Memory and Architecture

6: Memory and Diaspora in Tel Aviv’s Old Cemetery

chapter six Memory and Diaspora in Tel Aviv’s Old Cemetery BARBARA MANN If I forget thee O exile, may my right hand lose its cunning. —epigraph to The Book of Tel Aviv Street Names (1944) Part One: The Old Cemetery, Mourning, and Sites of Memory Aphotograph of Achad Ha’am’s funeral in 1927, in Tel Aviv’s Old Cemetery on Trumpeldor Street: Amidst a group of people surrounding the fresh grave, the poet Ch. N. Bialik1 eulogizes the ideological mentor of a generation of young eastern European Jewish intellectuals. Most of them look at the grave or one another. Some are in uniform, police or officials of some sort. Bialik is at the center of the photograph; he looks into the camera with an expression of fatigue and sadness—an eastern European Jew, wearing a heavy coat over a nondescript suit, with a modest cap on his head, standing by a freshly dug grave, in the dunes of the Trumpeldor Cemetery. More panoramic photographs of the ceremony show that the grave is located in the Cemetery’s newer section, surrounded largely by sand, a few other graves, and some spare, newly planted shrubbery. The dark suits| 141 of the crowd, their European dress, contrast sharply against the bareness of the place, the emptiness of the dunes, the dirt, the stone wall of the Cemetery looming in the background, the large, triangular stone of a mass grave strongly visible on the horizon. What is most affecting, however, about this particular photograph, is the result of a belated, surreptitious knowledge: Bialik stands in almost precisely the spot where he will be buried seven years later. His fatigue seems more than simply grief for his friend and mentor, almost a kind of surrender, an admission, but of what precisely? Is he simply tired of standing in the center of yet another photograph? It is the nature of photography that the viewer often possesses some knowledge of the world outside the frame that those within the photograph lack. This is especially the case with photographs of historic events, where the retrospective knowledge of hindsight produces belated, unconscious judgments regarding the photograph’s subjects, who themselves appear 142 | Barbara Mann fig. 6.1. Ch. N. Bialik eulogizes Achad Ha’am in the Trumpeldor Cemetery, 1927. Courtesy of the Historical Museum of Tel Aviv–Jaffa. oblivious to future events. This photograph, however, disturbs this knowledge , and the viewer’s sense of power, in that Bialik’s fatigued expression seems almost a premonition of his death. The photograph of Bialik standing awkwardly upon his own “final resting place” profoundly unsettles the notion of death as “at peace.” It also complicates the association contained within the Hebrew terms for graveyard—a “house of graves” (beit-kvarot) or an “eternal home” (beit-olam)—between the cemetery and home. The photograph links these two oscillating and unresolved relations—death as not rest/cemetery as not home. Its early Tel Aviv historical setting—and the centrally defining roles played by Bialik and Achad Ha’am in the creation of modern Hebrew culture—implicitly raises the contradiction of creating something that is at once radically new, and a home. In this, the Trumpeldor Cemetery is emblematic of Tel Aviv’s own repeated and paradoxical attempts to be a “home” for modern Hebrew culture. Memory and Diaspora in Tel Aviv’s Old Cemetery | 143 fig. 6.2. General view of the Cemetery during Achad Ha’am’s funeral. Courtesy of the Historical Museum of Tel Aviv–Jaffa. The Cemetery was founded during the 1902 cholera epidemic in Jaffa, when Ottoman officials prohibited burial of the dead within the city walls. Jewish community leaders requested an alternative and were granted permission to purchase land in what was then called “the Lands of North Jaffa.” According to one story, the area consisted largely of shifting sand, and was difficult to cultivate because of these rough topographical conditions.2 Legend also has it that sacred books were buried in a special grave and two “black weddings” were held at the site in an effort to gain God’s favor and halt the epidemic.3 Only five years later was the plan to build a modern Jewish neighborhood outside of Jaffa announced, a plan that led, in 1909, to the founding of Achuzat Bayit, the neighborhood that eventually became Tel Aviv. In essence, then, Tel Aviv began with its dead. In the words...