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A Jewish Garden
Edited by Itamar Gov, Hila Peleg, Eran Schaerf, Hanser, 2022

A talk with Eran Schaerf

When it comes to Jewish identity, different clearly defined perspectives often clash diametrically, a fairly topical bone of contention; there is a dispute about who is right; not so in this garden where we want to walk with the artist Eran Schaerf. A garden of words, as the editors write: a guide book for an indeterminable Jewish identity, and it raises multiple political and linguistic questions that we will discuss with Eran Schaerf – in search of new questions.

The book that prompts our conversation explores Jewish experience, history and thought through the creation of an imaginary landscape of literature. Here, around 160 plants thrive, acacias by Clarice Lispector and Bruno Schulz next to a carob from the Talmud, in between a magnolia by Chantal Akerman, a chestnut by Yasmina Reza, nuts by Paul Celan and Anton Shammas and the mustard seed by Primo Levi. The democratic plant alphabet creates surprising new neighborhoods and relationships across centuries, classes, religions and ethnic groups in the migratory garden.

How does Lilith haunt the Garden of Eden in Jewish memory? Why does the Palestinian Anton Shammas belong in the Jewish garden? Who will be expelled from their own language? How is a cultural memory created? Yiddish as a world language – where did this idea come from and where is it leading? How unscathed (or not) do words cross geographic and political borders?

“I left a country that wasn’t mine and moved to another that isn’t mine either. I took refuge in a vocabulary of ink, with the book as space.”

Edmond Jabés

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