Helene Wecker (Sheldon Wecker)
Eight years after they first bewitched us, Ahmad the jinni and Chava the golem are finally back.
To the delight of fans of 2013’s bestselling historical fantasy “The Golem and The Jinni,” author Helene Wecker has penned a sequel titled, “The Hidden Palace.” Picking up where the first installment left off at the waning of 19th century, the new page turner spans the first 15 years of the 20th century. Although the Jewish Golem and Arabian Jinni themselves never age, time nonetheless ticks on and they must adapt to the quickly modernizing and tumultuous age.
In a recent conversation with The Times of Israel from her home in northern California, Wecker acknowledged her fans’ long wait for the sequel.
Pesach Sheni: Mickey Marcus changing history
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مسلمون ألهموا سبينوزا ولوك وديفو
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April 5, 2021, 3:14 p.m. ET
Credit.Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin/The New York Times
In this age of anxiety, anger and contestations between the West and the Islamic world, many epoch-shaping stories of intellectual exchanges between our cultures are often forgotten.
A powerful example comes from literature. Millions of Christian, Jewish and Muslim readers across the world have read that famed tale of the man stranded alone on an island: “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe, the 18th-century British pamphleteer, political activist and novelist.
Few know that in 1708, 11 years before Defoe wrote his celebrated novel, Simon Ockley, an Orientalist scholar at Cambridge University, translated and published a 12th-century Arabic novel, “Hayy ibn Yaqzan,”
In this age of anxiety, anger and contestations between the West and the Islamic world, many epoch‐shaping stories of intellectual exchanges between our cultures are often forgotten.
A powerful example comes from literature. Millions of Christian, Jewish and Muslim readers across the world have read that famed tale of the man stranded alone on an island: “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe, the 18th‐century British pamphleteer, political activist and novelist.
Few know that in 1708, 11 years before Defoe wrote his celebrated novel, Simon Ockley, an Orientalist scholar at Cambridge University, translated and published a 12th‐century Arabic novel, “Hayy ibn Yaqzan,”or “Alive, the Son of Awake,” by Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl, an Andalusian‐Arab polymath. Writing about the influence of Ibn Tufayl’s novel on Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” Martin Wainwright, a former Guardian editor, remarked, “Tufayl’s footprints mark the great classic.”