Until the late 19th century, Jews were identified in their own religious and poetic imagination as wanderers, their sacred center - Jerusalem, Zion - fatefully out of reach. This book examines the work of medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi to chart a journey whose end was envisioned as the realignment of the people with their original center.
"This is a work of immense scholarship . . . [that] includes medieval Spanish poets like Judah Ha-Levi and the contemporary novelist Philip Roth. Booking Passage is about a return to sacred places, and the sacred in Israel. The dream of 'homecoming' is lastingly recoverable, truly, only in literature and as literature."-Alfred Kazin
