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(More customer reviews)Young Tel Aviv is a worthy addition to the growing literature on the garden suburb that grew into a metropolis. From its beginnings, Tel Aviv was a middle-class city that stood in stark contrast with the "hegemonic pioneering ethos" of the Jewish Yishuv. The "two cities" alluded to in the subtitle are "Tel Aviv as it was and Tel Aviv as it seemed" during the 1920s and 1930s. The author discusses the city's public sphere, especially its commercial exhibitions, Purim carnivals, and residents' Sabbath promenades. "The outdoors did not just serve as functional role - it was a widespread cultural preference," she writes. Young Tel Aviv also includes chapters on consumer culture, entertainment and leisure-time activities, and ethno-religious and class-based subcultures. For the non-Israeli reader, perhaps the most eye-opening chapter is "Portrait of a City." This was a densely populated (160,000 inhabitants packed into two-and-a-half square miles in 1939), noisy, unkempt, and smelly environment. (Tel Aviv lacked sewers until the 1940s.) Utilitarian tenements and shantytowns flanked the gleaming, Bauhaus-inspired facades of the commercial center, demonstrating "a disparity... between the ambitions of the city's leaders and many inhabitants and reality." Behind its (Hebrew) public face, "Tel Aviv culture blended West and East, Jew and Hebrew, the Diaspora and the Land of Israel, the cosmopolitan and the local." And the "integration of materialism and idealism" yielded a highly distinctive urban mix that distinguishes Tel Aviv to this day.
Zachary M. Baker
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