An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature

Chapter 4. Tel Aviv Necropolis

143 This city doesn’t deserve to exist. This is just a misunderstanding. —Yaakov Shabtai, Past Continuous 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 Eastern Europe and the cities of the Levant. Established in 1909 as a suburb of Jaffa, Tel Aviv was cast as the first Hebrew city in two thousand years. It was named after the German Zionist novel Altneuland (1902), written by Theodor Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization (1897). Set in a utopian Jewish city, this bestselling novel was translated into Hebrew by Nahum Sokolov, who took its title “Tel Aviv” (Hill of Spring) from the book of Ezekiel (3:15). The significance of naming the city Tel Aviv, like naming the first school the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, reflected the interconnected relationship between the biblical past, Zionism’s political roots, and reality in the Land of Israel. Paralleling other creation narratives of the Zionist enterprise , Tel Aviv’s conceptual focus was embodied in the city’s motto “I will build you and you will be rebuilt,” taken from Jeremiah (31:4). The biblical source of this expression represented the connection between the exilic past and the national present, as did the city’s municipal symbols— the beacon and the gate—which denoted a symbolic light to the Diaspora Tel Aviv Necropolis chapter 4 144 chapter 4 and demonstrated Tel Aviv’s position as the doorway to Israel. “In Tel Aviv, the desire for authoritative roots coincided with the somewhat contradictory desire to emphasize the city’s newness, modernity, and epistemological distance from the Diaspora.”1 Offering a modern urban dream to complement traditional agricultural ambitions, by accepting an ideology in which the citizens were being built with the city, they were able to reject the negative aspects of their past, accept those facets which reinforced the ideology, and embrace a role as urban pioneers in the new collective.2 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, hostile descriptions of the urban landscape were rarer in fiction and poetry. It was not until the 1970s— late by comparison with portrayals of “the city” in Europe—that writers adopted negative 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. Finally the city is portrayed as a monster, and a graveyard. Its lone flâneur protagonist is isolated and alone. The city is depicted frequently with dark, forbidding streets, and a seedy underworld dense with corruption and prostitution through which the antihero wanders in horror.3 Given the symbolic Zionist ideological construction of the city and the powerful rhetoric in its foundational phase, the adoption of negative imagery and the inversion and rejection of the city’s particular signifiers (such as the insinuation that the first Hebrew city is no more than an Arab backwater or a European ghetto) offered Hebrew authors the opportunity to criticize the narrative, and even suggest Tel Aviv had failed. The city becomes a hostile place that embodies the futility of Labor Zionism with its agenda of inclusiveness and communal involvement. The white architecture that had once celebrated the city’s innovations and aspirations now stands as a monument to the city’s past. The buildings, serving as tombstones, enhance impressions of the city as a necropolis. One hundred years after the first lots were cast Tel Aviv has come to signify, in a modernist tradition of the city, a place of alienation. “The Hebrew City” has become indistinguishable from other metropolises and is represented as a place of corruption, decadence, decay, and death. In this chapter, I consider four literary works that share the centrality of Tel Aviv tel aviv necropolis 145 in the narrative and the suicide of one or more protagonists in the novel: Yaakov Shabtai, Past Continuous (1977), Requiem for Na’aman (1978), Yehudit Katzir, Closing the Sea (1990), and Etgar Keret, Ha-Kaitanah shel Kneller [literally, Kneller’s Summer Camp, 1998; published in English as Kneller’s Happy Campers, 2009]. Tel Aviv, like the depictions of other modern cities in literature, is “a projection screen for meanings” even...