A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (review)

Hebrew Studies 49 (2008) 376 Reviews stages in the evolution of Hebrew literature. Professor Pelli exhibits the most impressive mastery of his field while sharing with the reader a laudable, formidable body of literary scholarship. Yair Mazor University Of Wisconsin—Milwaukee Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201 ymazor@uwm.edu A PLACE IN HISTORY: MODERNISM, TEL AVIV, AND THE CREATION OF JEWISH URBAN SPACE. By Barbara E. Mann. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Pp. xix + 310. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University, 2006. Cloth, $55.00. Paper, $21.95. Barbara Mann’s book is a notable contribution to the recently growing literature on the city of Tel Aviv. Creating its very own mode of critique, it reads the city not merely as a sum total of historical events and sites, but also as a collection of ordinary practices interwoven with interpretive readings of literary texts and cultural moments. Such an approach intentionally unsettles the well-defined disciplinary domains. Mann clearly does not work with a ready-made categorical model, staying well away from conventional binaries , like “white city/black city.” Instead, she opts to unearth yet another forgotten photograph from the archives, another poem or letter of complaint to the municipal offices. Constantly changing perspectives, she offers new viewpoints from which to consider her images of Tel Aviv. This consonance between critical practice and its object is the book’s major contribution. Resonating with the city’s typical architectural dispersal and its modes of organization, Mann’s book is not ruled by one interpretive logic, agenda, or organizing principle. Nevertheless, it does not shy away from taking a position and even insists to look closely at the cracks and fissures in the TelAvivan space and discourse. This method already becomes apparent in the author’s choice of chapter titles which cannot be caught under one category such as sites, historical events, etc., but reflects a heterogeneous approach. The first chapter, “Jews in space,” includes a well-organized, impressively researched and erudite historical and theoretical introduction about the city’s historical evolution and the relations between Judaism and urban space. The second chapter is dedicated to a specific site in Tel Aviv: Here Mann surprisingly opts to start off her book with a reading of the Trumpeldor Cemetery as a Zionist uncanny, a place which is extremely instructive about the repressions and contradictions that constitute Tel Aviv and about its place in the Zionist Hebrew Studies 49 (2008) 377 Reviews project. Similarly, the third chapter takes an unexpected look at Rothschild Boulevard as a monument. This allows Mann to fascinatingly link a historical reading with a study of the street as a site of everyday, ordinary practices . The fourth chapter does not focus on any specific site. Again, its organizing principle manages to surprise: “A View from the Balcony.” Serving as a kind of hybrid space between inside and outside, the balcony offers a way to examine the interrelations between the private and public domains in the story of Tel Aviv. In her penultimate chapter, Mann takes a closer look at the “edge of town,” and problematizes Tel Aviv’s self-image as a center via her research at the municipal archive, where she looked at complaints written in by residents of the more peripheral neighborhoods, letters asking to be connected to water and electricity supplies, etc. Such letters “provide an important and rare glimpse from the margins of Tel Aviv self-defined center” (p. 217). These neighborhoods, thus, disturb the social, economic, and ethnic homogeneity of the city, which, in spite of itself, reveals the periphery it includes. To conclude, Mann looks at the traumatic assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, but she tells it as a double story: the story of Tel Aviv’s initiation into the national-historical narrative and that of the square, a story that through a “rhetoric of walking” reveals complex and contradictory practices of remembering and uses of the urban space, while simultaneously laying bare the forgotten remnants of the Arab village on which the square was built. Mann pinpoints Rabin’s assassination as a founding moment in the disintegration of “monolithic Israeli identity.” At the same time, though, “the square, and by association Tel Aviv, entered the narrative...