One can miss a city, fully. Its smell, sounds and first and foremost, its people. Every single one of them, because each and everyone of them are creating the city, that special feeling and the memories one can miss.
Jerusalem. The city of sinking sun - in the original German translation from Russian by Jennie Seitz and Friederike Meltendorf: Jerusalem. Stadt der untergehenden Sonne - by the writer and scientist Alexander Ilitschewski has the evocative power of a memory trigger. Ilitschweski which is born in Azerbaijan during the times of the Soviet Union and lives in Israel after studying physics and mathematics in Moscow and a short exile in California is not a tourist. He is walking the streets not like a tourist looking for the excitement of the new discoveries, but with the comfort of the everyday connection to the place. He knows its history which alongside with the everyday connections create a particular human geography.
Ilitschewski´s writing is precise and informed, empathic and curious. It reveals the beautiful diversity of this city of huge contrasts, where languages and cultures and traditions and modernity meet or sometimes bluntly clash. A beauty which is not aesthetic but based on the soul of the place. A beauty that suits both poetry and prose, gently intermingled in Jerusalem.
It is a different kind of book with an unique strength and a writing which seems to come as a profound human need. The writing seems to come less as an exercise of self admiration but rather as the result of the pressure to share the story and the experience.
My literary journey back to Jerusalem was intense and punctilious but it was so good to be back, also for the sake of discovering a different way of writing about places. Being personal and directly connected to the place is not a sin, rather the opposite, enriches the quality of the writing.
I am enamorated with the cover of the German edition, a perfect visual rendition of the writing that I couldn´t have enough of.
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