Already 100+ years old, Tel Aviv and the Zionism it represents constitute a historical site and relic. The old graveyard is what Foucault would have called a heterotopia in the midst of and tightly hemmed in by what was to become the modern city center. It’s a Zionist necropolis. Theorists, poets, painters, and politicians, all the guys are there –Ahad Ha’Am, C.H. Bialik, S. Tzernikovsky, M. Dizengoff, Reuven Rubin. Also interesting are the memorial markers of the people murdered during the Arab riots of 1921. The old City Hall, including Dizengoff’s office, and Beit Bialik are right up the way from the graveyard, loving restored. Built in the 1920s, they all reflect what is called “the eclectic style,” which preceded the advent of Bauhaus in the country in the late 1920s and 1930s for which Tel Aviv is more famous. These old Tel Aviv sites tell us a lot of things about combinations: with the creation of new urban space and modern styles, with the death and history, and the passage of time and their distancing effect on ideology, with the smallness of place and the impact of trauma and conflict, with historical-memorial-preservation consciousness and culture in contemporary Israel. Old Tel Aviv and the Zionism it represents was a long time ago in a compacted small space.
Reblogged this on David Chery.