Sigalit Landau
A SENSE OF PLACE
Natanel Elfassy & Daniel Zarhy
photography by Yanay Yehiel
Published in Haaretz Weekend Magazine| 12.06.2008
The variety of residential groupings in Israel - city, "development town," village, kibbutz, settlement - often promotes the sense that the type of locale defines the identity of the people who live there, and not vice-versa. To many people, the term "Tel Avivian" or "Jerusalemite" connotes not just an address, but a type of character, an identity, a political stance. Just as the word "kibbutznik" or "settler" denotes more than a random spot on the map. We asked seven artists from different fields about how their childhood surroundings and current places of residence influence their creative work.
Clara Khoury / Land and olive tree
"When I was little, instead of staying at home with a babysitter, I would go with my father [the actor Makram Khoury] to Wadi Salib where the Haifa Theater had its second stage. The theater is located in a very old building, which was once a bath house, and I remember running around among the old, abandoned stone buildings. That was Haifa for me. I spent part of my childhood with my grandmother in Kafr Yasif. When my parents were traveling, they'd send me there. The village was so beautiful then. In my grandmother's house there were always children and grandchildren, the smell of cooking, and nature surrounding you. Whatever direction you walked, within 10 minutes you'd reach one of the olive groves.
When the first intifada started in 1987, we lived in Haifa in the upper city. As kids, we didn't quite understand what was happening. Our feelings and the reactions of my parents didn't seem connected to the environment in which we lived. My sister, my brother and I asked my parents if we could move back to the lower city. It felt more natural for us there at that time, to go back to Abbas Street. We rented a big old Arab house, with high arched windows and a porch on every side.
"After high school, I moved to Tel Aviv, because I was looking for a place that would give me the freedom to locate my identity: I don't mean my Arab identity necessarily, but more in terms of being a woman. My home today is not furnished in any particular style. On the one hand, I collect things, sort of like in my parents' home. An eclectic combination of new and old. On the other hand, since I've moved so many times, I don't really have trouble getting rid of things. I've come to understand that I don't really feel like I belong to any one place.
"In Haifa I feel like I belong only when I enter my parents' home. I feel a sense of belonging to the food, to the tastes, to the smell. I can wander around with my suitcase, that can be my home. The little things that give me a sense of hominess don't necessarily have to do with a certain place. Now when I come back to Tel Aviv, it's soothing. There's something nice about being anonymous, even for a short time.
"For my father's generation, the land has importance. The lands he inherited from his father who received them from his father and so on are not for sale. For him, they're a part of the history, of the heritage. His sentiments are not only for the land, but also for the olive trees that grow on it. It's a beautiful heritage, which I respect and appreciate. But I think - what will happen when I have to deal with the decision of what to do with these lands? I like to picture a large planter that can hold both the land and the olive tree, but can also be moved from place to place."
Sigalit Landau / Islands of sanity
"I was born in Kiryat Yovel, which was founded as an immigrant neighborhood in the 1950s. I remember it as a colorful and multicultural neighborhood. For me, the bus stop across from our house was a performance space. As long as people were waiting for the bus, I had an audience. The buildings in Kiryat Yovel are very low. Even though the buildings were boxes that were built to house the new immigrants, and grass didn't even want to grow there, there was a sense of cleanliness and order. The scale was important: The block was clearly defined, and there was a nice amount of space between the buildings.
"When I was in the high school of the arts, which was in the Academy of Music, right by the Terra Sancta building, I used to take the Number 4 bus to Rehavia, the well-off center of Jerusalem. There the scale changes. It was an amazing place, an old building, made of stone, of course. In the middle of the yard was a mulberry tree and all the musicians and dancers, high-schoolers and college students, would hang out there. Later on, they moved the college students to Givat Ram, and the high-school students to another place, and the building was sold. That kind of epitomizes everything that's happening in Jerusalem. For me, it's not only sad in the general sense, but it's sad because my personal memories are disappearing.
"At the end of the 1980s, when it suited me to live near Sheinkin, I was serving in the army and I moved to Tel Aviv. I lived on Ha'avoda Street, and I had to deal with ugliness, crumbling plaster, cat pee, rot of various types, dampness, mold. It's a totally different aesthetic climate from what I was used to. Granted, in Jerusalem you have the contrasts of religious-secular, or Arab-Jew, but in Tel Aviv I felt more pain. As if the bluff was worse. In Jerusalem I had a sense of layers, of crusts of history and time. Tel Aviv felt to me like a sour ulcer that hadn't healed. The ability to say that Tel Aviv is pretty and poetic is something I had to acquire.
"For the past 15 years I've been renting an apartment in Florentin. In Florentin, the construction is low-rise and on a human scale and high density, so that life is lived in the streets, and it's great. I look for what's between the buidings, for what there was in the housing project, or what you found around Sheinkin in the 1980s. I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of Jerusalemites end up in Florentin. Like Nahlaot, it's old, it has a real neighborhood feeling, with a varied population that includes old people and young people. In Florentin there is no pretension. In comparison, the "White City" does have pretension, it's not white at all. It's gray and cracked. To live in the White City seems to me like living in an idea. I prefer to live in an X-ray - to seek the skeleton of things. That way I don't get paranoid. What you see is what you get.
"When you come down to it, the city is an important source of inspiration. But at the same time I get a whole bunch of escapist ideas, a kind of utopian thinking, that develops while I'm busy with other projects. I've thought about projects that relate to a different space, to mapping the bottom of the sea, or maybe to creating an alternative of underwater construction. Maybe to create islands - little islands of sanity."
Shlomi Shaban / Roaming the city
"Tel Aviv is like a combination of a big city and a neighborhood. When I was working on my last album, 'Ir' (City), I focused on my experience in Tel Aviv. When the work on the album was done, I realized how significant for me this sense of roaming the city was. When I get into it and let my imagination carry me away, all the people become either people I know or passing episodes in a personal experience. It's the creative fuel. Like artists from the 18th-century, composers and writers who would walk the forests or along the riverbanks and come back with a melody, an idea or a feeling.
"I think the sense of wandering is so powerful with me because I don't drive. I either ride a bike or go on foot. The experience isn't always connected to specific surroundings. The details are less important to me in the city, it's the general feeling and atmosphere that are more meaningful. The song 'New Age Woman' is kind of a summary of all my wanderings in Tel Aviv during the years of working on the album:
"On the promenade, Etzel House sings to Salma and Herzl
An oratorio of fruit juices and trauma
Slivers of light dissolve amid the dying palm trees
Yes, Jaffa is alert, Manshiya does not sleep."
"When I'd get stuck while writing a song, I would get on my bike and ride around to refuel myself. The song describes 15 or 16 hidden cameras in one night in Tel Aviv, like the number of verses in the song. The cameras are located in different places: Some are in central places like the Mann Auditorium and some are in places that are more personal to me, like a certain corner of Mazeh Street.
"I usually start off my wanderings on the same route, expecting the experience to take me to a different place each time. There are a few landmarks: From my home on Ben-Zion Boulevard, I ride to a central place, like Habimah [Theater], and then stop and look around. In the past I wouldn't even look at Habimah, but now I enjoy looking at it, because of the renovations and the changes. I'm interested in looking at cultural centers at the times when they're not in operation, before the curtain goes up. Afterward I keep on going up Rothschild Boulevard and stop for coffee - another excuse to linger. From there I continue to Neve Tzedek and have another coffee, but I don't sit in a cafe. I take it with me and go to the rear plaza of the Suzanne Dellal Center, next to the Batsheva headquarters, so I can watch the dancers going in to rehearsals.
"The next stop is the Etzel House on the promenade. From there, depending on the time, I either go into Jaffa or turn around and head back. Jaffa is not comfortable for bike riders, the sidewalks and the streets are totally neglected. In Jaffa, I would go down the boardwalk and turn right to the port, stand by the area where the fishermen are and watch them. I never spoke with them, though. They scare me."
Itai Tiran / Little temples at home
"I was born in Petah Tikva, a city of two colors - gray and green. I started out as a classical musician actually, acting wasn't considered an option. As a kid, I practiced a lot at home. My experience was internal, technical. I wouldn't go out of the house to get inspiration for Mozart from the architecture. But one building did act as an inspiration to me. The architectural gem of Petah Tikva, for me, was the conservatory, where I went about five times a week.
"The conservatory building is square, but the upper part is round. When you go inside, you find a very broad and lovely staircase that goes up three floors and all along it are paintings by Yosl Bergner. I really loved going up those stairs, and sliding my hand along the wide banister on the way down. As if it had some special meaning.
"If I arrived five minutes before the lesson and had to wait, I would circle around the floor with my hand on the railing. After completing this "journey," the teacher's room was just a tiny chamber, no more than two meters by two meters, with a small sliding window and a piano and two chairs. It was a nice feeling to go from the "cathedral" where you see a three-story-high ceiling, to this little room, which you know you're entering in order to study, for a Spartan experience. I loved the feeling of connection with the building. This is the only building with which I really felt such a strong bond.
"Another powerful experience that I vividly remember from childhood is the feeling that I had in Tel Aviv. Today I experience the city differently, but back then I was afraid of Tel Aviv. My maternal grandmother lived on Peretz Hayot Street and I used to visit her often. Something about the peeling walls and the rusty faucets caught my eye. Sort of like a ghost town. Now I can tie it to Hamlet, to the father's ghost. Even inside my grandmother's house I wasn't relaxed. I would always hear someone walking in the stairwell, or a door slamming. And there were those old sliding windows and this huge ceiling [typical] of the Bauhaus buildings, which was high and peeling. I felt like the plaster was going to eat me up. In my grandmother's kitchen, the counter was falling apart, the wood had been coated with 7,000 layers of shellac.
"Those feelings began to change when I started attending Thelma Yellin High School. Then Tel Aviv became more accessible. From moment to moment, I fell more in love. A person who comes out of Petah Tikva says: I made it out. And at age 20 it happened. I moved to Ramat Gan for a year, and afterward, when I finished my acting studies, I moved to Tel Aviv.
"Today I live in a rented apartment in Tel Aviv, and it's critical for my sense of creativity. The key question I ask myself when I'm searching for an apartment is what sort of creative experience I will have here, in relation to my self-image and in relation to my art. I love that I can have these different corners in the house, especially when it's very carefully designed. It can be a corner where I have records, an armchair, a lamp and a record player. But it has to be perfect down to the last detail, because one needs little temples inside the home."
Hanoch Daum / How much space I had
"I was born and raised on Ramat Magshimim, as the son of the community's respected rabbi. My father was the center of the home. The living room, that area that's supposed to be a family space, was his. In the living room, Father received visitors and worked on his Torah sermons. The walls were crammed with books, in a compulsive quantity, over 10,000 books I would say. There was barely room for a couch. It took time, even after my father passed away, for us to air out the room, to make a little room for ourselves in it, too. We donated the books to the hesder yeshiva in the Golan Heights.
Ramat Magshimim is situated in the worst possible location in the Golan Heights. A little further south and you can see Lake Kinneret. A little further north and you can see Mount Hermon. And on Ramat Magshimim Idealism. The location was chosen because of its proximity to the border. But as a child, you don't care much about the view. I look at my kids' childhood and compare it to my own. How much space I had compared to them. On Ramat Magshimim, there were large houses - simple and not over-ambitious, situated some distance from one another. The whole place was open to us, there were hardly any cars, everyone rode bikes. From about age 4, we would wander freely on the streets of the moshav, all the way to the edge, to the cattle shed, and to the abandoned Syrian buildings, including the rotating cannon - a reminder of what was there before the Six-Day War and a paradise for children's games. There were also several old IDF posts around the community, which we used for hide-and-seek.
"In Gush Etzion, where I live now, the houses are so close together, it can make you schizoid. It's like they wanted the houses to turn into one single large building where everyone would live. But it's a good place, Gush Etzion. The air is fantastic, it's a place where good people live, and politically, too, to most people it's considered part of Israeli territory and there is no intention of evacuating it. We love our house, we're raising two kids here, there is space and each one has his corner. We have a large balcony with a spectacular view, and another one with a human view - it looks out over the synagogue and you can observe the social events that take place on Shabbat there. But still, we're waiting for the home of our dreams, which would include a large garden, like I had when I was growing up on Ramat Magshimim.
"But things have changed on Ramat Magshimim, too. When I go to visit my mother there now, I see how the residents are closing themselves off in their expanded houses. This change symbolizes the change in the status of Ramat Magshimim from a cooperative economy that looks after the collective, to a moshav in which each one worries about his own home. The new situation is less romantic, but it's apparently necessary and unavoidable. I remember an amusing scene that was caused by the cooperative framework of Ramat Magshimim: This one family, who were all much taller than average - the parents were over two meters tall, and the children were also very tall - requested permission from the building committee to raise the roof of their house by two bricks. But then someone said, if they're allowed to do that, then another family, whose members are shorter than average and therefore don't need that much height will have to be compensated somehow. Even if this is only legend, it exemplifies the difficulties to which this sort of romantic lifestyle can lead."
Rani Blair / No way to escape
"I grew up on a plateau - endless space in a straight line, on the northern edges of the Halutza dunes in the western Negev. We would walk for two hours and turn around and still see the houses on the moshav. No matter how far we kept walking, whenever we turned around, we could still see the moshav. As though there was no way to escape, to get lost. Home would always be right behind you. When I was a kid, there were no roads on the moshav either. Just gardens and houses, without fences, everything was open. There was one bus in the morning and one bus in the evening. It was a remote, deserted place.
"After my military service in Lebanon, I came to Tel Aviv. I lived there for 20-odd years, and now I've come back to Moshav Yesha with my wife and two daughters. I'm living this conflict, of wandering versus settling down. I'm searching for certainties in life, and lately, certainty means coming back to my homestead on Moshav Yesha and seeing that it is preserved. Being close to my parents, for the granddaughters to be close to them, to strike roots. Even if I have 5,000 minutes of television drama behind me, what's left to pass on to the next generation? A homestead, that's all. Still, everything's open. You can't be afraid to seek out boundaries, to touch them and get burned. Architecture essentially designates a situation, but within that situation, I can choose how to tell my story.
"The movement back and forth from the dunes to the city plays a significant role in my television work, too. 'Shabbatot Vehagim' (Saturdays and Holidays) is a love song to Tel Aviv - to the rented apartment, to the movement between apartments, to the singles who are looking for love, to the familiar experiences of being tossed out of the house, the failed attempts to settle down on the moshav, the return to the city. Like all my work, the series was filmed exclusively in real homes. I need those windows from which the actual view of the city is visible. When you film in a real house and the kitchen is real and there's food in the refrigerator and stuff in the drawers and the living room is messy, you get another kind of drama out of the actors. They feel at home, they get to know the house, and gradually they also use the house.
"My other series, 'Tevat Noah,' (Noah's Ark) took place partly in a loft in Jaffa. In the loft we built an ark with sloping wooden walls and windows at an angle. We sat in this space - 30 people, cast and crew, for two weeks. The "ark" stood in place and didn't travel anywhere. And we couldn't go out either. We ran the set inside it. We had no choice but to cope with the relationships, with the pressures and tensions that arose from the simple fact that we were crowded together all the time."
Rafi Cohen / The architecture of couscous
"I'm from two areas in Jerusalem. I was born in the German Colony, but I grew up in Katamonim with my grandmother. For some reason, the people who came from one place didn't connect with the second place. The difference in architecture is huge, too. The German Colony contained mostly old Arab houses, made of stone, with thick walls, inner courtyards and green iron gates. In Katamonim, there were housing projects that were built in the 1950s and 1960s.
"I'm essentially a culinary architect. In Israel, it was customary for the chef to stand on the production line and put out the courses. I concluded that this was not the way the profession would work for me, that there had to be a clear separation between the different roles. Like in the cinema, where you have a screenwriter, a director and a producer, and if you want to consistently achieve a high level, you can't be both the producer and the screenwriter.
"I believe that discipline produces the highest form of creativity. When there are well-defined boundaries, then it's possible to develop creatively to a much greater extent. Constraints improve the quality of the creation. The kashrut rules, for example, have spawned many good dishes, because of the constraints. You can see this, for example, in Jewish cuisine around the world, whether from Middle Eastern countries or from Eastern Europe. Because of the constraints of Shabbat, good things developed. For instance, the salads of the Moroccan Jews are much more elaborate than those of the Moroccan Muslims, because Shabbat forced them to rely on cold foods.
"Generally, I believe that a dish, like a building, before it can be identified with me, needs to serve a host of interests or rules: It must be original, the menu must be eclectic in the sense that it relies on a tradition but also contains a personal statement, either on the technical level, the level of flavor, or of the presentation, or the combination of ingredients."
