The Spirit of Tel-Aviv and the Remapping of Jewish Literary History

Tel-Aviv Poema, a long poem in Yiddish describing the city ofTel-Aviv, published in Buenos Aires in 1937. Although the poem is not a masterpiece, it represents another way of looking at "the first Hebrew city" that is ferent from those articulated in much Hebrew literature of the interwar period. This article presents various interpretative contexts for the poema, including contemporary Hebrew poetry, the tradition of the long poem Russian literature (such as Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman), and Yiddish poetry set in other cosmopolitan centers. For this Yiddish poet, whether ever set actually set foot in Tel-Aviv, the city-despite its claims for newness-is deeply rooted in the diaspora and the "old world" of European landscapes left behind.