Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Charting the Terrain -- I. People of the Book -- II. Double Standards -- III. Crossing Borders -- IV. Europe and the Middle East -- V. Language and Cultural Difference -- VI. Nativity and Exile -- VII. Reimagining History -- 1. Discontinued Lines: Drafts for an Itinerary -- I. Militant Archeology: Dispossessing Native Jews -- II. Gazing at Palestine: Yosef Haim Brenner and Albert Antebbi -- III. 1938: Beirut to Jerusalem via Damascus/An Itinerary for Edmond Jabès -- IV. Cairo: From Umm Kulthum to Nawal Saadawi -- V. Discourses of the City -- VI. Beirut: Setting the Standards -- VII. Beirut and the Poetics of Disaster -- VIII. Jerusalem and the Crusader Man -- IX. Jerusalem: The Islamic City -- X. Turning the Page: Back to Damascus -- 2. A Garden Enclosed: The Geography of Time -- I. Traveling through Glass Walls: Defining the Levant -- II. S. D. Goitein and the Geniza World -- III. Cities and Texts -- IV. The Common Currency of Verse -- V. Dunash Ben Labrat and Classical Sephardic Poetry -- VI. Yehuda al-Harizi and Old Metaphors -- VII. The Scarlet Thread of Song: From Samuel Hanagid to Yehezkel Hai Albeg -- VIII. The Spanish Inquisition and Jewish Humanism -- IX. Missing Pages: Women's Poetry in the Levant -- 3. History's Noise: The Beginning of the End -- I. Colonialism and Literary Forms -- II. Traveling in Time: Mordekhai HaKohen and Nahum Slouschz -- III. Yitzhaq Shami, Yehuda Burla, and the Hebrew Novel -- IV. Keys to the Garden: Albert Cohen and the Levantine Novel -- V. The Alphabet of Nightmare -- 4. Postscript: "To end, to begin again" -- I. 1948: The End of an Era -- II. New Hebrew: Language and Ideology -- III. The New Order -- IV. Shime'on Ballas, Sami Mikhael, and the New Israeli Novel -- V. Israel/Palestine and the New Levant -- VI. Recreating Memory: Alexandria and Baghdad in Israel.

VII. Reclaiming Nativity: The Poetry of Shelley Elkayam, Ronny Someck, Tikva Levi, and Sami Shalom Chetrit -- VIII. Anton Shammas and Israeli Hebrew as the Language of Exile -- IX. Envisioning a Future: The Covenant of Sarah and Hagar -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.