Nostalgia Sunday – Dolls on Display

June 12, 2011 - 9:58 PM by

I collected dolls as a child. More accurately put: on our many travels and no doubt inspired by “It’s A Small World After All”, in each country, my parents would purchase a “look but don’t touch” doll in national dress. Sometimes two, like the boy gondolier and his Venetian lady-friend. Or the Greek soldier in his white pleated skirt and his Athenian lady-friend. The Spanish flamenco dancer and her gentleman friend with the guitar. And so on and so forth.

Once home, these would go on a shelf. As with all knick-knacks, if you get enough of the same things, they eventually become a collection and so it was.

In addition to the Italian, Yugoslav, Greek and Japanese couples, there were the Israeli sabras: the soldier boy and, of course, the pioneering woman, shouldering her orange crate, plaited braids peeping out from beneath her kova tembel hat. There was also a charming Yemenite family scene made entirely of colorful twisted phone wire. And “Srulik”, the quintessential Israeli cartoon character made of some bizarre rubbery plastic or strange plasticky rubber.

The dolls, of course, were not only looked at but were also touched. A great deal, in fact. So much so that many fell apart. Imagine my relief, therefore, to learn that some other children had obeyed the rules and kept their dolls whole so that they might now be put on display at the Eretz Israel Museum.

The exhibit, A Land and It’s Dolls – Israel and National Identity, looks at local national costume dolls as a 70-year long sociocultural phenomenon that began before the establishment of the State of Israel, and came to its end in the late 1980s.

The heyday for these collectibles, writes curator Dr. Shelly Shenhav-Keller, were between the 1950s and the 1970s. “These dolls were made by artists, artisans and craftspeople who used an array of techniques and styles, typically employing straightforward methods. Most of the doll makers and designers were not born in the country; some of them had had art or artisan education and others had a modicum of knowledge of the field.”

“The dolls were displayed and sold privately, in souvenir shops or in shops owned by institutional bodies such as WIZO, Maskit and Hameshakem. They were bought as souvenirs, mementos of a place or an experience, by Israelis and particularly Jewish tourists who took them home with them after they left the country, a scrap of their national homeland in the shape of ornamental dolls that depicted local types, later to be put on display in their faraway homes.

Well, that would be my collection in a nutshell.

Shenhav-Keller believes that the dolls in this exhibit “manifest symbols, values and myths that relate to the creation of Israeli identity: nationality, ethnicity, the melting pot, pluralism and multiculturalism… attempting to answer the question: did these dolls… reflect, represent, shape or invent the sought-after imagined and hegemonic Israeliness?” They are, she says, “…witnesses to the story we wished to tell ourselves as a society, the story we wished to show ourselves, tell ourselves and others. At the same time, they give a knowing wink to the essence of the story.”

Since I never, in all of our travels, ever encountered a Spanish flamenco dancer with a fan or a German boy wearing lederhosen — it was jeans and t-shirts pretty much everywhere you went — I can only conclude that most of the dolls sold to tourists the world over were manifestations of nationalist symbols, values and myths. (Shenhav-Keller herself puts the late 1980s as the date that the doll trend ended). I guess Barbie would be the embodiment of hegemonic American-ness, globalization, etc. etc. I don’t care. I liked the collection but Barbie was my most favorite doll.

A Land and It’s Dolls – Israel and National Identity runs through November 15, 2011 at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv.

Tags: • Category: Art, design, education, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Travel 

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  1. Haveil Havalim #320 — Summertime edition « Frume Sarah's World on Sun, Jul 3rd 2011 8:19 PM

    2. [...] a preview of what looks to be a wonderful doll exhibit at the Eretz Israel Museum (in Tel Aviv) in Nostalgia Sunday: Dolls on Display. (I played with my dolls too…) Also to be found is Painting a portrait of a school in [...]

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