Subscribe to Print Edition | Thu., May 28, 2009 Sivan 5, 5769 | | Israel Time: 00:32 (EST+7)
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The hyphenated city
By Esther Zandberg
Tags: white city, Israel news 

The photograph taken on the occasion of the lottery for land plots in Ahuzat Bayit, held on April 11, 1909, has already been extensively discussed - even more so these days, during the events marking Tel Aviv's centenary. Nonetheless, the producers of the documentary series "Tel Aviv-Jaffa" - Anat Zeltzer, Modi Bar-On and Gabriel Bibliowicz - have found yet another perspective on the photograph, one that provides additional information about Tel Aviv: the hats.

And thus, the first episode of the documentary series, which was aired last Saturday on Hot cable television's Channel 8, kicks off with a survey of the fashion, class and politics of the wealth of hats worn by those who attended the historic event.

"If I want to pay homage to Tel Aviv's founders in the correct manner, what kind of hat should I wear: a colonial straw hat, an Ottoman fez, a Palestinian kaffiyeh," asks Bar-On, himself a man of many hats, who the narrator of the series.
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Whether Tel Aviv's founders considered themselves, and were in fact considered by the locals, to be "ambassadors of the West and its wards, or whether they were another local community within the Ottoman Empire as a whole and in Jaffa in particular," is one of the questions the series tries to answer during the course of three packed episodes.

Incidentally, during the lottery, its director Akiva Arieh Weiss wore a colonial straw hat. while the water-vendor wore a fez. Others adopted a third option: the bourgeois black fedora. The photo itself, as has already been written numerous times, fits Israel's self-image: a group of Jews in the middle of the wilderness establish a new world out of nothing. However, the founders' footprints in the sand hint that they made their way here from the city on which they are turning their backs and which is outside the frame - "the city that gave birth to Tel Aviv and then was swallowed up in it," as Bar-On puts it.

Born of Jaffa

The decision to dedicate the series' first episode entirely to Jaffa has political significance: "We wanted to demonstrate that Tel Aviv was indeed born of Jaffa, which was a center of commerce and culture and a gate to progress for the entire region," says Zeltzer. "Tel Aviv flourished on the flourishing of Jaffa, which began with Napoleon's conquest of the city, 100 years before Tel Aviv was founded," she continues. "At that time, Jaffa was already Westernized and cosmopolitan."

The German Templers developed industry, steamships docked at the port, the Thomas Cook company developed a tourism package. Christian pilgrims came to the city, and churches, schools, hotels and foreign consulates were built there. To illustrate the atmosphere, the producers quote British author William Makepeace Thackeray, who, in classic Orientalist fashion, wonders whether there was ever room for boredom in the Levant. The makers of the series show Tel Aviv's history from the time of Napoleon's conquest up to today, using historical visuals whose richness is unprecedented and which are presented in an extraordinary manner. "It was important to us to work in an archaeological way, to show, for example, what Allenby Street with its eight buildings looked like when General Edmund Allenby himself saw the street named after him, and how the street looks today," says Zeltzer, who supervised the historical research for the series.

"Day and night we walked the city's streets, in an effort to depict the change in a way that is both flowing and integrative," she adds. "In doing so, the visual aspect was key for us. You can sit in an archive and research Tel Aviv in documents and historical papers - which we did during an entire year of comprehensive research. But without seeing it with your own eyes, the research will be incomplete. I see today's photographs and film segments as the modern technological version of the pottery shards of days gone by."

A constant celebration

Zeltzer, whose production company - co-owned by Bar-On - was behind the series, was also a partner to the documentary series "It's All People" and "In the State of the Jews." In addition, she helped found the Forum for the Preservation of the Audio-Visual Heritage in Israel. The forum was established with the aim of getting a law passed requiring the preservation of audio-visual materials, "just like there is an Antiquities Law and it is inconceivable that antiquities would be discarded from a museum," she says.

Paradoxically, the more common photography has become, "the fewer photographed or filmed archival materials have become available to researchers," says Zeltzer, "and when I tried, for example, to bring to life Sheinkin Street in the 1980s and the 1990s - I'm not talking about the 19th century - for the series, I found that there was very little actual footage, just a fraction compared to what remains from the 1930s, for example."

After examining photographs, Zeltzer found that 1935 is the most documented year in Tel Aviv's history, "perhaps because of the Levant Fair, or because back then the city was still young, exuding its best. Everything looks beautiful, the people are well-dressed, the buildings are white and clean. The entire city facade depicts a constant celebration."

Could it be that this is what people chose to show and photograph, and not really what was?

Zeltzer: "I also asked myself this question and I think the answer is yes and no. On the one hand, many of the celebratory photographs are from private, rather than official, collections. On the other hand, one can discern a certain politics of photography: South Tel Aviv is featured a lot less and side streets were hardly photographed at all. By contrast, Allenby and Ben Yehuda Streets were photographed endlessly, and the Mugrabi Cinema - a thousand times. It was interesting to see in the photographs that the people who built Tel Aviv were both bourgeois, wearing fedoras, as well as laborers in cloth caps. Not the classic Zionist pioneer.

"To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a single photograph of the moment [in 1962] when the historic building of the Gymnasia Herzliya was demolished. We found films that have hardly been shown, if at all, of the demolishing of Jaffa's Shetah Hagadol [a slum area of ruins dating back to the period of the Arab Revolt and the War of Independence that was cleared in the 1950s], which is now Old Jaffa. We believe a mature city can regard the demolition of Jaffa and Manshieh [northern Jaffa] with a certain sobriety, specifically as it celebrates its centenary."

Perhaps contrary to expectations, the series does not touch on Tel Aviv's cultural life, but rather on "the growth of a place." The skeleton on which it is built is Tel Aviv's urban development, emphasizing the process of building, decay and renewal. Even luxurious homes built in the city decayed within a short time, Zeltzer says, and parts of the town that had once been central gradually suffered neglect over the years.

The visual documentation of Tel Aviv's development confirms the observations of architect Nicky Davidov, an expert on Tel Aviv, to the effect that the city has always sought the next garden city: from Jaffa to Neveh Tzedek, from there to Ahuzat Bayit and from there to Scottish planner Patrick Geddes' Garden City in the old north, on to Ramat Aviv, Ramat Aviv Gimmel and so on. "In time, the scale increased; over the years these garden cities became more urban," says Zeltzer, "but the principle has remained."

The series originally consisted of 10 episodes, and was slated for broadcast on Channel 10, but it was condensed to three episodes and broadcast on a non-commercial channel - mainly because of the high production costs, Zeltzer says. "Seven people did research for nearly a year - there isn't any material on Tel Aviv that we didn't sift through. From albums and home movies - by the way, it was hard to get materials from Palestinians - through doctoral dissertations and articles." The series' shrinking came at the cost of condensing some materials while relinquishing others.

"Tel Aviv-Jaffa" is moderately critical and thinly veiled in nostalgia. While the producers were greatly aided in their efforts by the municipality, "I believe we have said what we wanted to," says Zeltzer. The series' most brilliantly correct observation about Tel Aviv-Jaffa is that it is "a city with a hyphen at its heart."
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