“The air over Jerusalem,” wrote the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. “is saturated with prayers and dreams/ like the air over industrial cities./ It’s hard to breathe.” “The reason I prefer Tel Aviv,” an Israeli friend once said to me, “is that you can forget it and your tongue will not cleave to the roof of your mouth, nor will your right hand lose its cunning.” To put it another way: in Jerusalem, every day is Memorial Day.
On the day before Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, I went to Tel Aviv to soak up another sort of memory. I drove down with a friend, a fellow American Israeli who has lived in Israel even longer than I have. Both of us are sons of Jewish educators who made aliyah, and we both, back in the States, grew up on Hebrew. When parents like ours rocked us on a playground seesaw, they would inevitably chant the children’s rhymes of Chaim Nahman Bialik: Nad-ned, nad-ned.
We made our way to Bialik Street, where the greatest modern Hebrew poet built his home in 1924, the year he finally made aliyah. That old residential quarter of Tel Aviv, lined with crumbling Bauhaus gems alongside dazzling renovations, is not easy for Jerusalemites to navigate. (We were blessed with a GPS.) We parked in a lot on nearby Tchernikowsky Street (named for another towering Hebrew poet) and stepped into the Mediterranean sunshine. The white light of Tel Aviv, especially on a spring day neither hot nor humid, struck me as hopeful, full of promise, very different from the nostalgic golden glow of Jerusalem. Like the sun and the moon, both lights are necessary to the soul.
Bialik’s house is eclectic, domed, and very large, an architectural mix of Europe and the Middle East. For many years it has been a museum; it has lately been restored, the walls repainted in their bold original colors: reds, greens, blues. Columns and a fireplace in the salon are decorated in the Jewish orientalist fashion associated with Jerusalem’s Bezalel School of Art, an idyllic evocation of biblical vistas: vines and camels, palm trees and ancient Israelites.
Upstairs, in the library, world literature sits beside volumes of Talmud. Bialik translated Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” into Hebrew and wrote a commentary on the Mishnah. From the window seat I gazed across the street at the old city hall, another charming architectural mishmash of 1924, currently undergoing renovation. Here is the beating Hebrew heart of Tel Aviv, the urban experiment launched in 1909. Early last month, the outdoor inaugural ceremony of the city’s centennial celebration was held on this very spot.
Bialik wrote little poetry in this house. For some reason the muse stayed behind in Europe, which he visited periodically, and where he died (in Vienna) in 1934 following surgery at the age of 61. At his writing desk on the second floor he kept a Bible for reference, and penned speeches and letters, essays and articles in an elegant Hebrew hand. On the wall of the study hangs a painting of Bialik and his Odessa friend Y.H. Ravnitzky, with whom he edited the incomparable anthology of Midrashim known as “The Book of Legends” or Sefer Ha-Aggadah.
A big portrait of his wife Manya faces the desk directly. They had no children but they embraced the whole of Tel Aviv, whose citizens, young and old, flocked to the revered poet’s home for guidance and wisdom. He was, in his last decade, the dominant public figure of the young city—the secular chief rabbi, so to speak, of Zionist Palestine. He also enjoyed the friendship of his official Orthodox counterpart, another magnificent spirit, the great mystic and religious poet, Rav Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook. (Both men had attended Volozhin, the Harvard of Lithuanian yeshivas.)
Tel Aviv was famously named after a book, the Hebrew translation of Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland, which took its title from an image in Ezekiel: “mound of spring,” suggesting old and new. Rav Kook viewed Herzl as a messianic figure; Bialik, as evidenced by a satiric poem on display at the museum, was wary of magical Zionist thinking that saw political redemption at the doorstep. He presciently warned of an impending Shoah—he used that same Hebrew word—if Hitler were to rise to power. He urged Jews to leave Europe and join the hard work of building a Jewish future in British Palestine.
Down the block from Bialik’s place is another artistic landmark, built in the Bauhaus international style in 1931. From 1954 on it was the home of the Israeli painter Reuven Rubin (1893-1974) and his American-born wife, Esther. Rubin, born to a Hasidic family in Romania, came to Palestine in 1912 to study at Bezalel but quickly rebelled against its reigning esthetic, developing a modernist pastoral style that injected Zionist ideals into a romantic, dreamlike landscape. This house, too, is today a museum, stuffed with stunning artworks and quaint memorabilia. Rubin, in his later years, became a worldwide celebrity; in one photo, his hair bushy and white, he is mugging for the camera with another hirsute Jew, Harpo Marx.
But the most striking photo in the Rubin House is a wall-sized enlargement that shows the artist, lean and young, dressed in an Arab-style jalabiyah, posing on a Tel Aviv terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. He is the epitome of naïve re-invention, as romantic and brash as immigrant Hollywood Jews of the same generation sporting straw boaters, blending with the natives in Santa Monica. Accompanying the photograph are a few eloquent lines by Bialik, published in the Ha’aretz newspaper in 1926, that capture the essence of Rubin’s timeless talent:
“The Land of Israel, as seen by Reuven Rubin in his paintings, its hills and its cities, its gardens and valleys, its old folks and women, its Jews and its Arabs, its donkeys and goats, its stones and vegetation, and mainly when all these are mixed together unpredictably and distilled into one square white canvas—this Land of Israel seems like one Midrash Aggadah, the legend of the Land of Israel.”
The poet’s words, the artist’s works, the snapshots of times gone by, the mélange of bold buildings on Bialik and its neighboring streets, all conspired, on that sunny eve of Israel’s somber Memorial Day, to transport me to a fresh frame of mind. Gone for the afternoon were politics and diplomacy, theology and theodicy, drama and destiny. What remained, in the white light of Tel Aviv, was a memory of what never quite was, but might have been—and might still turn out to be. After 61 years, we pursue simple dreams of untroubled independence, as if they were born yesterday.
