The Vicarious Landscape of Memory in Tel Aviv Poetry

Modern Hebrew poetry about Tel Aviv has inevitably been influenced by images of those European urban centers that were the native landscapes of many of its writers. This essay examines the evolution of this memory of the European landscape in a selection of poems, focusing on the figues of Leah Goldberg and Meir Weiseltier, and drawing further examples from the work of S. Y. Agnon, Avraham Shlonsky, Nathan Alterman, and Dalia Hertz. I argue that the perception of Tel Aviv as a place with neither memory nor history has served as a powerful tool of poetic self-expression, and has thereby enabled poetry to explore the fundamental issues of territory, space, and exile in Israeli culture.