerpts from literary sources, centred geographically. It approaches some of the many 'settings' for the many memorable dramas in my people's history: 'Leaving' (here Leigh references the biblical departure of Jacob in particular, and how it differed from that of his grandfather - the patriarch Arbaham), 'Jaffa' (and the endlessly beguiling story of Jonah and the whale), 'Rome' - 'The rabbis of the Talmud decided to write the history of the city by revisiting a previous moment of time. "Rab Judah said in Samuel's name: When Solomon married Pharaoh's daughter, Gabriel descended and planted a reed in the sea and around gathered around it, on which the great city of Rome was built..."' From the eternal city we cover sections on 'Damascus/Baghdad', then 'Jerusalem/Girona/Toledo' - this section looks to Benjamin of Tudela, the mediaeval Jewish traveller from the Kingdom of Navarre. I'm very keen to read Benjamin, if for no other reason than when I visited Toledo in Spain some years ago it reminded me of Jerusalem more than anywhere else. But I digress.... (Digression is actually something this book does very nicely - in a sort of structured way.) From Spain we move to 'Naples/Venice', 'Berlin', and 'Paris'. The book is by no means meant to be comprehensive - it is a personal selection after all - but I liked the way Leigh linked theme to theme and place to place with a certain logical progression. And so to Poland again. No birds with heavenly messages this time, but to Krakow, and Oswiecim. As Leigh puts it: 'The guide's dilemma: how does one speak at sites of the Holocaust? ... maybe I should just withdraw? In relation to the 'great Auschwitz field' the Polish Jewish poet, Henryk Grynberg in his poem 'Poplars' says the following, "I don't try to understand anything nor say anything what else can one have to say here I come here to add my own to the growing silence" Grynberg, together with his mother, were the sole survivors of their entire extended family. I am only a tour guide. Some guides bypass the problem by rushing straight to the conclusions, keen to emphasize what they believe the site means. In some cases this can be meaningful, in many cases it sounds crass. I am suspicious since no amount of hyperbole ever seems to transmit the power of the event itself. And yet, words must be spoken, victims must be recalled. Maybe it is the easier option, but the words of the victim often seem more appropriate.' From the middle ages Islamic and Christian worlds of Yehuda HaLevi's poetry or Benjamin of Tudela's travelogue, to the 19th century shtetl of Shalom Aleichem's Railroad Stories, and the 20th century semi-assimilation of Joseph Roth's Wandering Jews, this book ably conveys the sense of a people's grand journey through time. A journey still underway of course - the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai's moving poem 'Sandals', and the Algerian-born Erez Biton's poem 'Zohra al Fasiya' round out the book. Biton - "speaks through the experience of the legendary Jewish Moroccan singer of that name. Her journey to Israel has come at the expense of the fame and status she enjoyed in Morocco and is now a sad shadow of herself, bereft of her glory and living through her memories." As the final words of the book's epilogue state: 'Not all journeys yield great riches. Paradoxically, journeys are sometimes required to appreciate this.'

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-12 00:00:00 Gary Reed Good