Contextualizing Preliminaries: The Writing of S. Yizhar

Yizhar's importance and contribution to Hebrew literature cannot be underestimated. His story “Ephraim Goes Back to Alfalfa” is considered the first Israeli story.Footnote ¹³ His stories “The Captive” and “Khirbet Khize” became part of the standard school curriculum, familiar to an entire generation, becoming inalienable assets of the young State of Israel.Footnote ¹⁴ He was awarded the Israel Prize for Literature in 1959 when he was only forty-three years old, a year after his monumental novel, Days of Ziklag (Yeme Ziklag) had been published. The second wave of his published novels and stories marked an unprecedented phenomenon in Hebrew literature: after a literary silence of twenty-eight years, Yizhar's writing emerged as rich and powerful, intimate and reflexive.

After a long literary hiatus, in 1992 Yizhar, then seventy-six, published Preliminaries. The novel garnered much attention from critics and scholars not only because it broke nearly three decades of silence, but also for its rich and lively narrative.Footnote ¹⁵ The novel also made an impact because of the narrator's deep ambivalence toward the Zionist project, the relations depicted between Jewish immigrant pioneers and native Arabs,Footnote ¹⁶ the possibility it offers of inscribing space in texts, and more.

Preliminaries was the first of six books Yizhar published between 1992 and 1999. In contrast to his earlier writings, in his later novels and stories he does not write mainly about recent events, but rather about events that took place twenty, forty, and even seventy-four years before the book was published. Furthermore, if in his early novels and stories he presents mainly fictionalized characters and plots, in the later period he writes in an autobiographical manner about a narrator who resembles himself.Footnote ¹⁷

Compared to Yizhar's other stories and novels, Preliminaries is unique. Although many of Yizhar's usual themes are present in Preliminaries, which makes it a part of a continuous endeavor, a poetic project that started in 1938, the novel's deep complexity lies in its ability to present a problem to the readers without providing any bottom line or conclusion.

The novel starts with a description of the world of a two-year-old. His personal story is welded to the collective story of pioneers looking for a home in their new place, the Land of Israel. This structure yields Yizhar the reader's careful attention. While the text avoids any conclusions, it doesn't mean that Yizhar avoided clear statements throughout the novel. One can easily find harsh, even painful sentences where the narrator stresses his position towards one subject or another, as he does regarding the Zionist territorial question and the problematic relationship between Jews and Arabs. And yet, he always makes sure to present another possible explanation for the situation.

Yizhar's complex writing allows the characters in the novel to present themselves as distinct from each other, and to represent their different possibilities. The combination between the subjects and the horizons they open turns the various layers of the novel into parts of a well-built yet liminal poetics. This poetics stresses its inner indecisiveness and turns the reader into an active agent who has to understand the power that lies in the lack of conclusion—and to see the two (and sometimes more) sides of the same coin.

Thus, for example, a few pages after glorifying the narrator's father as he plows the land, the narrator wonders whether this is not the reason he was stung by wasps, as he sat right next to his father who paid no attention to his kid, preoccupied as he was with his Zionist pioneer activity.Footnote ¹⁸ And when he describes the riots of 1921 in Jaffa, he asks who is responsible—the Jews or the Arabs. He does not answer this painful, complex question.Footnote ¹⁹

In many ways, Preliminaries presents itself as a liminal narrative, and by presenting problems without providing any moral answers to them it does something rare in the history of Israeli literature. To be sure, in his earlier works, such as “The Captive,” published in 1948, which tells the story of a small armed platoon that captured an old Arab man, Yizhar allowed his readers to judge the characters. But Preliminaries is more radical. It presents both the beauty and the problematics of the pioneer project, without offering any conclusions, leaving the reader baffled.

The novel's richness and complexity prompted most critics to concentrate on one or two themes and to view the narrator's standpoint as firm. Still, while some thought of the novel as mainly a semiautobiographical story,Footnote ²⁰ for others it seemed to be either a collective national story about the atrocities and failure of the Zionist pioneer project,Footnote ²¹ or else the story of its success.Footnote ²² This vast range of interpretations demonstrates that Preliminaries is a multilayered text that invites a liminal approach to various questions.

This shift is not only formal—it also signifies a substantial change in Yizhar's conception of his task as a writer. The author of the first Israeli story, who described the young Jewish natives (sabras) in Days of Ziklag—in his later writings looks back on his own work and problematizes it.

It is noteworthy that one of the most important elements of Yizhar's writing is his poetics of space and place.Footnote ²³ His spatial descriptions are finely detailed, and the perspective varies, stretching from a line of ants crawling on a small piece of land to the wide endless horizon. Still, Yizhar's space and place do not function only as platforms for human actions but also as their cause. Indeed, they are the sites where relations between people can develop.Footnote ²⁴

Yizhar's exceptional poetics of space and the importance of the chronotopeFootnote ²⁵ in his writing prompted critics to perceive him as the greatest literary conqueror of Israeli space, even though his texts are often highly complex in this regard.Footnote ²⁶ The importance of Yizhar and his literary conquests stems from the intertwinement of individual-community relations, moral and existential questions, and the poetics of space and place.Footnote ²⁷

This intertwinement appears in almost all his stories and novels, turning space into the protagonist of his writing, and revealing the structure that constitutes its poetics. Space becomes a center of existential questions and, no less importantly, of political and ideological issues.Footnote ²⁸ If the poetics of space contains these issues, the description of Tel Aviv in Preliminaries reveals a certain set of values to which Yizhar is responding.

The Poetics of Preliminaries: The Border as a Double-Edged Sword

In the Tel Aviv of Preliminaries, conflicting tendencies seethe under the city's ostensibly calm and pleasant surface. In this sense, the city and its modus vivendi function simultaneously to both blur and clarify borderlines. At times, the city is described as the perfect place for border crossing, be it an economic, social, ethnic, national, or geographic border. At other times, it seems that the urban environment encourages and creates boundaries and separates between different communities. On another level, there is also the division between the real, concrete place and the imaginary city. And, just as the city comes apart and together on these various levels—so does Preliminaries build the urban spirit of Tel Aviv as a collage of finely detailed occurrences.

And yet, Tel Aviv does not stand on its own. Preliminaries is a novel about home and the quest for it. Its five titled chapters along with the prologue and the epilogue are dedicated, respectively, to the different homes in which the protagonist's family has lived. Out of these seven chronological parts, four revolve around Tel Aviv. The prologue features a tent in a field, the first chapter a plowed plot, and the epilogue a house in Rehovot, a small town to the south of Tel Aviv.Footnote ²⁹ Though the novel starts and ends outside of Tel Aviv, the city is the main place that the protagonist calls home.

The city is, thus, a place set in between the temporary tent and the orchards surrounding young Rehovot. The evolution of this home, intertwined with the growth of the narrator, the novel's protagonist, begins in the tent with its semitransparent sheets. Only two years old, the narrator looks at the tent's orange sheets and sees the world as one harmonious whole. This is his first place and home, which, in his childish eyes, becomes a universe.Footnote ³⁰

The first chapter opens, then, on this calm and pleasant note, with the narrator's family now living in Ḥulda, an agricultural colony. Here, home is a piece of land plowed by the narrator's Zionist pioneer father. Working the soil (“the redemption of the land” in the Zionist lexicon) is so urgent for the father that he leaves his son at the edge of the field, keeping an eye on him every now and then, while prodding the stubborn donkey.Footnote ³¹

The relationship between parents and children, which is central to much of Yizhar's writing, plays a crucial role in Preliminaries. Footnote ³² Both the father and the mother are Zionist pioneers (ḥaluẓim) who left their old home for a new home. In contrast, the narrator is a native of the new land, which is his only home. The tension between the two generations is also a tension between two identities. In his next novel, Zalhavim, published in 1993, Yizhar writes: “My father came before this place existed, and I'm already after the place, he had a place-rift in his life, and I am flat and without any rift.…”Footnote ³³

This gap is expressed in the spatial description in both novels. But in the case of Preliminaries, we first meet the narrator's father as he is plowing the plot of soil while his son is sitting on the border between the plowed field and the open virgin land.Footnote ³⁴ The distance between father and son is also the distance between two options: a closed, well-defined home and an open home with blurred boundaries. As the narrator of Preliminaries says, plowing marks the pioneer plot distinctly against the surrounding space.Footnote ³⁵ It embodies not only the separation between home and wider world, between place and space, but also, perhaps foremost, the inner revolution undergone by the pioneer father who left his homeland to build a new one. The geographic boundary now turns into a boundary between the pioneer's “old” diasporic Jewish identity and his “new” Zionist Jewish identity.Footnote ³⁶

The rural-agricultural boundary also points to other kinds of otherness, in particular, Arab. The father wishes to transform the plowed earth: “This field will be a rich green … two thousand dunams of Zionist renewal. Jewish land. A little island of rich, scientific new green surrounded by an ocean of ignorance, primitiveness and under-development.”Footnote ³⁷ The plowed field reflects the father's failed attempt to transform his identityFootnote ³⁸ and to separate his territory from the space surrounding it. That is, he wishes to set up a barrier between his advanced, modern, scientific world (and home) and the empty wasteland, the backward Arab place.Footnote ³⁹ Though presented as “only” agricultural, this is actually a national barrier, a territorial claim manifested in the working of the land and the culture evolving around it.Footnote ⁴⁰

The potentially disastrous intention of this territorial act is realized later in the chapter when the son is stung by a swarm of wasps after scratching the ground in imitation of his father.Footnote ⁴¹ The wasps almost kill the child in defense of their nest—an inevitable response to the human violation of the natural order. The narrator wonders why the wasps stung the innocent child, and at the same time asks whether he invaded their territory.

The parents manage to drive the child, fighting for his life, to the doctor, who tells them that “if he is not dead … then he will live,”Footnote ⁴² thus offering the readers relief and solace after the horrible stinging and the frantic drive to the doctor's home. The protagonist of Preliminaries, who was placed on the border,Footnote ⁴³ embodies the peril of otherness (the wasps' venom), and unlike his pioneer (and stranger) father, he also embodies the “natural” holding of the territory.Footnote ⁴⁴

The first chapter ends with this sense of comfort, which is a suitable starting point for presenting a different Tel Aviv. When the narrator reaches Tel Aviv at last, he writes about its first days, when the city was small, when it was called ’Aḥuzat Bayit. In the third chapter, he describes a lively, cozy, pleasant place. Yet even here boundaries play the significant role of defining and separating the city's identities.

It may not be surprising that the novel's first encounter with Naḥalat Binyamin St. and Montefiore St., the heart of little Tel Aviv / ’Aḥuzat Bayit of old, occurs at the city's first kiosk. The narrator and his father are out for a stroll and, as they reach the new cultural center, they are tempted to drink soda while listening to jazz from the kiosk's phonograph.Footnote ⁴⁵

Here the narrator reveals the change in his father's attitude, from resentment to the enjoyment of music and leisure culture: “It is hard to escape from the music, or the din, as Daddy calls it with real pain … and they are constantly startled by the din, they should move away, or ask the municipality to do something … hand in hand, Daddy and the youngster reach the corner of Naḥalat Binyamin and Montefiore, and they stop at the opposite corner … and Daddy stops, looks and sees, and the youngster stops, … Daddy says something that it's hard to believe he would say… would you like a glass of soda? … and Daddy, with a big smile gives him all his attention … Taste it, he says, and Daddy dips his lips … it's sweet, says Daddy… and Daddy and he both burst out laughing and they laugh more and suddenly feel, that that's what it's like.”Footnote ⁴⁶

In the first chapter, the father sees his vocation as the redeemer of the land through agriculture, and transforms his identity by plowing the field. Tel Aviv draws out his hedonistic side.Footnote ⁴⁷ And yet, a straight line connects the plow digging into the earth on a hot day and the cool soda in the city. Both are clear manifestations of the Zionist project: land work is a clear territorial action, and the father sees his plowing as an extension of the national endeavor. But Zionist thinkers such as Theodor Herzl, Arthur Rupin, Max Nordau, and others also stressed the importance of normality to this unique national project. In that sense, drinking soda at the kiosk is no less important than, and complementary to, the agricultural-territorial act. It turns this episode into an integral part of Zionism and pioneerism. The “hedonistic” and the “devoted” aspects of the father unite and strengthen each other in a dialectical process.

This internal dialectic reveals a distinct gap between the urban and rural identities. It also allows the father to see himself as a revolutionary who has drawn a clear boundary between his current Zionist pioneer identity and his old diasporic identity. He does so not only while realizing his pioneer dream but also while sipping a soda and listening to jazz in the emerging Hebrew city.

This apparent dichotomy in the father's identity relies on an allusion, already in the second chapter, to the undermined gap between the rural and the urban spheres. The second chapter does not deal with Tel Aviv itself but with Neveh Shalom,Footnote ⁴⁸ in 1921 a neighborhood still separate from ’Aḥuzat Bayit, the place that would become Tel Aviv. Like the other early neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, Kerem Ha-Temanim and Neveh Tzedek, Neveh Shalom—which was founded in 1890 prior to ’Ahuzat Bayit—was established with the idea of leaving behind the congested boundaries of Jaffa. Agriculture was not an element of its residents' lives: the neighborhood was planned as a residential quarter for Jews from Jaffa, the Arab city next to Tel Aviv / ’Ahuzat Bayit.Footnote ⁴⁹ With their move to a new home, the narrator and his family now straddled two lifestyles: urban and pioneer. They didn't live in the city itself but on the new pioneer frontier. Yet the open field was no longer part of their everyday life.

Here the father is able to sustain his identity precisely because he dwells in the in-between space that undermines the clear binary boundary between city and farm, between the pioneer and the urban bourgeois. In this sense, the move to the city seems a direct sequel to the move to Neveh Shalom, carrying through the changes in the father's, the mother's, and the son's identities.

But the city does not just offer a trouble-free life. In the latter part of the novel—indeed from the third chapter onward—Tel Aviv does indeed seem tranquil and pleasant, a place of a happy childhood. But earlier—in chapter two—the city does not yet reveal this face. “There is unease. On every side unease,” reads the opening phrase of the chapter. It is 1921, thirteen years before Tel Aviv is officially separated from Jaffa, a year when violence broke out, when Arabs from Jaffa attacked Jews in Jaffa and Neveh Shalom. On the same page the narrator evokes this sense of discomfort over and over, comparing it to a shadow, to dark frightening depths, to thin smoke and stench. Immediately following these images the narrator explains: “Nobody says anything. But it's clear that it's coming from Jaffa. And that Jaffa now is a big black forest that is getting closer.”Footnote ⁵⁰

This sentence separates the urban order of Jaffa from the new neighborhood of Neveh Shalom. Instead of conveying a sense of unification, Yizhar describes how these two adjacent places function as two independent loci of identity construction. As an author who eminently wields space as a platform for individual and collective identities,Footnote ⁵¹ he shows here how the spatial gap separates the Jews of Neveh Shalom and the Arabs of Jaffa. While in the second chapter of Preliminaries, Neveh Shalom blurs the boundaries between urban and rural space, in another context it signifies the keenly felt barrier within the city.

The fear of Jaffa, which is, in fact, the fear of its Arab residents, is intertwined with a sense of geographic suffocation. Thin walls and a wooden gate constitute the clear physical boundary between the neighborhood and what lies beyond it.Footnote ⁵² The boundaries are not merely geographical; they embody the ethnic and national rift. Physical space, an important element in Preliminaries, appears already when the father plows the piece of land. It reappears here as the narrator speaks about the neighborhood that will become an integral part of Tel Aviv. The question of identity and space is conflated with the political questions of territory and control. As presented here, Tel Aviv strives for an exclusive, homogenous identity. Arabs remain beyond the city boundaries, and their proximity to the neighborhood fills the residents of Neveh Shalom with dread.

The geographical proximity to Jaffa, the city with an Arab majority, thus casts a heavy pall over the lives of all Neveh Shalom residents, among them the narrator of Preliminaries and his parents. But while in the first chapter it was the father who set up the spatial barrier between the “I” and the “Other”—a barrier both internal and external—here it is the mother who is burdened with this role.Footnote ⁵³ In the prologue the mother carries the narrator in her arms, disappearing into a perfect landscape picture. Her role is deeply connected to the sense of being at home, and, as she holds her son she creates the possibility of an all-encompassing home with no barriers between itself and the world. But in the second chapter her role is reversed—she no longer embodies the perfect boundless home but the inwardly turned one. The forgiving mother, who, in the first chapter, couldn't stop mumbling a prayer to rescue the narrator, emerges here on the essentialist boundary she has drawn between herself and the Arabs. For the mother, as for the father, the geographic separation is a spatial expression of the boundary between the “I” and the “Other”—whether the diasporic Jew or the local Arab. Instead of the plowed field of the first chapter, in the second chapter the reader finds the walls separating the Jewish neighborhood from Arab Jaffa. And despite the resemblance between the world views of the narrator's parents, a crucial gap separates them. In their behavior and actions both the mother and the father display a classic Orientalist attitude, treating the local Arabs as a peril to the “civilized,” “cultured” (that is, “Western”) home. They are attracted to the image of the Orient but repelled by its reality. Yet while the father sees this situation as part of the colonialist endeavor, that is, a spatial and national issue, for the mother it is an essentialist matter.

As the narrator notes, the father's effort is double. He is a farmer working the land and, as such, claims the right to call it home. This is a process of building the land and being built by and in it, as expressed in the well-known Hebrew phrase “ʾAnu baʾnu ʾarẓah livnot u-lehibanot bah.” The father's efforts focus on the construction of a “natural” connection to the land and to his new identity.Footnote ⁵⁴

But the father is also a writer, building a home with pen and paper, writing the land, as his son will later do. Sitting at his desk at nights, the father writes letters and articles. In one he replies to an article by Yitzhak Epstein, “A Hidden Question,” in which the author warned that ignoring the Arab residents of the land was wrong both morally and politically.Footnote ⁵⁵ The father publishes a three-part article, “From Imagination to Reality,” in the periodical Ha-‘olam, attacking Epstein's ideas and stating that the Arabs in Palestine do not belong to one nation but to different, sometimes hostile, tribes and ethnic groups.Footnote ⁵⁶

This is not a fictional episode. Ze'ev Smilansky, Yizhar's father, did indeed respond to Epstein's article and articulated the ideas mentioned above.Footnote ⁵⁷ Smilansky Senior was also a leader of Kibbush Ha-‘avodah (conquest of labor), a movement that supported Jewish labor in all fields, especially agriculture.Footnote ⁵⁸ His colonialism and Orientalism underpin, therefore, a national and territorial approach, notwithstanding the risk his acts pose to him and to his child.

The mother's similar Orientalist approach unfolds in the second chapter. Her ideology can be condensed into one sentence: the Jewish pioneer represents order and culture, whereas the native Arab represents chaos and threatening wildness. Though she displays the same Orientalist patterns of action as the father, hers feature an essentialist component. The chaos-cosmos model, which separates nature from culture,Footnote ⁵⁹ characterizes the Arab native as wild and repulsive and the Jewish pioneer as the representative of a higher culture and even a higher level of existence.

This change in perspective, from the father's point of view to the mother's world view, reflects upon Neve Shalom. Its thin walls and wooden gate not only create a physical border separating the neighborhood community from the residents of Jaffa, but also establish a moral and identity hierarchy. No wonder, then, that the narrator should later write: “Something strong, terrible and savage is stalking around free outside … free and roaring and strong…. You can't believe a word an Arab says. Least of all when they swear, the only language they understand is deceit … one day they suddenly … attacked the settlement, in a wild screaming mob … a terrible, savage, uncivilized, murderous mob….”Footnote ⁶⁰ The mother transmits these quotes indirectly in a very clear voice.Footnote ⁶¹

Both the father and the mother came from the Ukraine. In the new, sometimes hostile, land, Neveh Shalom becomes the unheimlich (the un-homely) for both of them.Footnote ⁶² Instead of offering a calm and relaxed atmosphere, the neighborhood that will later become an inseparable part of Tel Aviv seems to be an enclosed, defined place filled with fear and horror.Footnote ⁶³ Moreover, most of its inhabitants are of European origin, like those of fledgling Tel Aviv.Footnote ⁶⁴ Not only are the parents strangers in the place, theirs is an Orientalist attitude toward the native Arabs living next to them.

The narrator's view emerges already in the first chapter, where Yizhar compares the child's location with his father's place in the field. The ambivalence and the liminal position reappear in the second chapter. The narrator fears the Arabs outside his world and worries that the land will drive him and his parents out. Still, after introducing his mother's ideology and the physical boundary imprisoning him, later in the chapter he erects an inner screen between himself and his parents, first with a description of the rift between Jews and Arabs and scathing criticism: “The thin walls and the wooden gate … The whole idea of a Jewish neighborhood next to Arab Jaffa … the enlightened, the clean, the cultured, the builders of the land on this side and the natives, the backward, the filthy … on that side … as if they could sort out their differences peacefully here … what is it? Naivety, folly or criminal behaviour?”Footnote ⁶⁵

Furthermore, the narrator stresses the mother's role in shaping this view: “She, who was born and raised far away and has been here for twelve years … and some ignorant Arab woman who was born and raised here … are they really of the same worth and can they really have the same rights …?”Footnote ⁶⁶ The boundary of the first chapter, which allowed him to both criticize and appreciate his father's acts, now separates him from his mother.Footnote ⁶⁷

Yet besides disapproval of his parents, the narrator suggests another possibility. In this chapter he speaks foremost about a breakthrough, about the move from the place to what lies beyond it. This important theme, in almost all of Yizhar's stories and novels, is intertwined with the relationship between the individual and society.Footnote ⁶⁸ Here the narrator introduces another aspect of the divergence between him and his parents, their identities and ideologies. While they represent the pioneers' collective, exclusive attitude, he offers the possibility of inclusion, which combines a free, open home with the acceptance of otherness within it.Footnote ⁶⁹

It is in the midst of fear and density that the narrator tries to dismantle the boundaries. After quoting his mother, the protagonist (now five years old) describes his arrival at the beach stretching beyond the neighborhood and Arab Jaffa. Without any barriers, the endless sea is the antithesis of Neveh Shalom, an unmarked place/space where human acts leave no trace. It is the place where territorial conflicts are mitigated by the constant movement of the waves.Footnote ⁷⁰

But the thoughts about the endless sea are cut short by his return to the concrete, threatened courtyard, from which boundaries are crossed yet again, now in the form of literature. The child “in the corner between the door of the apartment and the wall of the arcade” imagines other places he knows thoroughly “from the books he has read … the written words rise up and make things that are more real than any real things.”Footnote ⁷¹ In this obviously reflexive moment, Yizhar points out the power of literature as an open medium, without walls. Though the walls of Neveh Shalom and the fear of its residents affect him, he can still find a way out of the rigid (yet at the same time brittle) physical boundary, to cross it without leaving his corner. Literature here reveals its imaginative power, which later turns into the power of the real place and space. The narrator's ability to imagine a new reality places him again in a liminal position, now between the sealed place and open space.

But just like the sea's ebb and flow, here too the movement of withdrawal and breakthrough continues. It recurs throughout the second chapter, with the sea and literature replaced by the train, the derelict factory outside the neighborhood, and memories of Purim—until the father returns home to his worried family with terrible news: the violent death of the author Yosef Haim Brenner.Footnote ⁷² Thus, the chapter ends on a note of explicit terror unrelieved by the breached boundary.

In light of the second chapter, the future Tel Aviv is intent on displaying both apparent proximity and actual separation. It is the Jewish place where progress, contentment, and even the absence of boundaries seem possible, especially when Yizhar conveys the narrator's experience and inner world. And yet, Neveh Shalom, which would become part of Tel Aviv, is actually designed to restrict the freedom of the narrator and his family. The neighborhood harbors violence, which can burst any time, as it does not offer the possibility of including otherness—a condition for urban existence as such.Footnote ⁷³ Literature, too, despite its liberating potential, can also collapse and disappear when faced with the heavy barrier and the danger of death lurking along the boundary between the I and the Other.

The first and second chapters of Preliminaries explicitly tie the construction of the boundary with the danger it poses. This is probably the main reason why certain critics and scholars interpreted Preliminaries as a novel concerned mainly with Jewish-Arab relations in Israel.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet the subject of boundaries touches on other themes and questions throughout the book, such as the growth of the narrator, the relationship between home and world, language with its limitations and wonders, the complicated structure of memory vis-à-vis nostalgia, etc.

These subjects are interwoven throughout the novel, from the beginning until the bittersweet ending. They appear and disappear, reappear and fade. For the reader, Tel Aviv becomes a city of revelation and concealment, of terror seething underneath the surface of calm. As mentioned earlier, the third chapter touches on the possibility of urban life with its entertainment and pleasures. After the author's near death in the first chapter, after the explicit horror in the second, after the internal barrier takes shape between the protagonist and his parents and between their past and present identities, the possibility of apparent reconciliation emerges.Footnote ⁷⁵

Tel Aviv between Pleasantness and Imagination

The city's first kiosk, with soda and jazz music, at the corner of Naḥalat Binyamin and Montefiore St. in the heart of ’Aḥuzat Bayit, allows the father and his child to feel close to each other. After the son blamed his father for neglecting him in the first chapter, after he called him a criminal, the two now wander through a small Tel Aviv until they reach the kiosk. The narrator, who criticized his mother's hierarchical cultural view (which is expressed spatially), associates the kiosk with a new culture that penetrates the new city's values. This is the culture of leisure, the influence of the outside world, of spending money and, above all, of Western “normalcy.”

While father and son are sitting at the kiosk, the clear boundary between the father's “old” and his “new,” pioneer identity dissolves. Plowing the lot, that is, the agricultural marking of the land, builds the new Zionist Jewish home and transforms the father's identity. This revolutionary act changes space and man simultaneously, a process that recurs in the third chapter, in which space changes as it changes man.

Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew city, the terrifying, horrifying place of the second chapter now reveals its calm, relaxed face. No longer under constant threat, it can evolve into a normal place that allows the father to relax, drink soda, and listen to music. He can thus leave behind a rural space for the sake of an urban place, his other Zionist home. If plowing the field required a revolution and a total change of identity, the city allows the revolutionary pioneer and urban identities to dwell side by side.

In the third chapter, Yizhar's Tel Aviv displays a seemingly delicate balance, as it allows the narrator to dismantle the barrier between “big” ideology and everyday life,Footnote ⁷⁶ because the threat of otherness has been largely reduced. The next chapters also present a blooming Tel Aviv along the seashore. Seeing the first movie, reading books, listening to music, flying kites toward the vast horizon, all move the soul of the child who will grow into a narrator brimming with stories.Footnote ⁷⁷

The Arab-Jewish conflict over the place called home, the conflict between the Jewish pioneer and the Arab inhabitant of the land, the conflict between the Jewish and Arab natives, are no longer at the center of the plot.Footnote ⁷⁸ They move to the background of the novel and, from the third chapter onward, are not mentioned again. Tel Aviv ceases to be a place that contains and points at these conflicts and themes; it no longer creates and destroys these boundaries.

Still, here too, the tension between the drawing and dismantling of the boundary churns below the surface, now as a gap between collective and personal space. The third and fourth chapters present not only the movie theater, the kiosk, the library, and music, but also a return to Purim with its masquerade, which frightens the young narrator, forcing him to withdraw in tears. Once again Tel Aviv reveals its Janus face, though it's now different. From the third chapter onward the Hebrew city is the site of both the collective spirit and the individual's most private and hidden aspirations. Here Yizhar draws a new boundary—between the narrator and others. This is not the generational gap between the pioneers and their son, nor the ethnic, national, and territorial conflict between Jews and Arabs. It is a rift running through almost all of Yizhar's stories, between the individual and the group, between the public and the private.

Living in the Margins—Individual Life, Concealed History, Vibrant Present

Yizhar's narrator makes sure to differentiate himself from the urban crowd: “Because even when they are all together, there is always one who is left on his own … And even when they all belong, there is one who does not entirely belong. Or let's say he belongs yet doesn't belong, or not wholly, or not all the time … who is always slightly not.”Footnote ⁷⁹ But why is Yizhar's narrator “always slightly not”? Why does he criticize the public here? Why, even at the movies or when listening to the choir, when roaming through the cheerfully excited streets on Purim, or when watching, with his friends, his skillful older brother flying kites, why does that screen stand between him and all the rest?

This question is not unique to Preliminaries. Yizhar is an author who writes extensively about individual-society relations. But his treatment of the subject does not usually touch on the influence of urbanity, and of Tel Aviv in particular, on the narrator's identity. That is, in Preliminaries, the subject that interests Yizhar is now framed through the individual's urban experience. In the first chapter, before the reader reaches Neveh Shalom, the narrator tells how his father placed him on the borderline between the plowed field and the open, untouched land. Since for Yizhar a spatial position is largely existential (at times also political), straddling the boundary is especially meaningful. When the narrator places himself on the boundary in the next chapters, he signifies the border but also blurs the binary reality it establishes.

This tendency clashes with an opposite development that recurs throughout the novel. Yizhar breaks the boundary with the identity and spatial location of the child who will become the narrator, yet rebuilds it over and over with his otherness. The narrator lives and exists on the margins of Tel Aviv (in the three chapters following the first), which allows him to draw the site's borders and at other times to erase them.

This move allows the narrator to strike a rare balance, manifested, among other ways, in the relation between built urban space and open pristine space. Straddling the boundary between the plowed field and open space elicits in the narrator a blend of empathy for and criticism of the pioneering enterprise. His relation to the city reflects a delicate balance that could collapse any time: it is the place where he finds comfort through concrete space, but it is also the imagined place that elicits discomfort and a deep sense of otherness and solitude.

In one of the book's most moving scenes, the son strolls with his father on Shabbat through the isolated neighborhood of Tel Nordau on the outskirts of Tel Aviv's built-up area.Footnote ⁸⁰ When they reach the dunes at the edge of the neighborhood, the father stops and explains to the son how the future city will look: “This is how far Yehuda Halevy Street will extend … and Rothschild Boulevard will be extended to down here, he points with both hands.” The son listens and imagines how the future center of Tel Aviv will look, then immediately describes the empty land surrounding them.

When father and son leave the place and return to the city, they leave only their footprints in the sand, and these will eventually vanish in the infinite cycle described by Yizhar: “A whole stretch of earth with no additions, as from time immemorial, as though all that has taken place these last years in Tel Aviv and all its glory is really nothing more than a slight scratch or a little heap on the edge of this unchanging wholeness, a mere what-of-it beside the great unchanging….”Footnote ⁸¹

Tel Aviv will erase the other, distant, history. Already in this part of the book, the small neighborhood of Neveh Shalom and the sense of fear and terror present in the first two chapters are no more than a distant memory. And just as memory fades, replaced by new adventures described by the author, the city eventually blots out the open space. Like Neveh Shalom, later integrated into the city, and the remote Tel Nordau, gradually turned into the very heart of the vibrant city, every building and place in Tel Aviv conceals an entire history of vanished sites. Aware of this concealed history, the narrator often describes not only the erasure of either built or open sites without boundaries but also what existed prior to current buildings and places.Footnote ⁸² Similarly, the city is part of an incessant historical process of destruction and building, of which even the word tel in Tel Aviv, which means archaeological mound, is reminiscent.

Yizhar endows Tel Aviv with both a past and a present and, moreover, adds an imaginary future. At the city's margins different times converge. This is also where the borderline is marked and deleted. Once again, the margins allow the city to present its tranquil face and at other times to reveal the undermining elements teeming beneath. The relationship between the built area and the primordial space exposes another dual view: the narrator fears the absence of boundaries around the wasteland as he does the erasure of the home (whether national or private) by nature and its emissaries; he fears nature would disappear under the home.Footnote ⁸³ If the first fear is evident in the first chapter in rural Ḥulda and in Tel Aviv, the book's second part presents an inverted picture in which the narrator is concerned about the existence and future memory of erased buildings, dunes, fields, of the sea and the unobstructed horizon.

This walk to the edge of town, to the border, exposes an internal tension between past and present, erasure and exposure, space and home, urban place and “natural” territory, and more. It describes Tel Aviv, the Zionist city, as a place of in-between-ness. The city, the narrator's home, is not a place that fulfills all dreams. Sure, it includes this aspect and when the father stretches his arms, he turns this dream into a reality. But at the same time this is a fragile place, a home that is threatened by the world outside, by open space. It is a home that aims to conquer space without any thoughts about the possible horrible consequences of its creation.

Against the common image of Tel Aviv, Yizhar presents a place that is haunted and haunting. This is a home with unstable foundations, a place where fear intertwines with sharp criticism. Its liminality and the many different layers constructing it turn the written city into a crucial part of the unique poetics of Preliminaries. The lack of conclusion turns Tel Aviv (as a microcosm of the Israeli situation) into a place of contradictions and problems, with no apparent solution.

Besides the creation and breaching of boundaries, Preliminaries presents urban (and the general Israeli) existence in its deep inherent contradiction. Its boundaries are generational, ethnic, national, spatial, along gender, class, but also temporal lines, between past and present. At times the narrator stands on one side of the fence, at other times he expresses the opposite possibility. Spanning the boundary seems to exempt him from a commitment to either view. But does Yizhar's narrator really avoid taking sides? Is the urban and Israeli experience he describes chaotic and confused, undecipherable and devoid of inner logic?

The answer to this question seems to be negative. The writer's borderline location implicates literature, presenting it as an art of the in-between, between signification and erasure, between memory and forgetting, between the real and the imaginary, between the individual and the community, between the I and the Other. Yizhar placed the narrator of Preliminaries on the borderline; next to him he placed the book. In this sense, his statements in an interview he gave at that time are not fortuitous: “I feel that the … situation of leaving A and going to B is the most stimulating. I acknowledge the existence of both sides. I don't belong to this or that side. I'm within the tension between them.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Written as an autobiography, even if there is much fiction in it, Preliminaries combines the sense of a continuous identityFootnote ⁸⁵ with an internal gap between the writing “I” and the written “I.”Footnote ⁸⁶ It both constructs and crosses identity boundaries. The autobiography, switching between the active and the passive voice, enables the writer to designate himself while pointing at the social structure surrounding him.Footnote ⁸⁷ In Preliminaries, the genre, the narrator's character and the spirit of Tel Aviv are interwoven, creating a complicated structure, a double-faced world in which one boundary is constructed as another is broken.

As in other works by Yizhar, here too the spatial modus often shapes both consciousness and poetics. The feeling expressed in the interview quoted above and conveyed in the book seeps into the city, turning the Tel Aviv of Preliminaries into a city of contradictions that are able to exist under the same sky despite the powerful tensions they provoke. The foundations of this city are throbbing with a rich past, which, though vanished, still casts a shadow on the present. Yizhar's Tel Aviv is a city whose clear and almost homogenous identity threatens and is threatened by the otherness it seems to welcome with open arms. An immense loneliness is entrenched among its buildings, as is the vulgarity that threatens to engulf the different, alienated, and reclusive individual.Footnote ⁸⁸ The growing and spreading ’Aḥuzat Bayit gnaws at more and more open areas; it almost even bypasses the shoreline. Yet this city is merely yet another archaeological layer in the perpetual cycle of the building and destruction of the home. In the book there is no distinct screen between Tel Aviv and the world. Its boundary may be there but it is half-transparent,Footnote ⁸⁹ a sort of lattice that allows one to glance beyond, to wake up briefly from reality and touch the imagination. This is the boundary Yizhar draws. This is the city he painted with words.