Publisher's Synopsis
Planned at the beginning of the 1920s as a garden city on the fringes of Jerusalem, the suburbs of Talbiyeh and Rehavia become a centre of emigration for German Jews from 1933 onwards, acquiring the nickname 'Grunewald on the Orient' - a reference to the residential south-western district of Berlin. The neighbourhood became a lively German-Jewish microcosm, with residents including the poet and playwright Else Lasker-Schüler, the historian Gershom Scholem, and the philosopher and scholar Martin Buber. It was an idyllic setting, but life was also tough and could be unforgiving; it lay at the cross hairs of a long-divided city. After the war, the recent history of the Shoah weighed heavily on the neighbourhood's inhabitants, but it also became a place of German-Israeli rapprochement. German Jerusalem is a story of a culturally distinctive neighbourhood, and a fascinating group biography of those who lived and worked there.
