Nili Scharf Gold's Haifa: City of Steps crosses conventional academic boundaries, interweaving autobiography with analyses of architecture, urban planning, and literature. It joins other personally inspired explorations of place in Hebrew literature, such as Ranen Omer-Sherman's Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film. Gold's book, which is more emphatically autobiographical, is extensively researched and rooted in a variety of historical records, oral and written, that she worked diligently to access. This scholarly rigor is balanced by a lively writing style that transitions smoothly among Gold's different roles, from historian to storyteller to memoirist to literary scholar.

In her introduction, Gold outlines the temporal and geographic terrain of the book: part of the Hadar ha-Carmel neighborhood, “the most important Jewish neighborhood in Haifa,” from 1948 to 1966 (70). While the book deviates from this terrain to wander farther afield in time and space, it is focused on the Haifa of Gold's memory and experience and is thus concerned with Jewish and Hebrew Haifa, acknowledging political currents mostly in the background of its more immediate concerns with the buildings, streets, and institutions serving the Jews of Hadar ha-Carmel. A map opens each chapter, accentuating the significance of microgeography in Gold's analyses. Haifa's distinctive, lyrical landscape of slope and sea permeates the study.

Haifa begins with an introduction that provides a historical and an autobiographical foundation for the five chapters that follow. The chapters are organized spatially, beginning with the western edge of Hadar ha-Carmel, the site of Gold's first home. This first chapter examines kav ha-tefer, the seamline, where during the British Mandate period the older Al Burj neighborhood bordered the developing Hadar ha-Carmel. The area offered a convenient location for government buildings, and these—city hall and the courthouse, as well as other public landmarks, such as the Zion hotel, and private ones, like the author's first house—are the chapter's focus. In this as in subsequent chapters, Gold provides meticulous historical detail about important city officials involved in Haifa's development, the buildings, their architects, and the circumstances surrounding their planning and construction, as well as her own family's engagement with these structures. The second chapter examines the Technion, the prestigious Technological Institute of Israel, as the heart of Hadar ha-Carmel specifically and of Jewish Haifa as a whole. This chapter intersperses an account of the Technion's construction with the civic life that sprouted around it, as encapsulated in several buildings, such as cafes, the Clock House, and the business center. Gold considers this architectural constellation through the influence and legacy of the architect who designed the Technion, Alexander Baerwald.

The third chapter shifts gears, elaborating on the steps clinging to the city's sloping topography, its most characteristic architectural element. The “meeting of human and mountain” that Gold identifies therein is particularly apparent in the area of the Talpiot market, where, she writes, “the geography takes on a quasi-emotional quality that is physically felt with every stair and interval down the slope” (107). Such observations, and the spatial analysis that supports them, lend the book an intimacy not often encountered in scholarly studies. Gold does not consider theories of space and place in this study, choosing a more historical approach; however, those familiar with the theories of Yi-Fu Tuan and other humanistic geographers concerned with the experiential or phenomenological dimensions of space and place will recognize affinities to Gold's approach to spatiality. In this chapter, centered on the theme of steps, Gold is at her most compelling and dynamic. She begins with a lengthy discussion of the Talpiot market, an important site in the quotidian lives of Haifa's residents. From there, she moves to the fascinating relationship between the market's Viennese Jewish architect, Moshe Gerstel, and the wealthy Arab developer Hajj Tahir Karaman. She then recalls her father's shop in the Bet Talpiot building and her own thrilling discovery, through painstaking detective work, that it was Gerstel, until then unrecognized as the architect, who had designed the building. The chapter then moves to a nostalgic description of Bat Galim, a neighborhood with a swimming pool by the sea, central to Haifa's intimate geography. Gold completes her exploration of the steps with a valuable discussion of the Wadi Salib riots, when residents of the poor and largely Mizrahi neighborhood of Wadi Salib marched on the prosperous Hadar ha-Carmel to protest deplorable socioeconomic conditions and ethnic discrimination. The arc of this chapter showcases the skillful movement among the personal, historical, and architectural voices that animate the book as a whole.

The fourth chapter narrows its focus, examining the Alliance School, where Gold studied in her youth, and the Central Synagogue, where she suffered a harrowing rejection. The death of her father when she was only a girl colors her experience of both buildings. The fifth and final chapter moves to the environs of Gold's last home in Haifa, where she lived from the age of six to eighteen. Her consideration of the Ge'ulah School she attended briefly leads to a reflection on its most famous teacher, Yehuda Amichai, while her analysis of the residential designs of the Ge'ulah neighborhood leads to the German Jewish artist Hermann Struck and Theodor Herzl's Altneuland. A section on “family mythologies” cements the particularly personal nature of this final chapter.

These disparate facets of spatiality and its expression, whether through architecture, texts, or experience, exemplify the book's distinctiveness. Interlaced throughout are original readings of fiction and poetry set in Haifa, by Yehuda Amichai, Sami Michael, Yoel Hoffmann, Yehoshua Kenaz, A. B. Yehoshua, Yehudit Katzir, Yehudit Hendel, Natan Zach, and Dahlia Ravikovtich. Gold reflects on these literary renderings of Haifa as well as on their authors’ personal connections to the city, offering a multidimensional literary urban portrait. Critically, her readings demonstrate the centrality of Haifa in Hebrew literature, more commonly associated with the antipodal spatial forces of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The one lamentable omission in this book is that of the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, whose most famous story, “Returning to Haifa” (1969), may well be better known globally than any other work set in the city. Documenting details of Haifa as it has been preserved in the memory of its protagonists, who return to it as exiles and visitors, Kanafani offers a countervision of the city that would have been fascinating to juxtapose with those included in Haifa. Though he was not a Hebrew author and as such beyond the purview of this book, even a brief mention of Kanafani's story as an important example of other literary Haifas would enhance this complex and multifaceted study.