Modernism and the Zionist Uncanny: Reading the Old Cemetery in Tel Aviv

Abstract

APHOTOGRAPH OF AHAD HA'AM'S FUNERAL in 1927, in Tel Aviv's Old Cemetery on Trumpeldor Street (fig. 1). Amidst a group of people surrounding the fresh grave, the poet Ch. N. Bialik eulogizes the ideological mentor of a generation of Eastern European Jewish intellectuals. Most of them look at the grave or each other. Some are in uniform, police or officials of some sort; a white-bearded Alexander Siskind, dark glasses reflecting back into the camera, stands just behind Bialik's left shoulder. Bialik is at the center of the photograph; he looks into the camera with an expression of fatigue and sadness an Eastern EuropeanJew wearing a heavy coat over a nondescript suit with a modest cap on his head, standing by a freshly dug grave, in the dunes of the Trumpeldor Cemetery. More panoramic photographs of the ceremony show that the grave is located in the cemetery's newer section, surrounded largely by sand, a few other graves, and some spare newly planted shrubbery (fig. 2). The dark suits of the crowd, their European dress, contrast sharply against the bareness of the place, the emptiness of the dunes, the dirt, the stone wall of the cemetery looming in the background, the large, triangular stone of a mass grave strongly visible on the horizon. What is most affecting, however, about this particular photograph, is the result of a belated, surreptitious knowledge: Bialik stands in almost precisely the spot where he will be buried seven years later. His fatigue seems more than simply grief for his friend and mentor; it seems almost a kind of surrender, an admission, but of what precisely? Is he simply tired of standing in the center of yet another photograph? It is the nature of photography that the viewer often possesses some knowledge of the world outside the frame that those within the photograph lack. This is especially the case with photographs of historic events, where the retrospective knowledge of hindsight produces belated, unconscious judgments regarding the