A Poet and a City in Search of a Myth: On Shlomo Skulsky's Tel-Aviv Poems

Poems about cities are among the oldest texts known to humanity. This article deals with a collection of poems dedicated to the city of Tel-Aviv. The collection, called Ashirah lakh Tel-Aviv (Let Me Sing to You, Tel-Aviv), was published in 1947 by Shlomo Skulsky (1912–1982), a well-known poet and translator. The book is a small canzoniere—a collection of sonnets. The article shows how Skulsky tackled the problem of Tel-Aviv's a-mythical past, trying to endow the city with a myth of her own. This synthetic myth makes Tel-Aviv Jerusalem's younger daughter and heir. Finally, the article shows how Skulsky, who immigrated to Palestine in 1941, just six years prior to the publication of his book, assumed a fictional poetic persona, pretending to be a veteran of Tel-Aviv, with memories pertaining to the early years of the city. This textual move went well with the effort to weave a myth for the a-mythic city.