THE TECHNION
The Genesis of Hadar HaCarmel
According to the chronicles of modern Hebrew Haifa, the district of Hadar HaCarmel was brought into the world by “the wondrous deed of erecting a technical school in a desolate, thorn-strewn place on the Carmel, far from the city’s settlement.”1 These words were written in 1958, the year of the tenth anniversary of the State of Israel and almost fifty years after the construction of that very technical school, the Technion.2 At that time it still seemed that the neighborhood born of this “wondrous deed” would keep growing; the Technion would continue to shower it with light and warmth; and Haifa as a whole would retain its status as a flourishing metropolis.
Completed in 1914, the Technion—the Technological Institute of Israel—stood alone on the middle of the northern slope of Mount Carmel, between its peak and the sea, and served as the foundation of the most important Jewish neighborhood in Haifa. Hadar HaCarmel—literally, “the splendor of the Carmel” and simply “Hadar” to locals—was initially planned as a “garden city.” In the 1920s it grew around the Technion building, which had been standing there for a decade. From its inception, Hadar gradually spread down the slope, its streets ultimately forming a grid. The grid’s horizontal avenues are wide and straight and run parallel to the coastline; they are intersected by winding vertical streets, stairs, and narrow alleys that weave their way down the mountain toward the bay.3 The area around the Technion was the center of commerce, culture, and entertainment for Jewish Haifa.4 There, many of the inhabitants of Hadar, immigrants and refugees from the other side of the sea, struggled to build the life they had dreamt of in their newly adopted city. Some tried to recreate their former world, and some tried to forget it, but the legacies of their other homelands subtly shaped the sites of their new city. They longed for the European milieu they left behind—the cafés, the music, and their mother tongues. They spun the stories of their newfound loves and passed them on to their children. They passed on tastes and scents and raised children imprinted with the traces of their parents’ worlds. They taught them the old rituals and languages that gradually became irrelevant to the younger generation. This was the site of tug-of-wars between parents and children, the biological and the spiritual, teachers and students, the culture of the past and the sensibilities of the future.
Even before I understood the forces that shaped the quarter in which I was born and raised, even before I grasped its structure and design, the Technion area at the heart of Hadar seeped into my consciousness. It was as if a mysterious hand led me along the paths of the history of Haifa, taking pains to show me early in my life the monumental work of the architect Alexander Baerwald and the venerable area adjacent to it. The Technion’s round dome and symmetrical lines accompanied me as I grew, while the triangles decorating its roof and the tall stairway leading to its huge entrance archways were etched in my heart. My nursery school dwelt nearby, and, at the end of each day, my mother and I would pass by the Technion and often sit in the garden nestled in front of that broad-armed building between the rows of tall trees.
The western border of the Technion complex, the one closest to that garden, was Shmaryahu Levin Street, which I passed daily. It gently descends toward the sea and, on the way, crosses Herzl Street, the northern border of the complex and the main thoroughfare in Hadar. I always feel warmth toward this little intersection of Shmaryahu Levin and Herzl: on its corner was one of the many coffee houses that characterized Haifa, the Viennese Café Krips, where my parents met for the first time.
As Herzl Street passes by the Technion, it meets the vertical Balfour Street, the institute’s eastern border. This crossroads is unique in its topography: Balfour Street soars up Mount Carmel at a dramatic angle from the broad Herzl Street. In fact, it is the only “vertical” street in the city that rises straight toward the peak of the Carmel uninterrupted. Balfour is also the steepest street that has ever been paved in Israel—its angle is the maximum incline allowed by Israel’s Planning and Construction Law. The histories of the buildings that stand at this intersection are a microcosm of the city’s development as a whole and, specifically, of Hadar HaCarmel. This space has continued to evolve in the memory of those who have lived in Haifa and of the authors who have written about it.
In the 1950s, when my daily route touched the Technion, Hadar had been bustling around it for over two decades, and the school had earned an international reputation as a prestigious institute for applied sciences.5 It had also already garnered a glorious national history that included its service as a home to each of Hadar’s public institutions in their infancy; the neighborhood’s sole source of water in its fledgling years; a communal site for performances and celebrations; a shelter for Jewish refugees in times of danger; a provider of technological assistance to the British against the Nazis; and a major player in the national struggle during Israel’s War of Independence. Furthermore, the building itself was one of the fundamental architectural symbols of the Zionist movement. Photographs of it adorn every encyclopedia entry on the history of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, and it is described as embodying the new Hebrew Style, an architectural aesthetic with parallels in both literature and art.6
The Edifice and Its Architect
The designer of the Technion, Alexander Baerwald, lived a life made of the stuff of Hollywood. This talented architect, a graduate of the Institute of Technology in Berlin, played cello in a chamber music group, wrote poetry, and occasionally painted. Born in 1877 to an assimilated Jewish family, he held the respected post of architect of the Prussian Public Works Department in Berlin. When he was only thirty-two years old, he was invited by the Jewish leaders who were planning the Technion to participate in its construction, mainly because he was Jewish. To prepare, he took an instructional journey to Palestine that determined his development as an architect. He decoded the region’s indigenous style, the Heimatstil, and envisioned a palace, or shrine, to higher education on a long and narrow stretch of rocky land on the Carmel slope facing the sea.
When he began the construction in 1911, he lived on the Carmel and would ride a donkey down the Donkey Path to the construction site. An illustrated story he wrote in rhyme that was found in his estate humorously relates the adventures of Baerwald, the son of Europe, on the mountain in the Middle East.7 He struggled with the hard rocks, the aridity, the conflicting opinions of the Jewish leaders, the Turkish police, and a lack of skilled workers and machinery—yet he continued building. All the while he was also working in Germany and was even decorated with a medal from the kaiser for the Prussian Royal Library in Berlin. In the midst of the Great War, he joined the German navy and fought for his homeland, but even on the front he dreamt about the educational complex he had been forced to leave behind. After the war he returned to that remote Palestinian town and began designing more buildings in the style that he had created. However, the man who planned the shrine to education died prematurely, after completing only a portion of what he had intended. Thankfully, he finished the dream castle of the Technion and a few additional works, but many of his other designs went unfulfilled. He fell while still holding his drafting pencil, leaving his students and colleagues to fight over his legacy. In 1932, approximately two years after he died, there was an exhibition in his hometown of Berlin, dedicated to the “loyal” architect “to whom the Professional Society of Architects and Engineers in Berlin owes a great debt.”8 In Haifa his touch is recognizable throughout the city, not only in the buildings that he himself designed but also in those constructed after he died, which still pay homage to his genius.
In planning the Technion Baerwald fully embraced a new architectural language, which used the characteristics of indigenous architecture that he had identified on his initial trip to Palestine.9 He valued the influence of the local culture and internalized it.10 He avoided both conspicuous colonialist features and decorative orientalism. His work combined his Prussian professionalism, European classicism, and updated construction techniques with Islamic morphology, the local Arab style, and ancient Jewish symbology.
Baerwald’s Technion gazes north over Hadar and Haifa’s lower city toward the Mediterranean. Its design displays both ancient and contemporary Middle Eastern motifs and classical European forms in a modern spatial order.11 A wide bank of external steps ascends toward its elevated main entrance, rising up from ceremonial gardens that unfold along a palm tree–lined boulevard. The front façade has a symmetrical composition, comprised of five parts, that brings to mind an ancient temple: the central, domed mass is bookended by two main wings, with a secondary body at the end of each wing. Each individual part is symmetrical within itself: the two main wings have evenly spaced quartets of rectangular windows. Above each window is a ventilation aperture. The arches beneath, on the basement floor, correspond precisely to each group of four windows. The unforgettable deep-set entrance in the central mass stands out due to its dome and the strict symmetry on either side. Its depth is accentuated by the flat plane of the side wings’ façades. A giant vault shelters the entrance, casting its authority over the entire composition.12
From a distance it almost seems as if the low building is a part of the stony mountain, but, close up, it is impossible not to be awestruck by the intricate work of the arches that form its entrance: three nesting arches, one inside another. In the wall behind them, three tall, sculpted arches frame the arched doors and the arched windows above them, making it difficult for an onlooker to know how many arches there are altogether; each arch seems to be a reflection of another arch, as in a hall of mirrors.
A Star of David is showcased high above the entrance doors, as though the entrance’s glory is there solely to frame it and, by extension, the Technion’s unbreakable bond with the Jewish people. Thus, the architectural, decorative, and topographical mechanisms channel the eye toward the symbol of Zionist ideology, a testament to the architect’s identification with the Technion’s national mission. All five parts of the façade are clad in limestone from the nearby shore of Atlit and carved with details of traditional stonework. Baerwald wanted to remain faithful to the ancient style and so asked the stonemasons “not to fix imperfections in the stone” so as to preserve their natural, rough texture.13 Ornaments, pointed arches, and hexagonal and circular portholes decorate the façade; an Assyrian-style row of sharp teeth marches on the roof above it, while the polygonic dome at the center of the structure is taken from a reconstructed model of King Solomon’s temple. All these echo the architect’s desire to draw from the glorious construction tradition of the Middle East in its entirety.
The Technion Courtesy of Haifa City Archives; photographer W. Loewenheim
The central, inner space has a very different aesthetic. Light streams into it from the dome and the large window above the entrance. A main staircase with a magnificently crafted wooden railing ascends from the lobby to the large hall above, breaking the symmetry. It is a modern, open, dynamic space that blurs the lines between inside and out. For example, its walls are made of smooth, plastered chalkstone, but select architectural details, such as the inner doorposts, are made of the façade’s rough limestone.14 The corridors that branch out from either side of the lobby also break the boundary between inside and out: on one of their sides is a series of open archways similar to the arcade of a well-ventilated mosque designed to accommodate the climate. Each corridor leads to a graded lecture hall. High on the back wall of the lobby, a window rises, shaped like the two tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, and above it, a hollow Star of David. The marble floor is paved in a magnificent pattern. While the inner space showcases Baerwald’s contemporary aspirations, the design of the façade is more conservative and Middle Eastern in style to match the environment. When viewed from outside, the building looks like a massive, terraced structure that is preventing the mountain from sliding into the sea. Baerwald succeeded, then, in navigating the balancing act presented by the assignment he had taken upon himself. He designed a monumental building that proudly announced its cultural and national mission, all the while creating the impression that the Technion had grown naturally out of its landscape.
Technion inner staircase
Courtesy of Haifa City Archives; photographer W. Loewenheim
To complement his masterpiece Baerwald also conceived of a garden that would continue the building’s design. He consulted the artist and garden aficionado, Hermann Struck, his friend from Berlin, on the garden’s design: straight lines of trees on either side of a palm tree boulevard that served as the middle axis. In 1923 Albert Einstein visited and symbolically planted two palm trees as a sign of support for the Technion. The gardener, Abraham Ginzburg, who lived with his family in the water tower on the highest point of the complex, also planted grass and flowers. Surrounded by a stone fence ornate with the purple flowers of thick bougainvillea, the lovely garden spread down the entire expanse in front of the building. Years later the gardener’s assistant would remember it in detail: “The garden was divided into four. In the western part, near the entrance gate, was a round pool, a column inlaid with pebbles at its center, water trickling into the pond. . . . Around the pool there were concrete benches . . . and behind them, trees that provided shade, which was particularly pleasant in the hot summer. In the second quarter of the garden rose trees with which the land was blessed: palm, fig, pomegranate, plum, carob, and vines.”15
From my early childhood I remember the garden that emerges from this description—its greenery, its bubbling waters, and the feeling of secluded, protected serenity that it bestowed on all its visitors. Many little children, like me, played among the tall trees, chasing butterflies and enjoying themselves, while their mothers sat and chatted, supervising and feeding the children or tending to little babies in their carriages. A few heartwarming lines in a letter that the then fledgling poet Yehuda Amichai wrote in 1947 confirm my memory of the garden’s denizens: “The sun is shining and in the little garden near the Technion babysitters and young mothers come with their children in carriages. . . . That green garden is filled with life.”16 Both my nursery school and kindergarten were located nearby, making the garden an inseparable part of the landscape of my childhood. I used to visit it almost every day with my mother and my baby brother on the way home, especially from Sonya’s Nursery, my nursery school on Ahad Ha’am Street. That street, located west of the Technion, was filled with trees and old houses, remnants of the Technikum neighborhood that had been absorbed into Hadar HaCarmel. The house where Sonya’s Nursery resided still stands, the remains of old playground equipment hidden in its backyard.
In that yard the three butterflies from Levin Kipnis’s story played and frolicked in the sun—a white butterfly, a yellow butterfly, and a red butterfly.17 Each wore a long dress in a different color, a pair of paper and wire antennae, and two gorgeous wings. In the class play at the end of the school year, these three butterflies appeared alongside the sun, the rain, and all the garden’s colorful flowers, and I, the white butterfly, proudly addressed the audience: “Dear parents, thank you for coming to Sonya Nursery School’s celebration.”
In my nursery school days, it seemed to me, as to generations of Haifa children who grew up in the area, that the Technion and its garden had been on the slope since the beginning of time. Of course, colossal buildings don’t spontaneously spring up, especially not in a small town on the periphery of the Ottoman Empire over a century ago. Nevertheless, the relatively short time that elapsed between the conception and execution of the Technion’s edifice is part of what makes its erection a miracle.
As early as 1901 the Fifth Zionist Congress decided to build a Jewish university that emphasized technological subjects. In 1902 the great Zionist dreamer, Theodor Herzl, published the utopian novel Altneuland, in which he dubbed Haifa “the city of the future” and predicted it would play a leading role in industry and technology. But the Technion itself was actually the product of the initiative of a non-Zionist organization.
In 1907 Paul Nathan, the leader of the relief organization Ezra Association of German Jews, visited Palestine and started working toward building an institution for technological studies, a “Technikum,” the likes of which were found nowhere in the vast reaches of the Ottoman Empire. His initiative won the support of the German kaiser, who, like other major European powers, was invested in spreading his country’s culture and benefiting its economy. Nathan chose Haifa to fulfill his vision, even though at the time, it was still relatively small, with a population of twenty thousand, only 10 percent of whom were Jewish. Nevertheless, he was convinced of the city’s potential as a future center of industry and a transportational hub (the Hejaz Railway had been inaugurated there in 1905). In 1908 a lot was purchased with the funding of German, Russian, and American Jews.18 Arthur Ruppin, the father of Jewish settlement in Palestine who founded the Palestine Land Development Company, foresaw the urban development that would follow the Technion and bought the surrounding land, which would become the Hadar HaCarmel neighborhood less than two decades later.
In 1909 the lot was encircled by a fence to ensure ownership, according to Ottoman law. Meanwhile, Jewish experts in Germany had already designed the curriculum for the Technion and decided to create a preparatory school for it, which ultimately became the Hebrew Reali School. Baerwald was invited to plan the entire complex, and in 1910 he opened an office in Haifa. In 1911, even before receiving a permit, the construction materials had been collected and hauled to the site on camels and in carts. The project faced many obstacles, however: Ottoman bureaucratic procedures, an inadequate and technologically unskilled workforce, a lack of modern machinery, and stubborn land that rejected the foundation.19 Despite all this, the cornerstone was laid in April 1912. In 1913 the main Technion building was almost finished, its workshops had been completed, and its well—at the time the deepest in the country—had been dug. The high school building had also been finished. With its small dome and toothed roof, the Hebrew Reali School was a diminutive reflection of the main Technion building. Unlike its bigger brother, however, its structure was charmingly asymmetrical. In its design Baerwald allowed himself to surrender more to local, vernacular architectural elements than he did in the Technion’s.
As construction progressed, the Zionists and the non-Zionists on the board of trustees engaged in a series of power struggles. The peak of these conflicts was the fight over the language of instruction, eventually known as the “war of the languages.” The non-Zionists wanted German, while the Zionists believed that teaching in Hebrew was tantamount. Due to the “discord,” those who championed Hebrew, led by the high school’s principal, Arthur Biram, were forced to conduct studies outside the premises, even though the high school building was ready for use. The echoes of this dispute even reached the New York Times in a 1914 article titled “Zionist Outbreaks Due to Language.”20 That year studies at the technological institute were about to begin. However, in August 1914 Germany declared war on Russia. In 1916 the complex housed the German army and in 1917 became a Turkish military hospital, which spared it from the bombings. In 1918, when the British entered the city, they erected a military tent camp there. It was not until 1920 that the Technion was transferred into the hands of the World Zionist Organization. But it took three more years to return the building to its former glory. The Technion, intended to be the sole technical academic institution in the Ottoman Empire, opened its doors only after that empire’s downfall. Ten years passed between 1914, when classes were supposed to begin under the Ottoman sultan, to its actual opening under the British Crown. The Technion was officially inaugurated in February 1925 and finally started to fulfill its original mission. Baerwald was appointed professor of architecture and, ironically, began teaching in German.
Twenty-five years later, in the abnormally snowy Haifa winter of 1950, the Technion celebrated its silver jubilee in the independent State of Israel. One of its first visionaries, the Zionist leader and scientist Chaim Weizmann, then the first president of the young state, participated in the ceremony. The Technion’s director enumerated its achievements: it had graduated more than one thousand engineers and quadrupled the number of its laboratories. The quick growth of Haifa’s Jewish population also contributed to the Technion’s expansion and the thriving of its urban surroundings. Joining the veteran Reali, schools around the Technion multiplied, among them, my kindergarten.
“Milka’s” school, my kindergarten, was in the area of the Technion, not far from the lovely Sonya’s Nursery, where we were all carefree butterflies.
In Milka’s kindergarten on Ben Yehuda Street, however, we did not flit from flower to flower. Instead, we learned to behave, to wait patiently for our turn, whether for lunch or a ride on the carousel in the front yard. Milka’s school was affiliated with the Organization for Working Mothers, which meant that it included an afternoon nap and a four o’clock snack: a light-blue Bakelite cup filled to the brim with nauseating cocoa and dark bread smeared with jelly. But on Fridays school ended early, and, instead of the afternoon nap, we all eagerly awaited the man with the panas kesem, or magic lantern. That lantern was housed in a large, wooden box, on whose front was affixed an illustrated scroll. The schoolroom was darkened midday, and we sat entranced while the man stood next to the box, slowly turning the scroll as he told the story. Lit from behind, the colorful pictures were revealed in front of our eyes, one after the other, and the tale, every week the same, was etched in our hearts: “Hannah’le and her Shabbat Dress.” First, the picture of Hannah’le in her beautiful white dress; then, Hannah’le taking care of a dirty kitten; next, Hannah’le helping an elderly coal porter carry his heavy sack; and, finally, Hannah’le weeping and distraught after realizing that her dress was stained with mud and coal dust. The stars saw her tears, however, and, in reward for her kind heart, turned every stain into a star so that the dress was even prettier than it had been at first.21
But Fridays held another magic: my father. By law, businesses and schools had to close early that day in honor of Shabbat, so he was able to pick me up from school on his way back from work. My father and I marched home hand in hand: I was in heaven. We walked down Ben Yehuda Street, and every week, or so it seemed, just before we turned toward the Technion, we would pass the same girl on the same corner, calling up to a high balcony for her mom (ima) to come out. At the top of her lungs, she would scream “Iiiiimaaaa!” And we, giggling, imitated her tone, calling out a random rhyme we had made up: “Kadiiiimaaa” (which means “forward”). From that corner we continued past the wall around the Reali School. In the spaces between the cypress trunks that hid the schoolyard, we could see only the running feet of the children playing. Here we would chant “this school Re’ali is not normali!” a popular local joke about the exclusive snobby institution. Then we turned onto Shmaryahu Levin Street, crossed Herzl, and from there, onward.
When I walked home with my father on Fridays, we never stopped on the enchanting Herzl Street and did not reach the large Herzl/Balfour intersection, but I knew the pleasures it held from my many strolls with my mother. Our stated destination was usually Meyer Coffee, where she bought quality ground coffee, but when the spirit came over my mother, we would go to Café Snir, the café and ice cream parlor in the Clock House on the bustling Herzl/Balfour intersection. We would sit next to the window, overlooking the street’s sharp decline. My mother, Dora, would order café au lait for her and ice cream for me in a shiny silver goblet: three scoops, one white, one pink, and one chocolate, with a triangle wafer. Was it here that she first drew me the map of their love, hers and my father’s? This map was dotted with the European establishments around the Technion complex. First was Café Krips at the corner of Herzl and Shmaryahu Levin. In front of it was a small plaza and inside, between walls inlaid with black tiles, one could climb the two steps to a gallery area encircled by a shiny metal railing. My mother told me that when she first moved to Haifa from Tel Aviv in 1940, she became friends with a woman named Frau Sturm. To this day I can remember her silvery-blue hair, arranged in a tall, structured coiffure of curls, and her beautiful hands, even though I never learned her first name (the way I was brought up, children never addressed unrelated adults by their first name). In fact, it was because of Frau Sturm that my mother met my father. My mother was sitting with her in Café Krips when suddenly a man entered and approached the table. He was an acquaintance of Frau Sturm’s from when they both lived in Vienna. His name was Jakob Scharf. Frau Sturm introduced my mother to him, saying, “This is Dora Preminger. She’s originally from Chernovitz.”
“Chernovitz?” the man verified. “My sister lived in Chernovitz.”
“My sister lived in Chernovitz” is the only fragment from that conversation that reached me verbatim. And what else did my father tell my mother about his older sister, Haya, who had moved to Chernovitz when she got married? Did he tell the woman he had just met about his only visit to Chernovitz in 1927? Many years later I would meet Haya’s son, Joseph, and he would tell me about that visit from the point of view of the six-year-old child he was then. That was the year that Joseph began first grade, but because of the family’s limited means, he did not have a school bag. My father, the uncle who had just arrived from Vienna, gave his little nephew his own expensive leather briefcase. Joseph kept that bag until he escaped Chernovitz at the beginning of World War II. And my father? Did he know that his sister Haya had already perished when the name Chernovitz reverberated in Café Krips?
Later I learned that Café Krips had been established by the Viennese pastry chef Walter Krips. I found out that he was among the first to bring whipped cream to Haifa, a fact that perhaps explains why my father went there so often. He used to tell us wonders about the superior schlagsahne served in Vienna.22
My father proposed three months after they met at Krips. He took my mother to Balfour Keller, the most expensive Viennese restaurant in town. Its name hinted at its location in the subterranean floor of the building—the cellar (Keller in German). The image of the painted chef who welcomed them with his white hat and handlebar moustache continued smiling from the top of the menu that stood outside the restaurant for many years afterward. That evening my father gave my mother a square, golden watch as an engagement present, which she wore until the day she died. The landmarks in my mother’s story were all clustered in the same area, and I could identify them easily. I passed Krips every day on my way to and from preschool, while Balfour Cellar sat near the Herzl/Balfour intersection, diagonally across from the Clock House, where Café Snir served me ice cream balls in chilled silver dishes.
Coffee houses were an important part of my life, not only as the backdrop of my parents’ romance. When I was a little older than a kindergartner, my mother used to take me slightly farther afield, to Café Ritz. There she taught me how to read German because, like many of Hadar’s cafés, Ritz didn’t have magazines in any other language. Viennese culture inspired much of Hadar HaCarmel, since many of its residents were central European immigrants. The spirit of European capitals continued to hover over my city throughout my youth. Earlier newspaper ads from the time of Hadar’s swift growth in the 1930s showed the importance of its cafés. In Café Vienna on Nordau Street, just south of Herzl near the Technion, they served homemade “Viennese ice cream” in the summer, and in Café Sternheim next door they danced to imported Austrian music.
The author Yehoshua Kenaz moved to Haifa with his family at a young age because his father worked for the British during World War II. Although he lived some distance from Hadar HaCarmel, his close friend Nili Friedlander recalled during our conversation that he knew it well—he even gave her a walking tour of his childhood Haifa.23 In the story “Musical Moment” Kenaz’s narrator visited Hadar HaCarmel twice a week because Mrs. Chanina, his “first violin teacher,” lived in a stone house on the elegant Yerushalayim Street or, as Kenaz calls it, “one of those quiet streets near the Institute of Technology.” After the frustrating and anxiety-provoking violin lessons, his mother would take him to a “German café” in the neighborhood.24
Kenaz’s autobiographical stories paint the city and his life there with the sensitivity and talent for observing detail that are his trademark. The reader of the story “Henrik’s Secret” is able to follow the footsteps of the narrator and his new friend, Henrik, just as the two boys follow Wanda, Henrik’s beautiful sister. Behind the stone fence surrounding the café at the corner of Nordau and Balfour, they watch Wanda dancing with an English soldier. Indeed, these cafés, with their European dance bands, attracted many of the British Mandate’s officers. In the eyes of the adolescent boys spying on these European leisure spots, they were the peak of glamor and intrigue.
Unlike the nameless cafés in Kenaz’s stories, which are recalled by the child narrator only through their cultural affiliation—“a German café”—one long-lived popular establishment has been preserved in literature by name: Café Atara.25 It was joined at the hip to Balfour Cellar in the same building. Atara did not star in my mother’s stories, but it has the privilege of appearing in important Haifa literary works. Among the regulars of that café was the twenty-three-year-old Yehuda Amichai, who lived in Haifa in 1947–48 and would emerge as one of the revolutionaries of Hebrew literature within a decade.
“We sat in Café Atara / in Hadar HaCarmel,” says the speaker in one of the moving tributes Amichai wrote for his father. “A Meeting with My Father” is a poem he wrote late in his life, over thirty years after the period it depicts. It is the only place in his oeuvre where he openly confronts the difficult months during which he lived in Haifa. Upon reading this poem in 1980, when it first appeared in The Great Tranquility: Questions and Answers, I rejoiced at both the unexpected connection between my hometown and my beloved poet and the fact that the most elevated figure in Amichai’s poetry, his father, was eternalized in a Haifa-centric poem.26 I understood the fatefulness of the time of their meeting and the gap between the poem’s dramatic circumstances and the intimate, everyday language with which it describes them. Yet at the time neither I nor almost any other reader could have known the poem’s full background.27 Twenty-three years passed between the publication of “A Meeting with My Father” and the day when I learned the full story behind it:
A MEETING WITH MY FATHER
My father came to me in one of the intermissions
Between two wars or between two loves
As if to an actor resting backstage in half-darkness.
We sat in the Café Atara
In Hadar HaCarmel. He asked me about my small room
And if I was coping on my modest teacher’s pay.
Daddy, daddy, before me you must have begot
Cherries that you loved,
Black with so much redness!
My brothers, sweet cherries
From that world.
The time was the time of evening prayer.
My father knew I no longer prayed
And said, let’s play chess
The way I taught you as a child.
The time was October 1947,
Before the fateful days and the first shots.
And we didn’t know then I’d be called the generation of ’48
And I played chess with my father, checkmate ’48.28
The speaker’s father comes to visit his son “between two wars or between two loves.” As the last stanza explicitly states the date, “October 1947,” the “two wars” are those in which Amichai served as a soldier: World War II, which ended in 1945, and Israel’s War of Independence, which erupted in 1948. The phrase “between two loves,” however, is more ambiguous. Who were the two loves? Amichai married his first wife, Tamar, in 1949, but what was the love that preceded it and who was the beloved?
After Amichai’s death I met Ruth née Hermann, the woman he had loved in those days, and discovered a treasure trove of love letters that she, their addressee, had preserved for sixty years. It so happens that the meeting between young Amichai and his father described in the poem occurred approximately one year before he fell in love with Tamar and two months after August 1947, when Ruth, his girlfriend at the time, sailed to the United States. The father, who traveled from Jerusalem to Haifa, knew that his son’s heart was broken and tried to comfort him in his quiet, understated way—by playing chess with him the way he would when the poet was a child. The religious father did not scold his son for no longer reciting his prayers and instead simply tried to lighten his burden. The threads of intimacy woven throughout the poem, however, are severed due to “the time,” and the tender language of the father-son conversation gives way to the lexicon of speeches and newspapers: “first shots” and “the generation of ’48.”29 The second stanza of the poem departs from both vocabularies and becomes an emotional cry. The “cherries” in its second line express longing for Europe, the birthplace of those sweet fruits, but also the birthplace of the poet as well as his father, who might have secretly wished that his children were European, like him.
“A Meeting with My Father” was written decades after the 1948 war had ended and the poet’s father had died. From the distance of time, the speaker dubs himself and those who fought in that war “the checkmate generation”: the generation that went to die but also the generation that “checkmated” the enemy and won the war. The emotional second stanza of the poem evokes the story of the binding of Isaac: the poem’s syntactical construction of “cherries that you loved” is similar to the biblical verse, “the only son that you loved.” The story of the binding of Isaac and God’s demand that the father sacrifice his beloved son has long been a symbol of that bloody war and the sacrifice of sons on the altar of the nation. Within the short poem, then, there is a summary of both the personal—the father’s worry and the son’s loss of the woman he loves—and the national experiences. These were the days of autumn 1947 in Haifa’s Hadar HaCarmel neighborhood, a few weeks before the United Nations vote on the Partition Plan, on the threshold of the war. Amichai and his father felt the looming “mate” of the checkmate, knew the love affair was over but did not talk about it, and together longed for the bygone time when the son was a European child who could buy sweet cherry cake in a German café.
The link between the father and Café Atara recurs in another poem in the same collection, albeit without explicitly mentioning Haifa. “A Second Meeting with My Father” opens, “Again, I met my father in Café Atara / This time he was already dead.” This jarring line undoes the power of death, for the fact that the father “was already dead” does not prevent him from meeting with his son. Moreover, the second meeting takes place in the same coffee house as the first. For Amichai, then, as for many citizens of Hadar, the milieu of the European café was like a “holding environment”—a womb, or a loving father—a means of visiting the sweet past, even for a minute:
Happy are those
Who have a patisserie next door to a coffee house,
You can call inside: “Another cake, more
Sweetness, let’s have more!”
Happy is he whose dead father is next door to him
And he can call him always.30
As in its twin Café Atara poem, Amichai uses the syntax to convey meaning when he speaks about the coffee house and his father: “Happy are those” and then “Happy is he.” The Hebrew word ashrei (“happy are” and “happy is”) recalls the long ashrei prayer, which is composed of three different psalms and is recited thrice daily during synagogue services: ashrei yoshvei veitekha. (“Happy are those who dwell in Your home.”) Through the syntax and linguistic allusions, the poet connects the warmth and sweetness imbued by the café with memories of his childhood synagogue and his father’s love and faith. One may even suggest that Amichai has substituted the coffee house (bet café) for the house of worship (bet knesset).
In a letter from October 15, 1947, Amichai wrote to Ruth: “Last night I came back to my room and behold, my father was sitting there. . . . He . . . brought ready-made sandwiches with him, and we ate together. . . . I was very, very happy.”31 The 1980 poem, “A meeting with my father,” then, is an autobiographical one in which most of the details are accurate: Amichai’s father did visit him in Haifa in the autumn of 1947. While Atara is not explicitly mentioned in that letter, its importance to Amichai is evident. Three earlier letters from the first month after Ruth’s departure mention Café Atara.32 According to them, the poet used to sit there when writing his long aerograms to her. A letter he wrote in the first week after she left sheds light on his frequent visits to the café: “for some reason, it is still hard for me to write the letters in my room. I go up to the Carmel or sit in Atara.”33 Amichai implies that it is easier to write love letters in a noisy café than in a quiet, lonely room.
But the poet had a more substantial reason for sitting in the café. The letters reveal that in the last months of 1947, Amichai was certain that poetry was his calling. Furthermore, before that autumn he had begun to forge what would ultimately become his unique contribution to Hebrew literature, that is, a poetic style that draws from everyday life. He wanted to absorb the mundane, to jot down his impressions on paper and hone his writing process. Atara, then, was an ideal place from which he could observe the lives of passersby. The café sat on the slope of the mountain, and its terrace and windows provided an excellent lookout over the neighborhood. In some of the letters, Amichai specifically refers to the morning tide of people flooding down the mountain to work and the evening ebb as they returned home. It is likely that he first noticed the power of this daily flux of people from his seat in Atara on the slope. Indeed, early on Amichai sent romantic letters dense with musings on the craft of poetry and the power of the quotidian, but as the United Nations vote on the Partition Plan approached, the echoes of the period and its trepidations grew louder and louder.
The letters also reveal the geographic outlines of Amichai’s life in Haifa. During that period he lived west of the Technion. It is likely that he would leave his home, cross the Technion’s garden, glimpse the toddlers playing there, and continue eastward to Café Atara. After the United Nations vote on November 29, 1947, however, his focus began to shift. In a letter written on December 21, Amichai particularly noted the young men, the students running up and down the Technion’s steps “with agile and hard footsteps . . . in their stride that wondrous mixture of harsh, heavy-footed masculinity and the agility of a Greek youth in the Olympic Games.” His words are not a mere expression of admiration of young men but rather a code for the escalating situation in Haifa at the end of 1947: “And especially in days like these, they [the men on the steps] have justification and good reason to walk erect and grow moustaches of all kinds and be a little vain.”34 Inside this epistolary description, the young man hides a patriotic message that he wished to convey to his addressee, hinting to her about the unstable security situation at the time. The unique national role that the Technion was filling, secretly preparing for war, lies between the lines. Furthermore, he indirectly reveals to her that although he detests war, the day is near when he, too, will climb the Technion’s steps on his way, not to class, but to military and weapons training.
It was an open secret in British Mandatory Haifa that the Technion was the city’s headquarters of the Hagana, the Jewish paramilitary organization. The Technion was the only academic institution in Palestine located at the heart of a Jewish settlement, and it made its various facilities available to serve the Jewish people during the Mandate years (1922–48). It also sheltered Jewish refugees during the Arab riots of 1929 and 1936. Throughout the Mandate period the Technion’s workshops met the munitions needs of the Hagana, and training sessions were conducted at night in its cellars, halls, and classrooms. A sophisticated system of buzzers warned of approaching British police. Furthermore, one of the Hagana’s central arms caches in Haifa was housed in the depths of the Technion’s well, and starting in the 1920s guns and ammunition were stored, weapons repaired, and hand grenades loaded in its basements. During World War II, when most of the yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine, joined the British fight against the Nazis, the manpower of the Technion was recruited to conduct missions for the British army, and many junior and senior faculty built airplane engines and developed explosives in the Technion’s laboratories and workshops. In the winter of 1947 the Technion became command central for the Hagana units that were on call, preparing for the fateful confrontation over Haifa. In 1948 studies were cancelled for a year when hundreds of students enlisted in the Carmeli Brigade and other units.35 After the 1948 war, classes resumed, and students once again flooded the Technion to study.
The Architectural Crossroads of Herzl and Balfour
Throughout the next decade the Technion building, weary of war and hardship, watched the Hadar neighborhood from its vantage point high on the slope. In its aging, stone heart, it reflected on the people who had brought it into the world and who now were memorialized in the names of surrounding streets: the road that would have continued its palm boulevard was named for Baerwald, its true father; on its west were Shmaryahu Levin and Ahad Ha’am Streets, named for the two Zionist leaders who raised funds for its construction, headed its board of directors, and oversaw its foundation.36 And yes, the elegant Herzl Street to its north was appropriately named for the prophet of political Zionism, whose vision inspired the choice of Haifa as the Technion’s home. The steep street that rises majestically up from Herzl is named for Lord Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary who declared his government’s support for a Jewish national home in Palestine in 1917 and graced the Technion with a visit a month after its inauguration.
If Baerwald were still alive in the 1950s, standing at the entrance of his masterpiece and looking down onto the Herzl/Balfour intersection, he would see the beautiful Ginzburg Flower Shop nearby and perhaps fondly remember Abraham Ginzburg, the gardener who cared for the Technion’s gardens so devotedly. He might proudly contemplate how this intersection near the Technion became the first in the city to have a traffic light due to the masses of people and vehicles that flowed through it.37 He might even be impressed by the pedestrian underpass that the city excavated beneath the street. And perhaps, Baerwald, the architect, would wish that someone would tell the full saga of the Technion as well as the tales of the neighboring houses and the people who roamed their interiors. Perhaps he would listen to the stories of the Technion’s architectural descendants on the Herzl/Balfour intersection; these are the buildings whose designs it nourished, so to speak, but that frequently rebelled against its style.
Indeed, thin threads tie all four buildings in the intersection to Baerwald: on the southeast a three-story residential house; on the northeast the Business Center; on the northwest the white, photogenic Clock House; and on the southwest the mammoth Bet HaKranot.
The three-story residential house that sits on the southeast corner was probably the first house built in the intersection. A few scattered memories and photographs support its claim to primogeniture, but the available archival material is scant, and the fog of time obscures the details of its beginnings. Its literary fate, however, is striking and more illustrious than that of its three neighbors. An enchanting bookstore called Ein HaKore (The Reader’s Eye) occupied its horizontal façade facing Herzl for many years. It had been a bibliophile’s oasis at the heart of the bustling Herzl Street. I would frequent Ein HaKore in high school, leafing through the newest poetry collections on display, drinking in lines that had not reached our literature curriculum. My gifted classmate at the Alliance School, Itamar, recalled that when he was an engineering student at the Technion and the textbooks he needed were sold out, he could always find them at Ein HaKore . . . in French. In her semiautobiographical novel, Corner People, the author Esty G. Hayim resurrects this bookstore and portrays her visit there as a turning point in her life.38
But this old corner building is tightly bound to Hebrew literature in hidden ways as well: the house’s builders and former owners were the Levin family, the great-grandparents of noted Haifa author Yehudit Katzir. The fictional descendants of her family roam the pages of her early stories. They dine at Balfour Cellar and frequent Café Atara, run through the underpass, and skip along Herzl Street. Twenty-five years after the publication of her first story, Katzir revealed her characters’ Haifaian pedigree in the family saga she wrote, Zillah. This epic novel preserves the Levins’ tradition of the house’s primacy in the Herzl/Balfour intersection: in Zillah Katzir transcribes the words of her grandfather, Aminadav Levin, as they were recorded on a cassette tape: “When the house, the fourth in Hadar HaCarmel, was built, and my family . . . moved into it, they rented out a room to the painter, Professor Hermann Struck, and his wife, Malka, who had just emigrated from Germany.” He recalled that the artist “used to sit on the balcony and sketch the landscape of the bay in charcoal for long hours.” He added that the Strucks stayed “in the room and then moved to the nice, comfortable stone house up the mountain that the architect Baerwald designed for them.”39 Indeed, the designer of the Technion not only planned the painter’s permanent home but also was a close, old friend of Struck’s, one of the first tenants of the intersection. In fact, Struck drew a striking portrait of the goateed Baerwald. And as for the claim of primacy, since Struck immigrated to Palestine in 1922, we can deduce that this house was already standing by that year.
The Business Center and the intersection
Courtesy of Haifa City Archives
The planning of the second-eldest building in the intersection, the Business Center, began in the midst of the violence of 1929, when attacks on Jews—which had been wreaking havoc throughout the country—reached Haifa. Before the center was built, all of Haifa’s commercial hubs were located in the Arab-dominated lower city, as Hadar was viewed as a garden city, a quasi suburb without commercial infrastructure.40 One of the motivations behind erecting a business center in Hadar HaCarmel was the need for established stores in the Jewish neighborhood, should the district once again be cut off from its usual suppliers. The style and building materials of Hadar HaCarmel’s Business Center reflect the shift in local architecture that stemmed from both economic and political factors. The cement factory Nesher had started production a couple of years prior, creating pressure to change the British law requiring stone façades. The center was made entirely from cement, which was cheap and lessened the need to rely on Arab stoneworkers. The modern design of the building, which was so different from the Technion, was completed in 1933. It signaled the beginning of a cultural and political move away from Baerwald’s original architectural, and perhaps ideological, dream of becoming a part of the existing Middle Eastern space. The Business Center building is shaped like an “L.” The lines that stretch through the openings of its windows and balconies give its façade a horizontal emphasis in the International (or Bauhaus) Style, a feature that foreshadowed the style that would become prevalent in the neighborhood within the next two decades.41 Yet behind the center’s concrete walls and quintessentially modern design lies part of the tragic story of Baerwald. The year he began planning the center was also the last year of his life. He had submitted a proposal at the beginning of 1930 and promised to revise it, but died of cancer in October of that year. The completion of the project was entrusted to the architect Leon Vamos, and Baerwald’s plans were lost. As a result, the architects’ respective contributions to the final design remain unknown to this day.42
To the west of the Business Center on Herzl Street stands the third tenant of the intersection: the first office building in Hadar, Bet HaSha’on, the Clock House, erected between 1934 and 1936. Its designer, Gideon Kaminka, was sent to Palestine to build it in 1933 by one of his clients in Vienna. When Kaminka was nineteen years old, he went to Berlin to consult with none other than Baerwald himself about his professional future. Inspired by their meeting, he began studying architecture in the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, which was known for its tempered modernism. Kaminka arrived in Haifa when he was thirty years old. In the ensuing decades he contributed to the city’s public life, primarily in the realms of construction and planning, and represented the Viennese modernist tradition there.43 Like him, many of Hadar HaCarmel’s residents were from central Europe, and he ultimately acted on their behalf as an elected official in the Histadrut (the workers’ union).44 The Clock House that Kaminka designed is composed of three simple bodies, two of which hug the corner where it stands. One lies flat, along Herzl, and the other faces down the slope. The third body stands above, straight and tall, creating the “tower” whose head boasts the famous clock. Although the building does not follow the International Style to the letter, its square terraces with their horizontal iron railings and the two-story-tall glass window near the staircase signal the architect’s tendencies in that direction.45 The aesthetic cleanliness of Kaminka’s design of the Clock House fits the intersection beautifully. Its clock has become an urban landmark that adorns many postcards.46
The Clock House Courtesy of Haifa City Archives
The fourth and last building to be erected on the Herzl/Balfour intersection is the majestic Bet HaKranot, the closest to the Technion. It remained the true focus of Haifa’s business and fashion industry for a long time. The very first pair of high-heel stylish shoes that I owned came from Bet HaKranot’s elegant Dan Gavrieli store. My mother took me there before my high school graduation, and I picked them, a shiny, deep maroon color and very pretty. Shopping at Bet HaKranot was reserved for special occasions, and its prestigious status was a source of pride for the city’s people for decades. In the 1961 deluxe edition of Altneuland, published in honor of Herzl’s hundredth birthday, the municipality of Haifa promoted Bet HaKranot as a commercial flagship, including a nighttime photograph of its shining stores to demonstrate the fulfillment of Herzl’s prophecy of Haifa as “the city of the future.” But the circumstances under which Bet HaKranot was built are darker than the book in honor of Herzl suggests and are connected to the tensions that dominated that period.
In 1934–35 the commercial development of Herzl Street accelerated due to the surge of immigrants from Europe fleeing the Nazi threat. Worried that the stores would overrun the Technion’s tranquil garden, the board of trustees instigated the construction of Bet HaKranot to serve, among other things, as a barrier protecting the northern border of the garden.47 The construction was sponsored by two national funds, Keren HaYesod (United Israel Appeal) and Keren Kayemet (Jewish National Fund). The plural of keren (fund) in Hebrew is kranot; the building was therefore named Bet HaKranot, literally, “House of the Funds.” The architect Joseph Klarwein won second place in the competition. During that period he also planned the Dagon Silos in the lower city, and in subsequent decades he would build historical projects on a national scale. The jewel in his crown is the column-encircled Israeli parliament building, the Knesset, in Jerusalem. It is possible that planning Bet HaKranot, which was inspired by the Technion, the symbol of Zionist Haifa, prepared him for designing the monumental symbol of Israeli democracy. Regardless, to the delight of the board of trustees, Klarwein designed the block-long Bet HaKranot in homage to the Technion, cladding its façade with the same stone that Baerwald used.48
Bet HaKranot stretches along Herzl Street across the entire northern border of the Technion complex between Shmaryahu Levin and Balfour. The end on Shmaryahu Levin is rounded to reflect that street’s soft decline, while the portion that borders Balfour seems aware of its status at the city’s heart, and the spacious plaza in front of it broadcasts authority. This is how Bauhaus on the Carmel describes this last major landmark to arrive on the intersection: “He [Klarwein] . . . aligned the new building parallel to the main Technion façade and not with Herzl Street, which stood at an angle to it . . . not only strengthening the visual relationship of his building with Baerwald’s monumental edifice, but also opening up . . . an interesting triangular urban space. . . . It was simple and dignified, with a regular series of columns marching in rhythm down Herzl Street.”49 The rare combination of simplicity and dignity remained a part of Klarwein’s architectural vocabulary throughout his career.
Indeed, Bet HaKranot bolstered the commercial development of its vicinity. Herzl Street quickly changed from a residential street to the main thoroughfare in all of Haifa, and the Herzl/Balfour intersection grew so thick with traffic that an underground passage was dug beneath Balfour Street so pedestrians could cross it safely. This underpass was decorated with public artwork in the collective optimistic and patriotic spirit of the 1950s.50 Heading each of its two entryways is a mosaic whose subject is biblical, its style ancient, and its scenery local. Mordechai Gumpel, the artist who created them in collaboration with his wife, Miriam, developed an artistic method that was exclusively manual, used the naturally varied shades of local stones, and created the illusion of movement through the way the small stones were carved. He believed that the ancient medium of the mosaic, which had been found in archaeological digs in Israel, would radiate the spirit of the ancient Middle East onto the Israeli identity, connecting it to the ethos of nation building.
Balfour Street and part of Bet HaKranot rising toward the Technion
Permission from PalPhot; photographer Yehuda Dorfzaun
The Tunnel and the Intersection of Fantasy and Fate
Adorned with colorful tableaus, its walls clad in marble, the underpass was absorbed naturally into the neighborhood’s landscape.51 It was affectionately nicknamed “the tunnel,” even though “tunnel is too big a word for this small underpass.”52 Who could have predicted that this passageway would star in the stories and fantasies of the children who had passed through it over the years? But it was mostly the darkness beneath the earth that ignited their imagination, not the beautiful art. Regardless, the underpass was not the only denizen of the intersection to imprint itself in memory. The corner of Herzl and Balfour was a magnet for adults and children alike. Its array of stores and sparkling display windows, cafés, and effervescent life were powerful attractors—and there was more. When parades passed through town, they would stop in the intersection to the joy of the masses watching from the sidewalks, the balconies of the Clock House, and the surrounding buildings. On Independence Day the intersection was closed to traffic, and many of the city’s Jewish residents danced there in joyous, raucous circles.
The lives of many Haifaians crossed the intersection, and its rhythm penetrated their blood. For many Haifa children, it was one of the landmarks that symbolized their maturation; some of them became writers, others—scholars. The vivid images of the place continue to live between the pages of their works, which revolve around this focal point of their city. The dimensions of the intersection and its meaning transformed with me as I grew. When crossing it as a little girl, I held my mother’s hand tightly; it felt enormous yet it was so near to the calm and sweetness of our shared ice cream at Café Snir, my feet dangling from the tall stool. The crossroad shrunk a bit in my teens—I would reach it on my own and dive into the crisp volumes of poetry at my favorite bookstore.
Three heroines of three separate Haifa literary works metabolize the intersection within their consciousness. Although each one of them is depicted with great artistry and represents an intimate experience, they demonstrate three distinct sensibilities in the relationship between a person and her hometown. Two of the writers of these works were born in 1963, and they remember the area as it was in their childhood. Unfortunately, authors born in the city in the 1960s and their contemporaries may be the last witnesses to Hadar as it was in its heyday, and their work preserves what is no longer there.
In Hadar HaCarmel’s days of glory, as it was being built and expanded, the Herzl/Balfour intersection stood out not only in the great investment the city’s founders made in its development but also in the names they selected for its streets: Theodor Herzl was the father of modern Zionism, while the British Lord Balfour provided external, international confirmation of the movement’s aspirations. These national allusions imprinted on the intersection did not escape the pens of the city’s authors. Sami Michael, for example, confronted the intersection’s Zionist message in his famous novel A Trumpet in the Wadi, which highlights the tensions between Israeli Arabs and Jews. The confessional narrative of the novel’s Arab protagonist, Huda, focuses on her neighborhood, Wadi Nisnas, and turns to the Jewish Hadar HaCarmel in only a few snapshots. Yet it preserves the perpetual ascent and descent inherent to Haifa. Indeed, this topography is branded in the consciousness of every Haifa resident, woman and man, Arab and Jew. In Haifa of the 1980s, as it is reflected in Michael’s work, however, there is a recognizable difference between the emotional attitudes of different ethnic groups toward the very same sites. When Huda is driven through Hadar by the Jewish man who has just entered her life, the couple’s trepidations merge with the obstacles presented by the city’s mountainous terrain: “On steep Balfour Street the engine groaned aloud and [Alex] slapped the wheel and grumbled, ‘Not pulling, not pulling. Shitty car.’ I looked down and even my dress looked faded in the passing lights. The thrill of expectation dispelled and my spirits fell. I wanted to go home.”53
Huda is a traditional Arab girl, and her fear of becoming intimate with a man is exacerbated by her fear of the unknown Jewish neighborhood. Huda, who freely travels by foot in the vicinity of her neighborhood, the Arab Wadi Nisnas, arrives in the heart of the Jewish Hadar only as a passenger in a car. Her footsteps up and down Haifa’s steep slopes are limited to the Arab wadi and its surroundings. Furthermore, the landmark Herzl/Balfour crossing has an almost “castrating” effect on her. The feminine, colorful dress that Huda wore for her date fades in the lights of the “Zionist” intersection. Her sexual anticipations wilt as the car groans on the steep Balfour ascent. She feels like a stranger and longs to escape, to return home. The emotional and physical experiences of the Christian-Arab woman in the heart of Hadar are in sharp contrast to those of her Jewish counterparts. The heroines of Esty G. Hayim and Yehudit Katzir roam freely around the intersection on foot, trying to fulfill the dreams it promises.
Esty G. Hayim, who grew up in Haifa, published five novels before she wrote Corner People, a quasi autobiography that takes place in the author’s hometown and fleshes out its public and personal landmarks. Dvori, the novel’s main character, knows the intersection well, and her visits in its vicinity are the formative events of her childhood. Each encounter in that location is awarded a detailed description whose aftershocks echo throughout the work. Set in the late 1960s, the book is a nightmarish bildungsroman that is told, for the most part, from the point of view of a young girl. With remarkable precision, she documents her life and the lives of those she loves, a family of Holocaust survivors from Hungary struggling to survive under the shadow of the mother’s mental illness. Dvori’s daily routine is confined mostly within the narrow borders of the Neve Sha’anan neighborhood, but a few specific peaks in her loaded narrative are tied to Hadar HaCarmel and its heart.
The intersection’s debut in the book is connected to Dvori’s recollection of a painful journey that took place when she was only five years old. At the corner of Nordau Street, near the intersection, she and her family were supposed to embark on an enchanted trip to the Sea of Galilee. The memory of the little girl’s odyssey is interwoven with the landscape of Haifa: boarding a bus in Neve Sha’anan; crossing a bridge; passing soot-covered houses alternating with fragments of seascape; running through narrow streets with her father, mother, and brother from the bus stop in Hadar all the way to the intersection; entering the underpass; and climbing up Balfour on the other side to reach the meeting point of the tour. The descent into the underpass and the ascent out of it were seared in Dvori’s mind. Crossing through its dark depths, she was frightened by a crippled beggar who reached out his calloused palm for change. When she emerged into the light of day, however, her fear evaporated because of a Barbie doll in the display window of the toy store Pinocchio at the corner of Balfour. Finally, the family boarded the tour bus. But as the bus wheeled away, the memory of the poor beggar in the tunnel haunted Dvori, and in her imagination his misfortune merged with the Holocaust stories she heard at home. Moreover, at the end of the odyssey, there was no reward: Dvori, her brother and her parents never reached the Sea of Galilee.54
The five-year-old’s trip through the intersection is described at the beginning of Corner People in a childish, unmediated form, but when the narrative nears its end, this crossroads reappears, this time, from the point of view of the adult Dvori, as she returns to the path of her childhood odyssey. Now the glamour has vanished from the intersection, and every station in the reconstructed route is a disappointment. The only emotion that time does not dull is the fear of the tunnel, and the threat that dwells in it invades the subconscious of the mature heroine: “I dreamt a terrible dream, and in it I . . . chop off my left shin. . . . Suddenly, I find myself in the underground passage on the corner of Herzl and Balfour. The stump is exposed and I hold out a charred aluminum pot for change.”55
In her dream Dvori herself becomes the maimed beggar whom she first encountered when she was five. He has evolved into a symbol in her psyche, merged with the fears from her childhood home, and years later has returned as a nightmare. Her descents into the tunnel, then, represent diving into the depth of her soul. But while the tunnel is a world of darkness and nightmares, the urban space above it abounds with magic. In this very site, the heroine discovered her calling. For her, the corner of Herzl and Balfour is the place where fear, fantasy, and fate meet.
Three years after her initial journey to the intersection, Dvori returns, this time accompanied by her aunt Esther, or, as she is called in Hungarian, Esther Neini. This is the happiest moment in the novel. Dvori is eight, and her glamorous aunt, who has appeared suddenly from Hungary, treats her to an adventurous shopping trip in Hadar. This expedition triggers the process of turning Dvori into a writer. The two visit the Ein HaKore bookstore at the corner of Herzl and Balfour. There, the aunt buys grown-up books like Anna Karenina for the little girl. In one of the many neighboring cafés, Dvori confesses to her aunt that, for her, words have “color and smell and taste,” and Esther Neini admits that she too has always had a love affair with the written word.56 The revelation of their common secret becomes a rite of consecration: from now on Dvori knows that she is destined to be a writer. The apex of this second trip to the intersection is the purchase of two typewriters: one in Hungarian, for Esther Neini, and one in Hebrew, for her little niece. The protagonist’s future is determined, then, within the boundaries of that beloved, familiar urban space.
Unavoidably, this fateful outing ends with Esther Neini and Dvori crossing through the tunnel. Unlike the sprint to the tour bus with her parents when she was five, this time the eight-year-old girl notices every detail, especially regarding the beggar: “I examined his palm, stretched out for the next donor. Four fingers were missing. . . . Perhaps, it was those same Nazis who shot Aunt Olga in the foot?” Dvori is still projecting her family’s terrifying Holocaust stories onto the figure of the beggar, and even the strength of Esther Neini cannot overcome them. Furthermore, this descent into the dark tunnel foreshadows the fact that the period of ultimate bliss with her aunt will not last. The next trip to Hadar with Esther Neini marks Dvori’s separation from her. When the two walk down the treasure-lined path that encircles the intersection for the last time, each detail on their way subverts its initial, happy parallel: “In the intervals between shopping, an inexplicable heaviness crept over me, as if something important had been lost. . . . The hour grew late. . . . Only the lights of the port promised their worthless promises.”57 The place where Dvori was anointed as an author is also the place where her short hope for happiness would be cut off. Throughout Corner People, this public space in the heart of Hadar becomes the center of the world, where the narrator examines the potential for human happiness and suffering.
Not so, in Yehudit Katzir’s first story, “Disneyel.” Here, Katzir’s Haifaian voice is that of a ten-year-old girl who sees the world through a child’s prism. Her hometown is dominated by the Carmel ridge, the omnipresence of the sea, and the urban landmarks nestled within them. It is a city that exists in an eternal up or down motion, its condition dependent on the whims of nature. The memories of the story’s narrator caress the Herzl/Balfour intersection with an eternal romantic light. Through them this space becomes the language in which the author reconstructs the pivotal moments of her young life, which were spent in a tight orbit around the three-story house built by her ancestors in the early 1920s.
When I first read the author’s debut collection of stories, it deeply resonated with me—Katzir’s portrayal of the core of Hadar preserved “my” Balfour Cellar along with other secret corners of my childhood. While the threads she wove together were of different colors than mine, the way she used cityscapes to delineate the routes of the heart rang true, and her stories gently led me to my own.
For Katzir, the steep Balfour Street, the trafficked Herzl Street, the tunnel, and the intersection are words in a private language; in “Disneyel” the city’s sites are the components of the erotic urban idiom in which she describes the dangerous balancing act performed by her female protagonists and forges the symbiotic connection between a mother and daughter.
The plot of the story itself is simple, almost banal, and is told in Katzir’s trademark address in the second-person feminine: att, or “you,” the “you” being the narrator’s mother. A beautiful and delicate woman from Haifa, a mother of two, is married to a man who, in her eyes, is too coarse. She has a suitor, a quasi family friend, Michael, who visits twice a year.
The title “Disneyel” is a combination of “Disney” and “Israel” but also hints at the name Michael (pronounced Mee-CHA-EL in Hebrew). He is a handsome but fickle man who used to burst into the lives of the mother and daughter twice a year when he visited the country for his real (or perhaps imaginary) businesses. The ostensible goal of his trips was to finalize grandiose plans for a Disneyland in Israel—Disneyel. Ever since the girl was four years old, she and her mother performed a set ritual before Michael’s visits. They would take a taxi from the Carmel to Hadar, get off near the Herzl/Balfour intersection, cross through the tunnel, hear the music of the violinist playing there, and toss him a coin. They would then continue to the exit of the tunnel toward Bet HaKranot, where a cluster of exclusive women’s clothing shops lay. The heroines of “Disneyel” would then buy a fancy dress for the mother and finish off with a celebratory ice cream on Balfour in Café Atara. When the magic password that ushers in this cherished ceremony, yordim lehadar (going down to Hadar), is uttered in the story for the first time, it is accompanied by a slow description, suffused with pleasure, of the biannual preparatory outing in the vicinity of the intersection that holds the treasures necessary for welcoming the guest.
In the eyes of the daughter, who reconstructs it, the ritual is shared by her and her mother, as if Michael were not only the object of the mother’s romantic fantasies but also those of her little girl. As in a sacred religious ritual, every detail must be performed with the greatest precision. A flaw in the integrity of the preparations might harm or even prevent the fulfillment of the yearned-for goal. This ritual is described twice in the text. The first version is based on the daughter’s cumulative knowledge, gained by repeating the ritual from the time she was four years old. It is stylized and general, as if in an imaginary Passover Haggadah that enumerates the rules of the holiday for the practitioners as they must be performed each year. What is reported in the narrative may be read as a guide for what to do before the hero or Prince Charming arrives.
The second depiction of the ritual, quoted here, is a painstaking reconstruction of the final, frenzied time as it was performed by the mother and her daughter. The rhythm of the text reflects the accelerated pace of this last performance of the ritual, in which there are more digressions than prescribed actions. These deviations might have contributed to the catastrophic ending.
On that winter afternoon . . . when you suddenly said, We’re going down to Hadar today, I looked at you without understanding, so you said again We’re going down to Hadar today, and at five we took an umbrella, and we went out, and the wind with a long whistle swept us up . . . to a taxi, and then from the taxi all the way down to the corner of Herzl and Balfour. We passed through the violinist’s tunnel, and . . . water flowed inside. He wasn’t playing, he was sleeping . . . and the case was open. . . . You took out a whole lira and put it on the red velvet. . . . Then we came out the other side of the tunnel right in front of the store . . . and Mrs. Mueller . . . disappeared for a moment and returned, a hanger in her hand, on which a green velvet dress hung.58
This sad scene of the final performance of the ritual appears around the midway point of the narrative, and it triggers the crescendo that leads to the catastrophe at its end. The whistling wind and the speeding taxi from the Carmel to Hadar signal the beginning of the tragic fall. The narrator’s language reflects the Haifaian topography that is etched in her body, as she depicts the chain of actions that foreshadows the descent into the abyss.59 The language of loss in this story is the same as the language of pleasure; it is the vocabulary of Haifa: the verb yordim (going down) hints at the uncontrollable movement downward, while the rhythm of the sentences and the textual detailing of the route radiate the power of the motion that is an inextricable part of traveling on the steep roads of Haifa. The ritual described here includes most of the familiar components, but its core lies in the deviations from the regular sequence. The taxi ride, the Herzl/Balfour intersection, passing through the tunnel, and the visit to the clothing store all remain, but this time they occur in the winter and the pouring rain. The tunnel is flooded, the beggar violin player is asleep, and even the abnormally large offering the mother leaves in his case does not appease fate. In the clothing store the mother snatches a dress without the necessary alterations, and the ice cream at Café Atara is totally omitted. Instead, the mother and daughter leave the area of the intersection and run through the rain to the opposite side of Herzl Street. As each digression is noted, it amplifies the terror of the girl who foresees the calamity.
Despite all the pain, however, the tight bond between Katzir’s speaker and the landscape of her city is not affected. Her swift, direct ride with her mother in a taxi down Balfour to the intersection also marks her intimate connection to the place. When she arrives at her destination, Katzir’s young narrator feels the sidewalks and roads of late 1960s and early 1970s Hadar under her feet and, by walking up and down on them, claims them as her own.
The heroine and her ownership of the neighborhood may reflect her creator’s biography. As Yehudit Katzir told me, she frequently visited the Herzl/Balfour intersection in her childhood, especially the southeast corner building owned by her family.60 The business headquarters of her beloved grandfather, Aminadav Levin, was located in that house, while her mother’s law office was on the nearby Shmaryahu Levin Street. When Katzir began her literary career in the late 1980s, her dying mother informed her, “you will write the novel about my grandmother.”61 Katzir obeyed this command twenty-five years later. Her 2013 family saga follows Zillah, the author’s great-grandmother, throughout the twentieth century. Ultimately, it weaves together all of its disparate threads near Tel Aviv. Yet interwoven in its fabric are Haifa’s tender landscapes, beneath which the narrator warms herself. Like a lover who soothes her longing for her beloved by interjecting oblique references to him into her conversations, so does Katzir embroider Haifaian moments throughout the long and winding plot of Zillah. At the heart of the book, she surrenders to her heart’s desire, digresses from the plot, and dedicates an entire chapter to the romance of her mother’s parents in Haifa. She titles the chapter “Love.” The descriptions of the perfect love affair between Yehudit Levin (née Margolin) and Aminadav Levin may also be read as a map of little Haifa between 1931 and 1933, at whose center is the budding Hadar HaCarmel neighborhood: a dark window on Nordau Street, the view of the sea, the bay that was still visible from the balcony, and, yes, the house where their love blossomed, on the corner of Herzl and Balfour.
The direct, natural relationship of Katzir’s Jewish heroines with the Herzl/Balfour intersection contrasts with the attitude of Huda, the Arab protagonist of A Trumpet in the Wadi. For Huda in the 1980s, the intersection and its Zionist street names symbolize Jewish dominance in Haifa. On a hypothetical continuum of a sense of belonging to the urban space and the intersection, Dvori from Corner People is located between Huda and the heroine of “Disneyel.” She emerges into Hadar in a slow city bus that makes its way between varied landscapes and different neighborhoods. This tiring route illustrates the large distance between her and the heart of the city. While walking in the area of the intersection, she is devoid of the feeling of ownership that radiates from Katzir’s heroine in “Disneyel.” Dvori remains an outsider, even when she descends by foot (albeit not by car like Huda) to the depths of the underground passage. Haifa may be her home, but she still feels uprooted, always afraid of another Holocaust, even in her hometown.
The Symbol of Hadar HaCarmel
Before the establishment of the State of Israel, when Hadar HaCarmel was an autonomous entity, its leaders held a competition to design the emblem of their neighborhood. The design, selected by the artist Hermann Struck and two other judges, is crowned with a detailed drawing of the Technion’s façade. Beneath it, houses descend on a diagonal slope, separated from the waves of the sea by a neat row of trees.62 In a concise visual manner, this emblem captures the relationship between the Technion building and the buildings that it birthed and sheltered beneath its broad wings. It also preserved the city’s quintessential feature, the decline of the mountain and the distance between the neighborhood and the sea.
Hadar HaCarmel is set on the slope, which is depicted in the emblem by the diagonal line. The entire area that stretched downward northeast of the Technion and reached the intersection of Herzl and Balfour would further grow to become the beating heart of Hadar for many years. From an urban history perspective, the buildings of the intersection are the descendants of the Technion. Architecturally, however, one can see the unavoidable rift between parents and their children as well as the remnants of the struggle between loyalty to Baerwald’s memory and status and the modernist direction adopted later by Hadar’s architects. While Bet HaKranot looks up at the Technion with affection and respect, the Clock House and the Business Center turn their backs to it, foreshadowing the future aesthetic of the city. Both the planning of the area and its buildings embody this combination of ideas and conflicts, great hopes for integrating into the Middle Eastern landscape, and visions of an international, modern city. The tunnel, too, the latecomer to the intersection, witnessed the grand dreams of those who dug it, who envisioned thousands of people crossing underground, shopping, and sitting in cafés.
The topography informed not only the creation of the urban space, the design of the Technion, and its surrounding neighborhood but also the souls of those who walked Haifa’s streets and the heroes of its stories. Most people who passed through the vicinity of the Herzl/Balfour intersection over the years did not know its history, but their consciousness still absorbed something of the dramatic meeting place between the ambition of architects, the stubbornness of the mountain, and the hope for a peaceful existence. The Technion and its garden, the slope, the tunnel, and the intersection and its buildings all penetrated the souls of Haifa’s children. They ran between the rows of trees in the Technion garden, played near the bubbling pool, raced their bikes down Balfour, hurried through the intersection to the neighboring schools, licked ice cream at Snir, went with their mothers to buy shoes or a dress at Bet HaKranot, crossed the busy streets ruled by Haifa’s first traffic light, and passed the violin player. The cool, dark tunnel; the sudden ascent of Balfour; the columns of Bet HaKranot; and the plaza at its front were a kind of a liminal space for the daughters and sons of Haifa through which they had to pass to mature and grow. And, from above, the Technion looked at each of them affectionately and promised that things would stay like this forever.
