Nostalgia Sunday

August 3, 2008 - 10:20 PM by Rachel Neiman · 4 Comments
Filed under: General

Only 241 more days till the Tel Aviv Centennial celebrations start and I can’t wait. It’s going to be party, party, party all day and all night from April 2009 till December 2009. Why? Because that’s the kind of city we are.

Tel Aviv has a grand old tradition of revelry in the face of adversity and austerity – I could wax nostalgic for hours about the open-house parties of the Eighties – but will suffice by saying this: we are not a trite city. We simply take our fun very seriously.

Every month during the centennial celebrations will have a theme: April – The Grand Opening; May – Education and Heritage; June – Little Tel Aviv; July/August – Summer; September – Spirit of Peace; October – Green City; November-December – History and Community.

Old Tel Aviv photo - Purim Queen

One community project is called “Revealing the Hidden City,” in which volunteers will scan and save old photos of the city from private collections and upload them to the Tel Aviv 100 website. Many will be displayed in 11 exhibits planned for the centennial year. The English part of the site isn’t ready yet, but you can check out some photos on the Hebrew site already.

But really, the monthly themes will be party, party, party! April features the opening ceremonies and the newly reinstated Tel Aviv Marathon; May will have art and film exhibitions; June will be a series of Tel Aviv “White Nights” all-nighters, the Tel Aviv Book Fair and the RS:X European Windsurfing Championships; July-August includes the 18th Maccabiah Games, a Children’s Festival and La Scala; September takes a more spiritual turn each Friday with a city-wide kabalat Shabbat to welcome the Sabbath; October’s ecological theme means a bike race and an international harp competition; and while November-December sounds serious (founders conference, business conference, Calder retrospective), don’t forget that December 31st is New Year’s Eve! More partying for us. Yay! Everyone’s invited, so start planning your visit now.

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Tags: "White Nights", Book Fair, Nostalgia Sunday, Revealing the Hidden City, spirit of peace, Tel Aviv, tel aviv centennial, Tel Aviv Marathon

Nostalgia Sunday

July 6, 2008 - 4:06 PM by Rachel Neiman · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Profiles

My mother’s uncle, Zvi Zinkin, was a painter. Not a famous one, except in our family lore. Dod Zvi and Doda Batya, as we knew them, were among the many eccentrics that called Tel Aviv home and made it a city like no other. They were elderly, agoraphobic, hard-of-hearing vegetarians when we met them in the 1970s, making their own watery beet juice and salt-free noodles (this was before veggie food was popular or palatable), composing poetry and melodies for Batya to dance, Isadora Duncan-style, around a living room embellished with wall murals of Zvi shaking hands with Moses, Herzl and Jabotinsky in the heavenly Jerusalem. Zvi’s true loves – Batya and the Land of Israel – were expressed through his paintings, some of which were handed down to my sisters and me.
Zvi Zinkin - Yarkon River 1
Zvi Zinkin - Yarkon River 2
One of Zvi’s recurring themes was the Yarkon River, usually depicting himself and Batya in a rowboat, or sometimes with just a solitary rower. He was also fascinated by the Reading Power Station. In these paintings, Reading’s distinguishing characteristic, the smokestack, has apparently not yet been erected.
Zvi Zinkin - Reading Power Station

Both Batya and my mother died aroud the same time, in 1975, and Zvi passed away a few years later. (I imagine the apartment went to people who scraped and plastered over the wall murals – I’ve never had the guts to go and check). My father, sisters and I managed to visit him only once, in 1976 – and it wasn’t easy to arrange. Zvi didn’t have a phone or couldn’t hear the phone – I was never clear on the details – so you had to send a postcard telling him about your plans to visit. Also, our relatives warned us that he’d become even more peculiar since Batya’s death. “He made a life-sized statue out of her old clothes and paper mache, and he talks to it,” they told my dad chillingly. “The girls will be frightened.” Actually, it was both Batya and Theodore Herzl, sitting opposite one another at the folding table, with a tape recorder of Batya playing the piano and singing. Somehow, though, it wasn’t really scary. It just was what it was: art and life, one and the same.