Inch or Two of Time

Jordan D. Finkin is Visiting Scholar in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

• ContentsAcknowledgementsAppendixIntroduction: The Aesthetics of SpatiotemporalityChapter 1: A Brief Essay on Time, Space, Nation, and MetaphorChapter 2: “Heymen un Reymen:” Homelandscapes, Shtetlekh, and Other Creative SpacesChapter 3: Temporaesthesia Chapter 4: The Revolutionary Principles of Time and SpaceChapter 5: Enclosed in Distances: The Poetic Experiments of Yocheved Bat-MiriamAfterwordBibliography

“An Inch or Two of Time sets forth a complex, elegant argument that recontextualizes eastern European modernist Yiddish and Hebrew poetry. Jordan Finkin’s book revisits concepts of Jewish collective memory and redefines the arc of Jewish history through the disruptive language and fragmented style and themes of interwar Jewish poetry. Finkin’s argument centers on the conjoined metaphors of time and space that are expressed and embedded in this poetry in the Jewish languages, Yiddish and Hebrew. Through them, Finkin addresses the broader issues of disrupted time and space, which informed all of modernist literature, art, and music during a period when these concepts were radically redefined in modernity at large. Finkin discovers the redefinition of ‘time and space, history and territory,’ which leads to new understandings of the idea of ‘nation’ and of literature. By reading key examples of Yiddish, Hebrew, and German modernist poetry through the conceptual prism of time and space, Finkin argues persuasively the degree to which these particular examples of Jewish modernist poetry can illuminate modernism in general.”—Kathryn Hellerstein, University of Pennsylvania