Defenses of the imagination : Jewish writers and modern historical crisis / Robert Alter.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Modern context: Defenses of the imagination -- 2. Portraits: Osip Mandelstam: the poet as witness -- Walter Benjamin: the aura of the past -- Gershom Scholem: history and the abyss -- Lea Goldberg: poetry in dark times -- Uri Zvi Greenberg: a poet of the Holocaust -- Charles Reznikoff: between present and past -- Eliot, Lawrence, and the Jews: two versions of Europe -- 3. Fiction and historical crisis: Jewish humor and the domestication of myth -- A novel of the post-tragic world -- Agnon's Mediterranean fable -- Shtetl and revolution -- Fiction in a state of siege -- Updike, Malamud, and the fire this time -- A problem of horizons.