Customer Reviews

Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City (Space, Place, and Society)

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In Tel Aviv, Mythography of a City, Maoz Azaryahu sets out to answer this question. As the subtitle suggests, Azaryahu seeks to answer this through the mythological perspective of Tel Aviv as the "First Hebrew City," taking the reader through the successive stages of Tel Aviv's history, and most importantly, how that history was interpreted by various sectors of the Tel Avivian/Israeli public. As a city founded on sand, a kind of literal and metaphorical blank slate, this work illustrates how conceptions of place are molded largely from the stories people tell of it, and how they transform over time. Tel Aviv, as a city created ex nihilo, became a canvas on which the Zionist experiment could assume various guises, in particular that of the "normal" international metropolis, wholly secular in its outlook, as opposed to a Jerusalem steeped in tradition. Azaryahu's uses relavant sources and traces an interesting history of a fascinating city.

This book is not a straightforward history of Tel Aviv. Instead, it is about what Tel Aviv has symbolized over the years and how people have thought of Tel Aviv or conceptualized it over the last century. Themes include the "First Hebrew City"; the city built on sand; an urban, capitalist, sophisticated Zionist model (no kibbutzim here!); the role of the beach; the Bauhaus architecture; a non-stop city; a place for secular Israelis to gather as a community; and the contrast with Jerusalem among other topics.

You do not have to know Tel Aviv personally to understand this book, but it does help. I had to read it for a class, and most students in the class had not been to Israel, but they still got the book. And enough background on the city's history was provided that another, supplementary book was not necessary.

The book was much better written than I expected. Since it is about symbolism and theory and since the author is an Israeli professor, I was concerned that it would be laden with impenetrable academic prose and post-modern jargon. It wasn't. For the most part, it was perfectly readable (though there were a few rough spots in the translation). If the reader is NOT looking for a traditional founding-to-present history of the city and wants something a little more abstract, this is a good choice.