Young Tel Aviv by Helman Anat;Watzman Haim;Watzman Professor Haim;Helman Anat;

Author:Helman, Anat;Watzman, Haim;Watzman, Professor Haim;Helman, Anat; [Helman, Anat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1084918
Publisher: Brandeis University Press

Something for Everyone

As work hours became confined to just one part of the day and modern Westerners’ buying power increased, the importance of leisure culture grew. Many leisure activities became part of the economy, since they involved the purchase of goods and services. New forms of leisure were to a large extent an urban phenomenon. The growth of cities, along with their density and heterogeneity, encouraged the establishment of official institutions and services devoted to entertainment and amusement. In addition to providing diversion and enjoyment, cities’ leisure activities helped crystallize identities, served as a force for social cohesion, and enhanced the attraction of city life.6

During the evening and at night, Tel Aviv’s main streets became filled with residents and tourists out to consume the city’s high culture and diversions, or simply to stroll along the roads or the beach. At the beginning of the 1920s, the municipal police chief expressed concern about crowding in places of entertainment, caused in part by the tendency among establishment owners to sell more tickets than their halls could accommodate, and also by the habit among policemen charged with keeping order outdoors to go inside and enjoy the shows and parties. Shoe shiners, as noted already, made most of their money at night from clients on their way to events and parties. Soft drink peddlers also waited eagerly for nighttime, when thirsty audiences and partygoers headed home. Tel Aviv’s hot, humid summer nights drew people out into the street in a desperate search for a cool breeze. A British police officer asserted that the summer heat made it impossible to stay at home. Leisure pursuits in Tel Aviv were thus conducted largely outside, or in the city’s generous selection of popularly priced restaurants and cafés.7

Marcia Gitlin listed the available evening pastimes: the movies, theater, musical recitals, lectures, social visits, or a walk along Allenby Street to the beach, a route lined with teahouses and fashionable hotels. Gitlin was disappointed to discover that, except for the Hebrew-speaking theater, most of Tel Aviv’s leisure activities were hardly unique. The cafés were “European-style,” and even the films resembled those in Cape Town, except that they had subtitles in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. The poet Natan Alterman described these places of amusement as drab in the morning glare as opposed to “when the day goes dark, when the bright lamps are lit on their fences.” Then they came to life, giving the old peddler his livelihood and filling the street with melodies blaring from loudspeakers and the aroma of roasted peanuts. In the light of morning, Alterman wrote, Tel Aviv looked like a humdrum, workaday city, but enrobed in magical electric lights, it was transformed in form and essence each evening. A journalist, Uri Kesari, wrote that 9 p.m. was the hour at which reality metamorphosed into a land of desires and illusions.8 The Tel Aviv municipality took a more practical approach to the city’s nightlife—it imposed a differential tax on the price of event tickets, to the benefit of high culture.

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