Cole-Hoffman Lecture 2011, Institute for Judaic Studies, Portland, Oregon

The Oregon Jewish Museum and
the Institute for Judaic Studies of the Pacific Northwest
present

Authors' Talk:
Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza
Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman

cole-hoffman

Monday, November 7, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Oregon Jewish Museum
1953 NW Kearney St, Portland 97209

General Public: $10 OJM Members: $8
Reservations at www.ojm.org or call 503-226-3600

Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza tells the colorful story of the recovery from a Cairo geniza (or repository for worn-out texts) of the most vital cache of Hebrew manuscripts ever discovered.

Excerpt from Chapter 1, Hidden Wisdom:
The story of the Geniza and its recovery is, by nature, a tale with numerous heroes, medieval and modern. Although [Solomon] Schechter deserves much of the credit for having, by force of his expansive historical vision and truly exceptional personality, rescued some 190,000 Geniza fragments from a kind of oblivion (or random dispersal), he was hardly the first to be drawn to the cache. Its presence was known—and at least partly appreciated—well before he arrived on the scene, and this book is, accordingly, also a chronicle of those who came before him, and others who would follow. "Looking over this enormous mass of fragments about me," Schechter wrote, in Moses-on-Nebo-like fashion, after several years of hard work breathing in the dust and spirit of this culture's disjecta membra, "I cannot overcome a sad feeling stealing over me, that I shall hardly be worthy to see all the results which the Genizah will add to our knowledge of Jews and Judaism. The work is not for one man, and not for one generation."

But this is perhaps as it should be. For the Geniza itself tells the tale of many generations, each of which preserved and transformed a part of the tradition it received. Maintaining the practice of concealment, ironically, made future revelation possible, as, over the centuries, an inadvertent archive was amassed. And so, in an almost unconscious manner, the Fustat community restored to the notion of geniza its ancient and essential dimension—that of history as hidden treasure. The protagonists of this story are the men and women who have brought its wisdom to light.

About the Authors:

The recipient of a 2007 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Peter Cole has published three books of poetry, Rift (Station Hill); Hymns & Qualms (Sheep Meadow Press); and, most recently, Things on Which I've Stumbled (New Directions). A fourth volume, What Is Doubled: Poems 1981-1989, was published by Shearsman Books in the UK.

Cole has also worked intensively on Hebrew literature, with an emphasis on medieval Hebrew poetry. His prize-winning translations of the Hebrew Golden Age poets have helped to recreate for contemporary American readers the multifaceted world of medieval Spain. His 2007 anthology, The Dream of the Poem—recipient of the National Jewish Book Award and winner of the American Publishers Association’s award for Book of the Year— traces the arc of the entire period and reveals this remarkable poetic world. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, co-authored with Adina Hoffman, was published in 2011 by Schoken. Forthcoming in 2012 from Yale University Press is The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition.

Cole has received numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the 1998 Modern Language Association Translation Award. The Dream of the Poem was awarded the 2010 TLS Porjes-Domb Prize and J’Accuse received the 2004 PEN-America Award for Poetry in Translation. Cole has most recently won an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught and been a visiting artist at Yale, Wesleyan, and Middlebury. Cole is one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, a small press devoted to the publication of the literature of the Levant.

Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood (Steerforth Press and Broadway Books) and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century (Yale University Press). A biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, My Happiness won the UK's 2010 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, written with Peter Cole, has just been published by Schocken / Nextbook. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, the TLS, Raritan, the Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Tin House, and on the World Service of the BBC.

Formerly a film critic for the American Prospect and the Jerusalem Post, Hoffman has been a visiting professor at Wesleyan University and Middlebury College as well as the Franke Fellow at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she is one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions and lives in Jerusalem and New Haven.