Alterman_commentary_City-and-Mother

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Natan Alterman, “A City and Mother,” 1934. Commentary by Giddon Ticotsky

In this text, a young man, a young city, and a young genre come together at a particular historical moment. The man is 23-year-old Nathan Alterman, a few years prior to his resounding debut as a leading modernist Hebrew poet with the publication of Kokhavim ba-chuts (Stars Outside) in 1938. The city is Tel Aviv, founded barely one year before Alterman was born. And the genre is the feuilleton, which by virtue of vacillating between another two—journalism and literature—facilitates irreverence, but always of the gracious kind, out of a constant commitment to entertain. The youthfulness of all three charges the text with energy, with a sense of open horizons and a plethora of opportunities—and moreover, a carnival spirit. Everything still has to be invented: the young city needs to be mythologized, the feuilleton has yet to be established as a more literary and artistic genre, and Alterman still has to find his own creative voice.

“A City and Mother” is the title Alterman chooses for his feuilleton, perhaps innocuously, perhaps sarcastically. The common sense of the original Hebrew phrase—Ir va-em—is a major city, a metropolis. About to celebrate its silver jubilee, and boasting some 34,000 inhabitants, was Tel Aviv a big city? In terms of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine—certainly yes. But compared to Paris, where Alterman had resided shortly before composing this piece—obviously not. This expression was customarily used to refer to a significant religious Jewish community, typically in the diaspora—very far from the secular and mischievous Tel Aviv portrayed by the poet. The title, moreover, emphasizes the city’s femininity, and is reminiscent of the etymology of metropolis, or “maternal city”. Note, however, that as suggested by Uri S. Cohen, Tel Aviv is less of a mother to Alterman and more of a lover, or perhaps a young sister to be looked after.

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Less obviously, this text touches upon a fundamental Zionist phenomenon: the metaphor and its concretization. Just as Herzl’s utopia had become reality (albeit partially) in Eretz Israel, so the Hebrew name of his visionary work, Altneuland, as translated by Nahum Sokolov, became the city’s name. In the beginning of Alterman’s work, “A City and Mother” becomes a real-life mother, the biblical Rebecca who parented the twins Esau and Jacob. Immediately afterwards, however, we encounter the opposite phenomenon—a metaphorization of the concrete: “The air becomes ambience and the wind becomes a mood,” and “municipal water cars prance like elegant peacocks.” This constant vacillation from the real to the symbolic and back again is what gives the text its lyrical dimension, perhaps inspired by Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en Prose and his flâneur. This double movement also foreshadows Alterman’s turn to neo-symbolism in his poetry, perhaps as a way out of the split between the visionary ideologies then in vogue and the meager reality then in sight: between the European metropolis of his imagination, with its city clock, and the donkey’s monotonous braying in a backwater Middle-Eastern city.

The tension between dream and reality, in terms of the textual content, is related to the feuilleton form itself: “A writer dipping his feuilletonistic pen in that whirlwind of life, ever gushing, bustling, butterflying in myriad waves and sparkles and flickers of light and darkness, must seem miserable and absurd, a phlegmatic tourist if you will, keen on capturing the Niagara Falls with his miserable Kodak…" And all these tensions—between metaphorical and concrete, ideological and real, and perhaps also between life and literature—are defused or at least sidestepped by focusing on the minute, the quotidian, on a “man’s love for the city.”

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Alterman_commentary_City-and-Mother