by Adam LeBor
7
The white city Shines
1940s
I was in the newest place in the world… a place where everything was new and everything was possible, including a kind of rebirth of the human spirit.
Evelyn Sert, heroine of the novel
When I Lived in Modern Times, by Linda Grant,
set in Mandate Tel Aviv
Yosef Pomrock, husband of Simha Chelouche, died in April 1942, when he was just forty-eight years old. He had stayed on in Palestine, just as he had told his parents he would even though they had sent him there from Radom to bring his brother Moshe home. Yosef loved his life there, had risen high in Tel Aviv society, and sat on the municipal council. Meir Dizengoff had been the sandak, the man who holds the baby, at Yosef’s son Zvi’s circumcision. ‘May Zvi too one day be the mayor of Tel Aviv,’ proclaimed Dizengoff, before the celebrations began. Although Yosef was an Ashkenazi, he rapidly adapted to the Sephardic lifestyle, even learning Arabic, the language usually spoken by the Chelouches. ‘My father fell in love with my mother, and with the oriental way of life. He loved to visit all my mother’s old aunts and eat there. The Chelouches were a very charming family, with wonderful food and traditions that he had never seen in Poland. They were very warm people, very close, always hugging and kissing each other,’ says Zvi Pomrock. An engaging silver-haired lawyer in his early seventies, Zvi is the chief historian of the Chelouche family. He is a walking encyclopaedia of both his hometown Tel Aviv and Chelouche lore, which he expounds with great enthusiasm.
Zvi was eleven years old when his father Yosef died. His uncles Zaki and Marco took him under their wing. They presided over Zvi’s bar mitzvah two years later, the ceremony marking his passage to adulthood. Zaki was then one of the city’s most renowned architects and sat on the municipal design committee. Zaki and Marco took Zvi to Jaffa, and explained the history of the Chelouches. Zvi loved Jaffa, the feel of the smooth sandstone buildings, the blue of the sea and the powerful sense of history reaching back through the generations. ‘Zaki and Marco were substitute fathers to me and we met almost every day. That’s why I know so much about Jaffa and the founding of Tel Aviv. In Jaffa they took me to the street of the money-changers, where Aharon Chelouche had his shop. They showed me where the old Arab coffee house was that had a cannon that was fired to mark the end of Ramadan. Marco was born in Jaffa itself, and Zaki was the first grandson of Aharon Chelouche to be born in the Beit Chelouche.’
Zaki was commissioned to draw up plans for a new market for Tel Aviv. Jewish women were increasingly uneasy about shopping in Jaffa, partly because they did not feel safe any more, but also for ideological reasons. ‘Jaffa was Jaffa, it was far away and they believed in Tel Aviv,’ explains Zvi. ‘It was also not pleasant for Jewish women to shop in Jaffa. In Arab families often the men went to the market, while the women stayed at home. But the Jewish women were much more modern, and they went shopping alone. It was an uncomfortable situation.’ Zaki’s plans were accepted. The new Souk Chelouche, ‘Chelouche Market’, bordered Manshiyyeh, Neve Tsedek and the Yemenite quarter. ‘You could buy everything at the Souk Chelouche,’ recalls Zvi. ‘I still remember the smell. There were all kinds of foods, set out on the stalls: fish, meat, bread, chicken, vegetables. There was even a small slaughterhouse.’
In Paris, Zaki had studied art nouveau architecture. But there would be no fussy peacock motifs or decorative swirls and curls in this modern Hebrew city. Tel Aviv’s architects chose the Bauhaus model as a foundation for their own school, known as the International Style, which adapted Bauhaus principles to the Mediterranean. The Bauhaus school, founded in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, aimed to synthesise simple, elegant design with modern mass production. Its open, democratic ethos embodied the spirit of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv’s Jews were more likely to wear simple shirts, shorts and sandals, free of adornment than tuxedos or ball gowns. The city was modern and forward-looking. The apartment blocks were run as co-operatives. Each had its own laundry, kindergarten, grocery shop, post office and plot of land, where residents could grow vegetables, to keep alive the pioneering spirit of connection to the land. The city soon had the greatest concentration of Bauhaus-influenced buildings in the world.
‘Choosing Bauhaus was a rebellion against the old society and the old ways. Tel Aviv is a city that started a new life, a new society. In Beit Chelouche the family lived together like a tribe, but when Zaki came back from Paris, the atmosphere here was that everyone was building the new state. Nobody was building art nouveau buildings with flowers. They wanted functional modern houses to live in,’ says Zvi. ‘Also, it is very hot here, with a lot of sunlight, and that goes with the Bauhaus style.’ Tel Aviv’s residential buildings were almost all three or four storeys high. The architects all had their own style, but the overall uniformity in design was intentional: Tel Aviv was a community, and it flowed horizontally, radiating a sense of equality, openness, even optimism. ‘We drove through the orange groves until we reached the White City and it was white, then,’ exclaims Evelyn Sert, the fictional heroine of When I Lived in Modern Times. ‘They were houses like machines, built of concrete and glass, not houses at all, they were ideas. I saw walls erected not just for privacy, but as barriers against the blinding light; windows small and recessed, each with a balcony and each shaded by the shadow cast by the balcony above it; stairwells lit by portholes, reminding me that we were by the sea.’1
Tel Aviv especially prided itself in its cultural life, accessible to all. The Mann Auditorium was designed to embody the values of an egalitarian society: its entrance was on the ground floor, without a grand, imposing staircase, the foyer was simple and open, and many of the walls were made of glass. Culture was to be de-mystified, and democratised. The International Style was suited to Tel Aviv for practical, as well as ethical and artistic reasons. By the early 1940s Tel Aviv had grown to almost 200,000 inhabitants. One in three of Palestine’s Jewish population lived there. Buildings were constructed in concrete, which is comparatively cheap and easy to use. Several of Tel Aviv’s architects studied with Le Corbusier. They incorporated his innovation of building apartment blocks on stilts, known as pilotis. The space underneath the building was used as a green garden area, and also allowed for air flow. The flat roofs were a social space. In the summer sun the White City was dazzling.
Zvi and his mother Simha lived in one of Zaki’s buildings at 56 Ahad Ha’am Street, still home to his law office.2 It was a model Bauhaus construction: sparse and angular with large corner windows and a winding iron staircase. The flats were light, if bare in their design. From the simple door handles to the window frames, everything matched. A few doors away, at number 49, stood what many acclaim as Zaki’s masterpiece: a curved, almost voluptuous cream-coloured apartment house whose feminine lines and L-shaped balconies seemed to blend both art deco and Bauhaus into a new style of its own. The influence of the Chelouche family on Tel Aviv was indisputable. Back in the 1880s Zaki’s grandfather Aharon had built Beit Chelouche in Neve Tsedek. Thirty years later his father Avraham Haim had constructed houses in the French provincial style. Then Zaki designed Bauhaus buildings, the three generations embodying the departure from Jaffa and the foundation and evolution of Tel Aviv. ‘Zaki was very old-fashioned, and he personally took care of every detail. He would not compromise with the owners. He built the house as he believed it should be built. If he wanted to add another floor, it would have to be exactly the same as the others,’ says Zvi.
Zvi’s mother did not like 56 Ahad Ha’am Street. She thought the flat, with its long corridor, looked like a train. Simha kept herself busy after her husband Yosef died. Every Friday she invited her friends over, sometimes for a simple social occasion, at others to promote a new young musician she had discovered. Simha never remarried. ‘I had one husband, and now he’s gone,’ she said. Simha’s brothers Zaki and Marco were also unlucky in love, even though both were married. Their dark good looks and old-world charm especially entranced the Ashkenazi women
, and both had plenty of admirers. ‘All the Chelouche men loved women very much,’ says Zvi. ‘They were attractive, educated and cultured, and they liked the good life.’ Only the third brother, David, married to Julia, enjoyed a happy domestic life.
One day Marco’s wife Paulette was swimming at Tel Aviv’s beach when she was stung in the face by an insect. Her face swelled up and the doctors were unable to help. After three days Paulette died. Stricken with grief, Marco moved back home to his parents’ house. Zaki had married a girl from Jerusalem, Mafleda Abujdid. Mafleda was a modern young woman, poised and elegant, educated in London. She rode horses, spoke foreign languages and played tennis. ‘Mafleda was very different from Zaki. She was very open-minded, and she was not constant. She went to the beach in very daring swim suits and at parties she used to dance with other men,’ says Zvi. Zaki too considered himself a sophisticated person. He spoke Hebrew, Arabic, French and German. He was well mannered, sophisticated and cultured, and always well dressed in a perfectly-tailored suit. He owned a beautiful open-topped car. He could not drive, but had his own personal chauffeur, Yaakov, who took him everywhere. But Mafleda’s behaviour was too much, says Zvi. ‘Zaki was old-fashioned and he could not accept this, and so they divorced.’
Some time later, Zaki married his second wife, Mira. There he fared no better; they argued incessantly. Zaki admitted to Zvi that he was difficult. When he had a migraine attack he had to lie down in a cold, dark room with a slice of potato on each eye. At home everything had to be in the right place. The perfectionism that was tolerable in an architect was less so in a husband. His diary had a fixed day for everything, all planned in advance, from work appointments to social outings. Once fixed, the times would not be altered.
Despite his idiosyncrasies, Zaki had one devoted female admirer: his sister-in-law, Julia. ‘My mother did not fall in love with my father as much as with the idea of getting married, and the honeymoon, making a home, and going to Venice and Paris,’ explains Julia’s daughter Edith Krygier. ‘When they got to Paris, they met David’s brothers, Zaki and Marco. Marco was a merchant, while Zaki was an architect and a playboy. He was very handsome and charismatic. My mother once told me that she adored him at first sight, but when she got to know him better she found out that he had a negative side as well.’ Zaki sometimes behaved badly towards women and could be stingy. ‘My father had the opposite nature, he was very generous, loving, genuine and charming. My mother loved and appreciated him for his values very much.’ After Zaki and Mira divorced Zaki did not marry again. ‘He told me that he could not live with anyone, that women had made a mess of his life,’ says Zvi.
The political and military forces in Palestine were also heading for divorce. As the war entered its final phase, the marriage of convenience between the Haganah and Irgun and the British began to fall apart. In February 1944, the new commander of the Irgun declared war against Britain. It was clear, the Irgun argued, that the Allies would win the war. But there was no guarantee that the British would give the Jews their own state. News was leaking out of the horrors of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. The Royal Navy was still turning away refugee ships and detaining the Jews in camps, in line with the 1939 White Paper. The Irgun’s commander was a Polish Jew called Menachem Begin, a former leader of Betar, and a friend of Vladimir Jabotinsky.
Begin’s communiqué announcing the Irgun’s revolt was illustrated by a map of Palestine with borders reaching Iraq. The Irgun demanded that a provisional Hebrew government be established, with a Hebrew national army, and that negotiations must be initiated to evacuate all Jews from Europe to the Holy Land. Begin ordered a campaign of terror against the British. Irgun members bombed, blew up and raided police stations and government buildings. Immigration offices were particularly targeted. Mandate officials granted only 1,500 entry certificates a month, and any Jews who immigrated illegally and were caught by the authorities were deducted from that figure. By mid-February all immigration offices in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem had been destroyed. Tax offices were next, followed by the British intelligence headquarters in Jaffa. Lehi would not be outdone: its members twice tried to kill Harold MacMichael, the British High Commissioner for Palestine, and succeeded in wounding him.
By now the Bulgarian Yaakov Yosefov was no more. He had Hebraised his family name to Aharoni, and usually went by the Hebrew nickname of Yoram. In addition he used several aliases, for Yoram lived underground. Released from prison in 1942, he went to Tel Aviv and found a job in a clothing factory. He made contact with the Bulgarian Lehi member he had met in Mizra prison. ‘They set up a meeting in a safe house in Tel Aviv. I went there at night, and it was completely dark,’ Yoram recalls. A Lehi commander, possibly Yitzhak Shamir – later prime minister of Israel – sat waiting for Yoram, his face in the shadows. Yoram was closely questioned, for Lehi was organised on a strict cell structure and security was watertight. Once in, there was no going back but Yoram felt he had come home. ‘This was a war. If the British had let in 100,000 Jews the Haganah and the Irgun would have stopped fighting. But we would not have. We wanted the British out and a Jewish state,’ he explains. ‘We considered all British administration, military and police as legitimate targets. But no civilians, women, families or children – only officials.’
The Irgun and Lehi stepped up their operations against the British during the autumn of 1944. In November, two members of Lehi killed Lord Moyne, the British minister responsible for the 1939 White Paper, in Cairo. The two were caught and sentenced to death. They told the court: ‘We accuse Lord Moyne and the government he represents of murdering hundreds of thousands of our brethren.’ The Jewish Agency reacted with fury, denouncing Lehi and the Irgun as traitors, and the Yishuv split in two as Jew turned on Jew. The Jewish Agency instructed any Jews who knew members of either Lehi or Irgun to report them to the British police, either in writing or by telephone. Fathers were even told to denounce their rebellious offspring. Special squads of Haganah fighters were despatched to track Irgun and Lehi members in what became known as the ‘Hunting Season’. Almost 1,000 Irgun and Lehi members were then handed over to the British, some kidnapped and beaten by their fellow Jews.3 Even today the ‘Hunting Season’s’ legacy of bitterness still shapes Israeli politics, and the divide between left and right.
By the end of the war, Falastin’s journalists were also disillusioned with their support for the Allies. Democracy had triumphed, but they did not believe that the Allied victory would lead to a free and independent Palestine.4 The British Labour and Conservative parties were both imperialists, one writer concluded, and nothing really changed, whoever was in power in London, ‘One Englishman comes, and another Englishman goes’. In April 1944 the Palestine Arab Party had been formally relaunched. The following year the Arab League was founded in Egypt. The Palestinians had delegate status and were recognised as a nation. In November the Arab Higher Committee, disbanded by the British, was reestablished. It was packed with placemen selected by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had relocated to Cairo, from where he intrigued and plotted. Both Jews and Arabs knew that soon, all the Englishmen would go. Then the conflict would be settled by military, not political means.
In Jebaliyyeh Ahmad Hammami’s wife and children missed him intensely. He had not yet returned from his sheep drive, and Nafise was left alone with nine children to feed and clothe on tight rations, in the middle of a war, with no man in the house. Of course Ahmad’s relatives, who lived next door, helped as much as they could. But it was not the same as having her husband there. Worst of all, there was no way to communicate with him. ‘I think my father must have been gone for months, but at the time it felt like years,’ says Hasan. Until one day there was a knock on the door. Leaner, browner, dustier and smelling distinctly of sheep, there was Ahmad, and the whole family rejoiced. ‘When my father came back he was wind-burned and covered with the dust of the desert. His legs were covered with deep brown scars. He told us how bitterly cold the deser
t was during the night and that he could not keep warm, how they tended every sheep as if it were a human being; how they could not follow the old desert routes since they were too long and too slow, and closed because of military and border restrictions. And how they kept running out of water and firewood to keep warm or prepare food. He was a hero to us all.’
Nafise, too, was happy to see her husband, but her joy was tempered. ‘She could not quite restrain herself from criticising my father for leaving her alone with the children for so long,’ says Hasan. The sheep fetched a good sum, and the family, for now at least, had enough to live on. But by the following autumn, the funds began to run low. Ahmad suggested to his wife that he go on another sheep drive. After all, he argued, he was now an experienced hand. Nafise refused point blank. Ahmad knew when he was beaten. And anyway, perhaps it was not such a good idea to push his luck. Instead Ahmad opened a wholesale shop for dried and perishable foods in Jaffa’s market, by Clock Tower Square.
Hasan loved going to the shop to help his father. He spent most of his summers and weekends there. ‘I sat behind the oversized dark wood roller desk, using the heavy scales, moving bags of potatoes, onions, beans or whatever there was. The sacks were frequently piled up to the ceiling. The store would smell bad if the onions had not sold fast enough, so they had to be moved quickly. The busiest days in that market were Thursday and Friday when the merchants from the villages and the retailers would come in to buy their supplies.’ Hasan often looked out for an elderly east European Jewish lady, desperately poor, judging by her ragged clothes. She did the rounds of the merchants, and most had a bag of surplus vegetables for her. The Muslim obligation to provide for the poor is called zakat and sadaqah in Arabic, while for Jews it is the Hebrew tsedakah. The words are almost identical. ‘By the end of the day, the market was deserted of people but it looked like there had been a hurricane, with all the abandoned empty bags, the loose vegetables and other goods that had been spilled or left behind after being picked over,’ says Hasan.