Tel-Aviv, the First Century: Visions, Designs, Actualities

11 Der Eko Fun Goles; “The Spirit of Tel-Aviv” and the Remapping of Jewish Literary History

eleven Der Eko Fun Goles: “The Spirit of Tel-Aviv” and the Remapping of Jewish Literary History Barbara Mann Blessed be the glory of the Lord from his place; also the noise of the wings of the living creatures. . . . Then I came to the exiles at Tel-Aviv. —Ezekiel 3:12–15 Tel-Aviv . . . is not Eretzyisroel . . . Tel-Aviv is goles. —Eretzyisroel in 1937, Sh. Fraylach I am the very spirit of Tel-Aviv, Good morning to you! . . . White houses under me. Long, beautiful wide-spread streets . . . What a difference from Jaffa. From the narrow, stinking “streets.” Culture, culture!— Called out from all sides. —Reuben Joffe, “I fly over Tel-Aviv,” Tel-Aviv: Poema (Buenos Aires, 1937), 25 In Mayne Zibn Yor in Tel-Aviv [My Seven Years in Tel-Aviv], a Yiddish memoir published in Buenos Aires in 1949, we find the following conversation between two new immigrants in Haifa; one of the men, newly arrived from Warsaw, is considering moving to Tel-Aviv: I’m going to Tel-Aviv. Why Tel-Aviv? Because in Tel-Aviv there are “goles-yidn” [Jews from the Diaspora]. 213 Der Eko Fun Goles Well we’ve got some here from goles as well. But there are more in Tel-Aviv and I yearn for them, since the entire European goles is confined to the ghetto.1 There are a number of ironic reversals contained in this exchange: firstly, Tel-Aviv, the very spearhead of Zionist urban redemption, is a center not for “new Hebrews” or even “new Jews,” but for plain old goles-yidn. Moreover, the speaker yearns to be with them, precisely because they remind him of home, of goles. Thus the entire dichotomy of exile v. homeland is turned upside down—Europe, not Israel, is where the heart is; and Tel-Aviv itself has become “goles”-ized, a new home not simply for Jews, but a specific kind of Jew, “goles-yidn,” Jews from home. This ironic exchange between two immigrants in Yiddish will help frame one of the main questions arising from the literary representation of Tel-Aviv, a city whose cultural development coincided with a period of tremendous social, political, and geographic upheaval: how has the depiction of Tel-Aviv challenged, and even undermined, Jewish culture’s normative dichotomy between exile and homeland? While modern Hebrew literature has historically traversed a variety of landscapes and spaces in diverse and often oppositional fashion, an essential affinity for exile is, I suggest, at the center of Tel-Aviv’s identity as an urban space— an identity that was deeply informed and shaped by the city’s literary representation. Perhaps not surprisingly, this connection to exile and the Diaspora found in Hebrew texts is even more pervasive in Yiddish writing about the city. In order to both substantiate and complicate this claim, this essay offers an interpretive analysis of Reuben Joffe’s Tel-Aviv: Poema, a booklength series of Yiddish poems published in Buenos Aires in 1937. Joffe’s work has not received any critical attention and his book was neither extensively reviewed nor even advertised in the press when it originally appeared .2 Its naïve and “boosterish” tone is out of keeping with the darker sensibility of Hebrew writing about the Yishuv in the late 1930s. Yet the volume apparently sold well in Jewish communities in Latin America.3 The poem seems unique, moreover, in its breadth and detail; certainly very little comparable exists in the Hebrew poetry of this period, in terms of its length and detailed focus on the social and physical geography of the city.4 Alongside the iconic spaces found in many literary 214 Barbara Mann depictions of Tel-Aviv such as the sea, Jaffa, the Carmel Market, Habima Theater, and Rothschild Boulevard, Joffe also includes poems devoted to the Yemenite Quarter, Brenner House, the relatively new neighborhood of the Borochov Quarter (today Givatayim), and sites along the Yarkon River such as Napoleon Hill. Joffe’s poema teems with the business of Tel-Aviv’s citizens: shopping, traveling, arguing, eating, and making their way home, to the beach, or to the synagogue on Shabbat. The poema is careful to point to the specifics of life in Tel-Aviv, as opposed to that of Jerusalem or what it calls “the colonies,” indicating, for example, that although cinemas and theaters are closed on Friday nights, many of the Tel-Aviv’s citizens gather for public...