Hannah Arendt and Muriel Spark missed each other by just one day in Jerusalem in the June of 1961. Spark attended the Eichmann trial between 26 and 28 June for the Observer newspaper. No reports for the paper seem to have appeared. Instead, Spark was to place the trial at the ‘desperate heart’ of her most historically ambitious and aesthetically awkward novel, The Mandelbaum Gate (1965). The first four chapters of the novel were published in instalments in the New Yorker in 1965. Codas to Arendt's reports on the trial published in the magazine four years earlier, like Eichmann in Jerusalem, Spark's fictions of Jerusalem run an uncomfortable line between the act of witnessing Eichmann's trial and the question of what the trial said – or demanded – about being a Jew, or in Catholic convert Spark's case, a half-Jew, in relation to modern Israel in the early 1960s.

Both writers produce dissident answers to this question. Where Arendt responded to what she saw as the sanctification of the suffering of survivors in the prosecution's case with a critically judging irony, Spark interrogates the power of fiction itself to make meaning out of what she calls the ‘bottomless pit’ revealed by Eichmann's trial (MG 283).