To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account

By Saul Bellow

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Travel

Saul Bellow's 1976 nonfiction account of the months he spent in Israel in 1975, while his wife, the mathematician Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, taught in Jerusalem. He records his conversations with politicians, writers, scholars, soldiers and ordinary Israelis, and his thoughts on the country's history, its security, its relations with its Arab neighbors and the wider world, and what Israel means to Jews in America and elsewhere.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”