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

13 Decay and Death: Urban Topoi in Literary Depictions of Tel-Aviv

The founding and growth of Tel-Aviv reverberated with the ideology of Jewish national revival and the quest to build a modern Jewish city different than both the Jewish shtetl in East Europe and the cities of the Levant. The Tel-Aviv creation narrative focused positively on the constructive energies of urban pioneers engaged in building the first Hebrew city.1 Although criticism of Tel-Aviv, mainly from the Labor Zionist establishment (which preferred an agricultural ideal), existed from the very beginning of the city’s construction, forbidding descriptions of the urban landscape were rarer in fiction and poetry. It was not until the 1970s—late in comparison to portrayals of the city evident in Europe— that writers adopted negative universal urban topoi, widespread in European and American literature, to depict Tel-Aviv. Imagery representing the urban environment as a place of alienation, decay, disillusionment, and failure, with its attendant sexual, financial, and moral corruption, has been adopted and adapted in Israeli fiction. Writers increasingly depict Tel-Aviv society as decadent and corrupt; the city is portrayed as a monster; while the flâneur protagonist is shown to be isolated and alone. The city is depicted frequently with dark, forbidding streets, and a seedy underworld dense with corruption and prostitution.2 Given the powerful Zionist rhetoric of Tel-Aviv in its foundational phase, in adopting modernist urban tropes in literary depictions of TelAviv , authors were engaged in challenging the traditional Zionist narthirteen Decay and Death: Urban Topoi in Literary Depictions of Tel-Aviv Rachel S. Harris “This city doesn’t deserve to exist. This is just a misunderstanding.” rative of Tel-Aviv, even suggesting that the city did not stand up to its reputation as a thriving metropolis or that Tel-Aviv betrayed the Zionist ideals that underlay its founding. In this essay, I consider four literary works that share the centrality of Tel-Aviv in the narrative and the suicide of one or more protagonists: Ya’akov Shabtai, Past Continuous (1977), Binyamin Tammuz, Requiem for Na’aman (1978, 1992), Yehudit Katzir, Closing the Sea (1990), and Etgar Keret, Kneller’s Happy Campers (2000). In these texts, the dark portrayal of Tel-Aviv indicates the realization of the mythological city first imagined in literary form. Tel-Aviv’s success lies in its normalization and its similarity to other modern cities. Literary depictions of negative urban tropes challenge the city’s mythological foundations but reinforce the claim that Tel-Aviv is indeed a city like any other. By emulating Western models, the real city echoes the universal urban experience. Nevertheless, even in the later literature of the 1990s and 2000s, it is clear that Hebrew fiction acknowledges the distinctly local characteristics of Tel-Aviv. In adopting urban literary topoi to convey Tel-Aviv, Israeli writers present a new city while simultaneously reinforcing an old idea: Tel-Aviv is a hybrid between East and West, myth and reality. Nostalgia for the Lost City of Tel-Aviv Set in Tel-Aviv in the 1970s, Shabtai’s Past Continuous describes three discontented middle-aged friends (Goldman, Israel, and Caesar) and the founding generation of their parents. The novel opens with the death of Goldman’s father, and the information that Goldman commits suicide exactly nine months later. As a result, all the events in the novel are presented within the framework of death. In a form of escapism, Past Continuous reflects the nostalgic attitude that had taken hold in the 1930s in the longing for the “small and intimate neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else.”3 By constructing “a monolithic and naive panoramic picture with sand dunes, white buildings, blue sea, and sky,” Shabtai reinforced a myth echoing the “messianic and utopian spirit that ha[d] pervaded the entire Zionist project.”4 Thus Shabtai tapped into both the reality of the 1970s and the idealized attitude toward Tel-Aviv’s early years. Decay and Death 249 250 Rachel S. Harris Shabtai’s immortalization of Tel-Aviv juxtaposes the image of the decaying city of the 1970s with a nostalgia-laden perception of Tel-Aviv’s foundational era during the protagonist Goldman’s youth. Through Goldman, Shabtai presents the longing for a childhood landscape that has now been vanquished: “The empty lots and gardens and parks and little woods and virgin fields . . . had now disappeared and given way to streets lined with apartment complexes and offices and commercial and industrial areas.”5 This...