The City Where Nothing is Sacred

By SIMONE ZELITCH

WHEN I LIVED IN MODERN TIMES
By Linda Grant.
260 pages. Plume. $13.

"No one likes Tel Aviv," writes Linda Grant. "Who knows? Perhaps it [is] the ugliest city in the world?" When most American Jews arrive at the airport, they do their best to bypass the city altogether, hopping on a bus straight to Jerusalem. At best, we make a quick trip to the Diaspora museum and take in a few of the galleries in Jaffa before heading off to parts of Israel that look a little less like a grimy corner of Miami. Tel Aviv feels aggressively vulgar; its beachfronts obscured by hideous hotels, its chain-smoking residents dressed in short-shorts and polyester tank tops. Classically, American Jews have journeyed to Israel in search of our souls. The thought that those souls may, in fact, be found in Tel Aviv may strike us as absurd.

Yet Tel Aviv is the true hero of Linda Grant's award-winning novel, When I Lived in Modern Times. While many novels about the history of Israel focus on a search for authenticity and identity, Grant celebrates a city that is abrasively and defiantly new. The city was built on modern ideals in the hopes of creating a Jewish city unparalleled in human history. Founded in 1909 and named after a German utopian novel, Tel Aviv is deliberately both rootless and cosmopolitan. The central character of the novel, Evelyn Sert, a callow, post-World War II English emigre, marvels at the dazzling white concrete houses built in Bauhaus style, the streets that run in straight lines, the fierce modernity like "a gun firing itself into the future."

Evelyn seems a natural match for Tel Aviv. She says, "I was at an age when anything seemed possible, at the beginning of times when anything was possible." She travels to Palestine disguised as a Christian religious tourist, but in fact, "I was not in search of antiquity." Rather, she was in search of "a place without artifice or sentiment, where life was stripped back to its basics, where things were fundamental and serious and above all modern."

Young Evelyn clearly feels that her life will begin when she gets off the boat in Palestine, but she is hardly a classic Zionist heroine. On arrival, she is sent to a kibbutz, only to find the work unbearable. When she makes her way to Tel Aviv, she finds a position as a hairdresser; in an attempt to bring in British trade, she dyes her hair blonde and poses as the wife of a colonial police officer. New identities come easily to Evelyn, but although she lives in a time and place where many people were forced to change their names and personal histories, her duplicity lacks a sense of urgency. She seems to do it simply because she is clever enough to succeed. It is a game a young girl can play.

We generally imagine the early youthful immigrants to the Land of Israel as serious and selfless, determined to turn themselves into new men and women. But on reading early histories, we are struck, again and again, by the way their determination was matched by an exaggerated sense of their own righteousness. During her brief stay at the kibbutz, Evelyn is swept away by the story of the settlement's idealistic early years, but she cannot bear up under its demand for conformity. Then there is Evelyn's boyfriend, Johnny, a member of the Irgun who specializes in kidnapping British officers and who seems to lose heart only when the Betar football team has a bad season. For all his political seriousness, perhaps even because of his political seriousness, Johnny reminds Evelyn of a child: "A great child, a wonderful one, the kind any parent would love to have. He was devoted to the things he attached himself to. He didn't ask inconvenient questions and ignored the ways in which life turned awkward."

The only real grown-ups in the novel are the refugees who come to Israel not to search for their souls but to flee for their lives. These are the Jewish-German immigrants who flocked to Tel Aviv in the '30s. They brought Central Europe with them, importing phonographs, heavy furniture, and wardrobes more suited to Berlin than Tel Aviv. Long-time residents called them Yekkes, the Hebrew word for suit-coats, because they never seemed to take off their jackets. Mrs. Linz, a radical freethinker who is so formal that she cannot eat a peach without a knife and fork, seems initially absurd. Yet as the novel goes on, her exaggerated civility begins to seem like sanity. She has escaped Nazi barbarism and has taken secular internationalism with her like luggage. In a country where colonialism battles various forms of nationalism, the Yekkes are true cosmopolitans: citizens of the world.

These German Jews have contempt for what they call the Oestjuden, the eastern Jews who came to Palestine from Russia and Poland, and took with them what Mrs. Linz calls "their founding myths of Zionism": labor ideology imported from the Soviet Union or Irgun ideology from revisionist figures like Jabotinsky. The Yekkes have no tolerance for Jerusalem. "If Mrs. Linz had her way, she'd evacuate all the inhabitants of the Old City, blow up everything—the Wailing Wall, the churches, the Dome of the Rock—and build something useful, like a hospital." It is significant that Mrs. Linz is the only character in the novel that seems to acknowledge that Arabs as well as Jews live in Palestine. Still, she maintains a basic optimism. Arabs, too, will join the international community. To the Yekkes, the triumph of everything secular and modern feels inevitable. At one point, Mrs. Linz spots a black-hatted orthodox Jew from her balcony and says to Evelyn, "It's a pity you don't have a camera to record his image, for people of that type will be extinct within the decade."

Of course, Mrs. Linz was wrong; the men in the black hats have survived and thrived, particularly in Israel. The twenty-first century is a hard time to be a citizen of the world, perhaps even harder than 1946 was. It could be argued that a Tel Aviv shattered by suicide bombings is hardly a refuge from barbarism. Still, it is worth noting that the city is now, more than ever, international. Consider the Russian names of so many of the teenagers who died in the Dolphinarium disco bombing. In some ways, Russian immigrants are the new Yekkes; a generation that did not come to Israel because they were passionate idealists, but because they wanted to lead ordinary lives free from persecution. It is a tragic irony that the very country that was intended to be a Jewish refuge is now wracked by violence. In a world where claims to sanctity so easily draw blood, I can not help but agree with Evelyn's boyfriend, Johnny, when he said, "We have been waiting a long time for Tel Aviv, many centuries...And you know what is the best thing of all, what makes us the opposite of Yerushalayim? Nothing is sacred."

 

Reprinted with permission from the AVI CHAI Bookshelf, where birthright israel alumni can order free books and periodicals.