The development of the novel and the rise of modern cities have taken place concurrently. As society has tended more and more to become concentrated in what we call cities, the novel has been a major literary response, concerning itself with the complex interaction among individuals in groups and between individuals and society. (p. 91)

Because the city as a dense heterogeneous society tends to instill in its inhabitants the sense of a threatening "other," the modern Jewish novel becomes a classic example of how the city functions symbolically in modern literature. Like Leopold Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses, who roams the streets of Dublin as an outsider because he is a Jew, the characters … [in] Amos Oz's My Michael,… never lose their sense of strangeness in the urban environment. (p. 93)

[In] Jerusalem, despite its centuries of civilizations, it is the hills that always dominate, that appear ready to envelop...