In transit to nowhere

"Hanoch Levin's Tel Aviv" is a new book in which architect Nissim Davidov says Neve Sha'anan's history if one of negotiation between dreams and reality.

"It would be nice to define it as a merry-go-round with ups and downs, but it seems that in this neighborhood, dreams shattered before anyone attempted to realize them," says Davidov.

Reality, Davidov continues, "stayed put, marking time, and sent the dreamers back to the Musrara swamp, the Ayalon stream next to which the neighborhood was built. And while reality tread in place, the earth crumbled, and the swamp became uglier. It seems that the phenomenon of broken dreams characterizes the neighborhood not only in a general way, but also at the individual level: disappointment and heartbreak are the portion of many of its residents since then and until today."

The playwright's birthplace and his plays echo the misery of those who mark time hopelessly. "Hanoch Levin's Tel Aviv" is being published by the Bauhaus Center (edited by Omri Yavin) on the 10th anniversary of Levin's death, as part of the city's centennial celebrations. But Levin, in fact, "ridiculed" the city and its deification "as a naughty, dynamic and successful city," says Yavin, who opens the book with Levin's "Poem of Longing for Tel Aviv. It's a poisonous piece, beginning: "Where are the days when our gang/ stuck it to Rina in the park."

The book consists of three essays: one by Davidov, an architect and a scholar of Tel Aviv city planning; one by Ruth Dar, who designed stage sets for Levin's plays; and one by Yavin himself. He is the son of architect Shmuel Yavin, the curator of the Bauhaus Center.

The essays move from Tel Aviv as a present-absentee, "an elusive idea and not a real place," for Omri Yavin, via Tel Aviv as scenery in Dar, toward the actual, material city in Davidov's chapter.

Davidov uses the Levin connection to survey the real Neve Sha'anan, where Levin was born and raised at 17 Rosh Pina Street, a house visited regularly by guided tours in search of the plays. Davidov goes from its days as a garden spot - in the dreams of its founders in the 1920s - to the neighborhood of refugees and immigrant workers we see today and does an excellent job of depicting the neighborhood's character and fate, an urban metaphor for the miserable heroes who populate Levin's work. Like the founders, they see their dreams shatter. The literary-theatrical context adds a layer of fatalism to the neighborhood and a a mythic dimension like that of the fictional town of Macondo in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

Predetermined fate

Neve Sha'anan's fate was sealed before it was constructed, says Davidov. The site, acquired in 1921, bordered on Wadi Musrara, a riverbed threatening to flood each winter and along the iron tracks of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway, built in 1892. A series of modernizing infrastructures (to this day) proved to be nuisances, from the nearby Rothenberg electric station, built in 1923, through the old central rail station and the new central bus station. Cynical and destructive "vision" delivered a fatal blow to the neighborhood.

"Each time the gates to progress and development opened in Neve Sha'anan," Davidov says, "they closed very quickly and left behind the neighborhood and its residents, who never voluntarily took part in the vision, and were and are always excluded from it."

Its founders envisioned Neve Sha'anan as an agricultural garden. But the lots were too small for people to make a living from farming, and it soon became a mixture of residences and small businesses.

There were violent incidents, the community disintegrated and residents moved away. Neve Sha'anan was forced to give up its dream of autonomy and had to depend on Tel Aviv for services. Instead of being an independent community, it turned into a marginal outlying area. Even the 1922 iconic Menorah project of architect Yosef Tischler was never fully realized.

Neve Sha'anan was always stereotyped in an image bordering on racism, as early as 1924 as a place of immigrants from the Caucasus. They "met with contempt and revulsion, yet another building block in the negative image that stuck to the neighborhood," Davidov explains, "an image that persisted even after they were removed in the 1950s."

Neve Sha'anan was a transit point for "Suitcase Packers," in Davidov's Levinian definition, after the title of Levin's well-known play. But the archive statistics show that during most of the years before the founding of the state, and afterward as well, the percentage of new immigrants in Neve Sha'anan was lower than the urban average.

"An important question, then, is which immigrants become Israelis," Davidov asks rhetorically, "and which remained new immigrants all their lives."

City planning in the 1930s drove a rusty nail of its own into Neve Sha'anan and the entire area, turning them into the nether regions they are today. In 1938, a master plan prepared by city engineer Yakov Ben Sira was approved, which divided the area.

Plan No. 58 designated the north as a residential area, and No. 44 marked the south as mixed use: that is, for residential, trade, small business and industrial use. The division produced the eternal split between North and South, between the desirable White City and the remote Black City, an urban nuisance.

As in the movie "Metropolis," Tel Aviv too, Davidov says, "attempted to distance the 'machine level' [where the work is done] outside the range of vision."

Davidov says Neve Sha'anan seems typical of places, with both advantages and ills. But Neve Sha'anan apparently only has ills as "home" to the poor and refugees from disaster, who dream of moving "to a different place, a place that is Other. If we the planners had understood that Neve Sha'anan was an inseparable part of the city and not a transit point, perhaps we would have known how to answer the real needs of the neighborhood and the people who live there."