1. As we will see later, this statement is, of course, not accurate. Tel Aviv was also conceived as an antithesis of the Zionist rural vision. Still, one cannot imagine the Zionist enterprise in Israel without the influence of Tel Aviv and its inhabitants. It is noteworthy that the loan for the land of ’Aḥuzat Bayit was extended by the Jewish National Fund, which regarded that land as part of the Zionist enterprise. See Katz, Yossi, “The Establishment of Tel Aviv with the Assistance of the Jewish National Fund,” Jewish Social Studies 49, nos. 3–4 (1987): 293–302Google Scholar. See Helman, Anat, “‘Even the Dogs in the Street Bark in Hebrew’: National Ideology and Everyday Culture in Tel-Aviv,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 92, nos. 3–4 (2002): 359–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the criticism and the role Tel Aviv played, especially during the 1920s and the 1930s.

2. Herzl's novel Altneuland (Old New Land) was translated into Hebrew by Naḥum Sokolov in 1902, the same year it was published in German. Sokolov titled the novel Tel Aviv (Hill of spring), a name that contains the past or the old (tel, “mound” or “hill”) and the future or the new (’aviv, “spring”).

3. Even though Israel is located in the Middle East, Israelis tend to view Israel as part of the West, that is, the European-American world. See Herman, Tamar and Yaar-Yuchtman, Ephraim, “A Villa in the Jungle: Israel in the Middle East as Seen by the Israeli Public” (in Hebrew), Pe'amim 125–27 (2010–11): 295–316 Google Scholar.

4. The tension between the West's exclusive approach and the possibility of pluralism is expressed, for example, in school textbooks, which referred to Tel Aviv as a European oasis in the past but currently present it as a “world city.” See Bar-Gal, Yoram, “From ‘European Oasis’ to Downtown New York: The Image of Tel-Aviv in School Textbooks,” Israel Studies 14, no. 3 (2009): 21–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. This is not the place to explore all the literary and cultural texts on the subject. Three different conspicuous literary examples are Natan Alterman's December, Tmol Shilshom (Only Yesterday) by S. Y. Agnon, and A Little City and Few Men within It by Naḥum Gutman. Literature is only one field that constructs the “mythological” Tel Aviv. Other fields include art (See Omer, Mordechai, “The Wave and the Tower: Tel Aviv in Israeli Art” [in Hebrew], in Contemporary Israeli Art [Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 2006], 37–63 Google Scholar), media coverage, economics, consumption, architecture, specific urban sites and more. In this context even the city's flat geography functions as a cultural tool. See Azaryahu, Maoz, Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Helman, Anat, Young Tel Aviv: A Tale of Two Cities (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

6. This is the case, for example, with Hebrew, which has been the official language in Tel Aviv since the 1930s, even though other languages were commonly spoken there. See Helman, “Even the Dogs,” 359–82.

7. Ram, Uri, “Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the Bifurcation of Israel,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 19, nos. 1–2 (2005): 21–33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Izhak Schnell sees Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv as a post-Zionist site that points to the city's global aspect. See Schnell, Izhak, “Sheinkin as a Place in the Globalizing City of Tel Aviv,” GeoJournal 69, no. 4 (2007): 257–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Three typical examples are In Tel-Aviv by Avraham Shlonsky and Past Continuous and Past Perfect by Yaakov Shabtai. See Soker-Schwager, Hanna, The Tribe's Wizard from Me‘onot ‘Ovdim: Yaakov Shabtai in Hebrew Culture (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2007), 199–252 Google Scholar; Mann, Barbara, “Tel Aviv's Rothschild: When a Boulevard Becomes a Monument,” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 2 (2001): 1–38 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Weichart, Rafi on Tel Aviv in Israeli poetry, “Elegy for a Drowning City” (in Hebrew), Mo'znayim 68, nos. 9–10 (1994): 87–92 Google Scholar.

9. Mann, Barbara, “Modernism and the Zionist Uncanny: Reading the Old Cemetery in Tel Aviv,” Representations 69 (2000): 63–95 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mann “Tel Aviv's Rothschild,” 1–38; Harris, Rachel, “Decay and Death: Urban Topoi in Literary Depictions of Tel-Aviv,” Israel Studies 14, no. 3 (2009): 75–93 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Georg Simmel claimed that the urban experience includes anonymity and freedom. Simmel, Georg, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Wolff, Kurt H. (1903; New York: Free Press, 1997), 409–24Google Scholar. Still, national, ethnic, gender, and class relations in the city are in a constant process of negotiation, of shifting inequality, of boundaries created and breached. See, for example, Frug, Gerald E., City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 71–91 Google Scholar, 115–42; Soja, Edward, “On the Production of Unjust Geographies,” in Seeking Social Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 31–66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goix, Renaud Le, “Gated Communities: Generic Patterns in Suburban Landscapes?,” in A City of One's Own: Blurring the Boundaries between Private and Public, ed. Body-Gendrot, Sophie et al. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 77–102 Google Scholar; Heskin, Allen David, “Ethnicity, Race, Class, and Ideology Come Together in L.A.,” Comparative Urban and Community Research 4 (2003): 133–63Google Scholar.

11. Writing about old Tel Aviv reflects, of course, on present Tel Aviv.

12. This approach obviously draws its style from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. See Walter Benjamin, “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” “Arcades,” “The Arcades of Paris,” and “The Ring of Saturn,” in The Arcades Project (1927–40; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3–26 Google Scholar, 871–92.

13. In contrast to the Hebrew literature preceding it, Israeli literature was written by native Jewish Israelis (though some, if not most, were born when Israel was called Palestina ’Ereẓ-Yisra'el). See Shaked, Gershon, “One Poet and Tries Not to Be Unusual,” in The Hebrew Literature 1880–1980, pt. 4 (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuḥad, 1993), 9–28 Google Scholar, 189–95; Miron, Dan “About the Stories of S. Yizhar,” in Four Faces in Contemporary Hebrew Literature (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1975), 386–99Google Scholar; Holzman, Avner, “The Fiction of ‘Dor Ba'aretz,’” in ’Ahavot Ẓion (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2006), 319Google Scholar; Bartov, Hanoch, “From ‘Ephraim Goes Back to the Alfalfa’ to ‘The Marker,’” in Growing and Writing in Eretz-Yisrael (Tel Aviv: Zemora Bitan, 2008) 33–46Google Scholar (all in Hebrew).

14. On the importance of “Khirbet Khize” see Miron, Dan, “Between Silence and Cry,” Dappim: Research in Literature 7 (1990): 55–94 Google Scholar; Shapira, Anita, “Khirbet Khize – Memory and Forgetfulness,” ’Alpayim 21 (2001): 9–53 Google Scholar; Mendelson-Maoz, Adia, “The End of Innocence Era: Yizhar's ‘Khirbet Khiza,’” in Literature as a Moral Lab (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2009), 93–110 Google Scholar; Laor, Yitzhak, “We Write You, Homeland (The Ripped Tongue),” in We Write You, Homeland: Essays on Hebrew Literature (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuḥad, 1995), 126–30Google Scholar (all in Hebrew). On the importance of “The Captive” see, for example, Yaffe, Avraham Binyamin, “Young Prose in Time of War,” ’Orlogin 1 (1950): 188–93Google Scholar; Shalev, Mordechai, “Confusion and Sadism,” in S. Yizhar: A Selection of Critical Essays on his Work, ed. Nagid, Haim (1950; Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 1972), 47–51 Google Scholar; Dan Miron, “Comments on Two Stories,” in Nagid, S. Yizhar: A Selection, 154–63; Vilf, Michael, “The Cry of the Villages: A Connecting Motif between ‘Khirbet Khize’ and ‘Facing the Forests,’” Mo'znayim 41, nos. 3–4 (1975): 262–65Google Scholar; Gertz, Nurit, Khirbet Khiza and the Morning After (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuḥad, 1983), 76–77 Google Scholar, 132–36; Anidjar, Gil, “Rags Man Being: on ‘The Captive’ and the Holocaust,” Theory and Criticism 21 (2002): 9–19 Google Scholar; Hever, Hannan, “Give Him Entertainers—and He Will Rest in Peace: Canonical and Popular in an Era of Occupation,” in Canonical and Popular: Literary Encounters, ed. Shapira, Yael et al. (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007), 187–88Google Scholar, 218–31 (all in Hebrew); Ezrahi, Sidra, “Fiction and Memory: Zakhor Revisited,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 4 (2007): 521–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Gur, Batya, “As the Movement of Eternity's Eyelid: Preliminaries, a Story, by S. Yizhar” (in Hebrew), in Without Skipping a Page: A Selection of Essays and Articles (Jerusalem: Keter, 2008), 335–39Google Scholar.

16. I use this term since the narrator of Preliminaries uses it when he describes the native non-Jewish inhabitants of the territory.

17. Some early stories by Yizhar are autobiographical; others concentrate on early events in his life. The best-known example is the short story “Uncle Moses's Carriage” (“Ha-kirkarah shel ha-dod Moshe”), published in 1960. Still, as a whole, there are clear differences of genre and perspective between the two phases.

18. Smilansky, Yizhar (S. Yizhar), Preliminaries, trans. De Lange, Nicholas (1992; New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2007), 43–67 Google Scholar, 92–95. I will return to this point later on.

19. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 100–145.

20. Ariana Melamed, “How Pretty It Is to Tell It Right,” Ḥadashot, March 20, 1992, 30–31; Amos Levitan, “Beautiful and Necessary,” ‘Al Ha-mishmar, April 3, 1992, 19, 21; Avraham Blat, “Returning to Childhood's Paradise Lost,” Ha-ẓofe, May 1, 1992, 6; Arieh Sivan, “Arieh Sivan on Preliminaries by S. Yizhar,” Ma‘ariv Literature and Art, June 19, 1992, 2; Zali Gurevitch, “Yizhar's Haiku,” Davar, September 4, 1992, 24 (all in Hebrew).

21. Kobi Nissim, “A Vision of the Birth of the New Jew,” ‘Al Ha-mishmar, April 10, 1992, 19; Hillel Weiss, “Yizhar Takes Revenge with the First Generation,” Ma‘ariv Literature and Art, April 23, 1992, 14; Yoḥai Oppenheimer, “Yizhar: The Post-Zionist Phase,” Davar, April 23, 1992, 25; Oren, Yosef, “S. Yizhar or: Biography as a Marketing Tool,” Nativ 34 (1993): 63–65 Google Scholar; Bartana, Orzion, “Nerves,” in Eighties: Hebrew Literature in the Last Decade (Tel Aviv: Hebrew Writers Association in Israel, 1993), 59–61 Google Scholar; Lurd, Amnon, “S. Yizhar: Narcissism and Anti-Semitism,” Nativ 72 (2000): 50–56 Google Scholar (all in Hebrew).

22. Dan Miron, “Yizhar Returns to Fiction,” Yedi‘ot ’Aḥaronot Shabbat Supplement, March 20, 1992, 22–23; Miron, “If He's Not Dead, Then He Will Live,” Yedi‘ot ’Aḥaronot Shabbat Supplement, April 3, 1992, 26–27; Shaked, Gershon, “Beautiful ’Ereẓ-Yisra'el of Words,” Literature Then and Now (Tel Aviv: Zemora Bitan, 1993), 181–99Google Scholar (all in Hebrew); Dov, Nitza Ben, “An Epic of Birth, Survival, and Growth: Preliminaries by S. Yizhar,” Hebrew Studies 52 (2011): 293–314 Google Scholar.

23. The term “space” is used in the field of human geography in relation to openness, neutrality, and emptiness. Because of these characteristics, it relates to both freedom and the vulnerability of a borderless existence. But “place” is also a center of calmness and stable norms, a defined site of human meaning that offers a sense of security. See Tuan, Yi-Fu, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 27–28 Google Scholar, 99–100; Tuan, , Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6–17 Google Scholar, 54, 179–80; Tuan, , “Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81, no. 4 (1991): 684–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. See Miron “About the Stories,” 386–99.

25. “Chronotope” is a term coined by Mikhail Bakhtin that means “time-space.” According to Bakhtin, the time-space described in literary texts influences the characters and determines their behavior. See Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258 Google Scholar.

26. Miron “About the Stories,” 386–99; Davis, Lennard, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 52–101 Google Scholar; Shaked “One Poet,” 208–14; Nevo, Gidi, Seven Days in the Negev: On “Days of Ziklag” by S. Yizhar (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me'uḥad, 2005), 21Google Scholar, 165–90, 198–230.

27. Shoham, Uri, “The Open Willow, the Closed Orchard and the Arab Village” (in Hebrew), Siman Kri’ah 3–4 (1974): 336–46Google Scholar.

28. Many scholars have claimed that space contains moral, ideological, and political issues. See, for example, Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space (1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)Google Scholar; Soja, Edward, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989; London: Verso, 1990)Google Scholar; Certeau, Michel De, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar. No less important is the role of ideology in representations of space and place. See, for example, Jackson, Peter, Maps of Meaning (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kort, Wesley A., Place and Space in Modern Fiction (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004)Google Scholar; Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995)Google Scholar; Cosgrove, Denis, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1985)Google Scholar; Cosgrove, , Mappings (London: Reaktion, 1999)Google Scholar; Dainotto, Roberto M., Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

29. The tent is described in the prologue (Liminary) (Yizhar, Preliminaries, 35–39). The plowed field appears on pp. 43–94 and the house in Rehovot on pp. 303–5.

30. Gaston Bachelard writes about the first home: “For our house is our corner of the world … it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.” Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (1958; Boston: Beacon, 1994), 4Google Scholar.

31. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 43–60.

32. See Freilich., Lea “The Father, the Son, and the Work of Memory: The Question of Genre of Preliminaries by S. Yizhar” (in Hebrew), Mikan 4 (2005): 108–27Google Scholar; Govrin, Nurit, “‘How Does a Father Put a Child on a Wasps' Nest?’—Between a Son and His Parents: a Renewed Reading in Yizhar's Writing” (in Hebrew), Dapim le-meḥkar be-sifrut 16–17 (2009): 251–93Google Scholar; Nitza Ben Dov, “An Epic Birth,” 293–314.

33. Smilansky, Yizhar, Zalhavim (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Zemora Bitan, 1993), 50Google Scholar. As Yizhar himself notes, the father figure is important. See Smilansky, Yizhar, “Saying the Finite in the Infinite” (in Hebrew), Ḥadarim 11 (1994): 225Google Scholar.

34. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 43.

35. The element of agriculture was prominent in pioneer Zionist ideology since the early twentieth century. See De-Shalit, Avner, “From the Political to the Objective: The Dialectics of Zionism and the Environment,” Environmental Politics 4, no. 1 (1995): 70–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. See Zerubavel, Yael, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 13–36 Google Scholar; Shapira, Anita, “The Myth of the New Jew” (in Hebrew), in New Jews, Old Jews (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 1997), 155–74Google Scholar; Almog, Shmuel, “Redemption in Zionist Rhetoric,” in Land Redemption in ’Ereẓ Isra'el: Idea and Action (in Hebrew), ed. Kark, Ruth (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1990), 13–32 Google Scholar; Henri Nir, “Land Redemption, Man Redemption and Pioneering in the Thought of Zionist Labor Movement—from the Second Aliyah to the Fifth (1904–1935)” (in Hebrew), in Kark, Land Redemption, 33–47.

37. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 52.

38. After the narrator is stung by a swarm of wasps, the father starts mumbling prayers even though he had abandoned the religious aspect of his identity. He also reconstructs his Jewish memory and quotes paragraphs from the Talmud. See, for example, Yizhar, Preliminaries, 66–67, 93.

39. This separation stems, of course, from an Orientalist approach, which sets up a hierarchy between the two identities. See Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978)Google Scholar.

40. The element of belonging—of delineated space turned into a place related to a certain ethnic group either physically or through cultural mechanisms—is crucial to the establishment of the nation state. See Schama, Landscape and Memory, 37–242; Olwig, Kenneth Robert, “Sexual Cosmology: Nation and Landscape at the Conceptual Interstices of Nature and Culture; or, What Does Landscape Really Mean?,” in Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, ed. Bender, Barbara (Providence, RI: Berg, 1993), 307–43Google Scholar; Jacobson, David, Place and Belonging in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

41. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 60–61. This act presents the son as a copy of his father, yet their spatial separation is, as mentioned earlier, also a separation of identities. See Weiss, Yfaat, “Local Space, Israeli Time—a Time Map” (in Hebrew), Zion 74 (2009): 373–96Google Scholar.

42. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 94.

43. It is noteworthy that through this act his identity becomes liminal.

44. This is not the place to discuss the complex relationship that evolves throughout the novel between the native narrator and his parents. Suffice it to say that the native Israeli Jewish identity in Preliminaries is pitted, on the one hand, against the traditional “exilic” Judaism embodied in the pioneer's identity and, on the other hand, against the native Arab identity. In this sense, Preliminaries obeys a common code in native Hebrew literature. See Hever, Hannan, From the Beginning: Three Essays on Native Hebrew Poetry (Tel Aviv: Keshev Le-shirah, 2008)Google Scholar. But this liminality creates a unique situation and allows the narrator to create an identity based not on exclusion but on the inclusion of both the Zionist pioneer and the Arab identities.

45. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 149–66. The strolling recalls, of course, Walter Benjamin's idea of the flaneur, the urban wanderer who roams through the city and exposes its hidden phenomenology.

46. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 158–65.

47. Young Tel Aviv was represented as a well-known site of leisure culture (Helman, Young Tel Aviv, 105–30).

48. A deep irony informs the contradiction between the neighborhood's name (neveh, “home”; shalom, “peace”) and the plot of the second chapter, where the narrator writes about the riots of 1921.

49. Sapir, Shaul, “Zerach Barnet and the Foundation of Neveh Zedek Neighborhood outside Jaffa's Walls” (in Hebrew), Ba-mikhlalah 10 (1999): 197–217 Google Scholar.

50. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 97.

51. See Miron, “Comments on Two Stories,” 264, 267, 273; Kurzweil, Baruch, “Notes for a Chapter from a New Novel by S. Yizhar,” in In Search of Hebrew Literature (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1982), 128–31Google Scholar; Shaked, Gershon, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pioneer,” ‘Akhshav 51–54 (1987): 167–68Google Scholar, 174, 180, 182; Yigal Schwartz, “From ‘Makom ’Aḥer’ to ‘Dolly City,’” Haaretz, Culture and Literature section, June 16, 1995, 1; David, Mishka Ben, From Philistia to Ziklag (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense Publications, 1990), 278–79Google Scholar (all in Hebrew).

52. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 135–38.

53. One of the most important themes in Preliminaries is gender. In an interview conducted when the novel was published, Yizhar said: “In Preliminaries there's frankness I had difficulties admitting … meaning that mom was part of belonging to all the people, dad was more intimate.” Yizhar, “Saying the Finite,” 225. This is not the place to discuss the gender theme in the novel. I will only mention Esther Fuchs's claim that Yizhar describes women as an object of passion, since their presence is limited to the private sphere. See Fuchs, Esther, “The Enemy as Woman: Fictional Women in the Literature of the Palmach,” Israel Studies 4, no. 1 (1999): 213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54. The internal tension between the construction of identity and the “natural” connection to the land is described over and over in the first chapter of Preliminaries. See for example Yizhar, Preliminaries, 43–67, 92, 105–15, 183–95.

55. Epstein, Yitzhak, “A Concealed Question” (in Hebrew), Ha-shiloach 17 (1906–7): 193–206 Google Scholar.

56. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 53–54.

57. Ze'ev Smilansky, “From Imagination to Reality” (in Hebrew), Ha-‘olam, August 28, 1908, September 11, 1908, September 18, 1908.

58. Hazan, Meir, “In Days of the Mandate: The Beginning of ‘Restraint’ in the Ha-po‘el Ha-ẓa‘ir Party in the Years 1905–1917” (in Hebrew), ‘Iyyunim bi-tekumat Yisra'el 12 (2002): 239–69Google Scholar.

59. The separation of cosmos from chaos also transforms the unknown into a part of the known territory. See Eliade, Mircea, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 6Google Scholar, 15, 34, 140–41, 151–52.

60. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 106–8.

61. And one should not forget that her fears do not only reflect an Orientalist approach, but also reflect an actual fear of the Arabs of Jaffa who attacked and killed forty-seven Jews in the riots of 1921.

62. The Freudian term unheimlich has often been translated into English as “the uncanny,” but the literal meaning “un-homely” better reflects the meaning here.

63. There is a clear analogy between the plowed field and the built neighborhood: in both cases the parents are responsible for the demarcation of the territory, and in both the outcome is an attack by the inhabitants who feel expelled from their own territory.

64. Helman, “Even the Dogs,” 362.

65. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 136.

66. Ibid.

67. The same mother, at the beginning of Preliminaries, holds her son so close that she abolishes all distance between them.

68. Mahlo, Aviva, “S. Yizhar between ‘Sketches’ and ‘Work’: New Discoveries on S. Yizhar's First Literary Experiments,” Sha'anan 12 (2007): 181–208 Google Scholar; Yeshurun, Keshet, “About S. Yizhar,” in Mashkiot: Critical Essays (Tel Aviv: Hebrew Writers Association in Israel, 1953), 251–60Google Scholar; Miron, “About the Stories,” 386–99; Byzer-Borer, Ruth, “Fiction and Reality in Yizhar's Characters’ Representations,” Biẓaron 24–25 (1985): 83–90 Google Scholar; Bartana, Orzion, “Whoso Breaketh an Hedge, a Serpent Shall Bite Him,” in End of Century and Beginning of Century (Tel Aviv: Akad, 2001), 117–23Google Scholar (all in Hebrew); Ben Dov, “An Epic Birth,” 293–314.

69. This is not to say that Yizhar dismisses the conflict with the Arabs. His attitude is somewhat reminiscent of Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridity. See Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (1994; London: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar. But unlike Bhabha, Yizhar does not negate the necessity of a territory of his own. He accepts the possibility of a hybrid identity, but this limited possibility is subordinate to his narrator's national/ethnic self-definition and necessities.

70. In Hebrew literature the sea stands in opposition to the territorial conflicts of the land. See Hever, Hannan, To the Desired Shore: The Sea in Hebrew Culture (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me'uḥad, 2007)Google Scholar.

71. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 100–101.

72. Ibid. Brenner's death symbolizes the fear of the death of both the Zionist pioneer movement and literature.

73. Simmel, “The Metropolis,” 409–24; Wirth, Louis, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74. Miron, “Yizhar Returns,” 22–23; Miron, “If He's Not Dead,” 26–27; Nissim, “A Vision,” 19; Weiss, “Yizhar Takes Revenge,” 14; Oppenheimer, “Yizhar: The Post Zionist,” 25; Alexander Barzel, “Who Are the ‘We’ Demanding Their Place during the Story,” Davar, October 1, 1993, 23; David Aran, “Following ‘Yalkut Ha-re‘im,’ ‘Mikdamot’ and ‘Post-Mortem’: On the Writers of Dor Tashaḥ and the Literature Written with the Establishment of the State,” ‘Al Ha-mishmar, November 27, 1993, 19; Shaked, “Beautiful ’Ereẓ-Isra'el,” 181–99; Zehavi, Alex, “The Seal of Light,” Dimuy 5–6 (1993): 36–37 Google Scholar; Oren, “Yizhar or Biography,” 63–65; Bartana, “Nerves,” 59–61; Lurd, “Narcissism,” 50–56 (all in Hebrew).

75. And perhaps memory functions as a possibility of self-reconciliation. That is, memory stripped of nostalgia but also stripped of the immediacy of fears and barriers that can comfort and help reconcile tensions.

76. This ideal picture touches on a deep dialectic. On the one hand, an ideology informs the father's acts in regard to the land and his existence in it. On the other hand, he strives for a normal situation in which the revolution could be replaced by an unmediated sense of belonging to the place. But this is a dangerous situation, since it does not require a deep ideological commitment to the (obvious) place. According to Gurevitch and Aran, this dialectic creates the Jewish and, later on, Israeli tension between ’Ereẓ Yisra'el as a “big place” of ideological realization and a “small place” of everyday life. Gurevitch, Zali and Aran, Gideon, “About the Place: Israeli Anthropology” (in Hebrew), ’Alpayim 4 (1991): 9–44 Google Scholar.

77. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 149–96, 199–246.

78. Hannan Hever sees the Jewish Israeli native in a conflictual position in which he embodies a new beginning yet also emphasizes his historical right over the land. See Hever, From the Beginning.

79. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 225–26.

80. Tel Nordau is also the neighborhood where the family's home is located. Again, one can see how Yizhar makes sure to place his narrator on the spatial borderline. Equally noteworthy is that strolling triggered sitting in the kiosk and the father's identity change in the third chapter.

81. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 189–91.

82. One of the remarkable and most beautiful examples is Yizhar's description of a “mighty sycamore tree” in front of the school, followed by the building's history since the narrator's childhood (Yizhar, Preliminaries, 152).

83. This is also the fear that the Arab presence would disappear following the expansion of Tel Aviv. This disappearance could be seen as planned (see, for example, LeVine, Mark, “Conquest through Town Planning: The Case of Tel Aviv, 1921–48,” Journal of Palestine Studies 27, no. 4 [1998]: 36–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar), though this seems to me a reductionist claim that dismisses the internal and external dynamics of the relationship between Jews and Arabs during this period, as well as the phenomenological experience of Jews living in Tel Aviv and the existential aspect Yizhar is referring to.

84. Yizhar, Preliminaries, 222–26.

85. This complexity led numerous critics and researchers to different conclusions regarding the novel and its genre. See Shaked, “Beautiful ’Ereẓ-Yisra'el,” 181–87; Miron, “If He's Not Dead,” 26–27; Barzilay, Yitzhak, “The Roots of S. Yizhar,” Ha-do'ar 72, no. 3 (1992): 22Google Scholar; Freilich, “The Father,” 108–27 (all in Hebrew). On this complexity see Eakin, Paul, How Our Lives Become Stories (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, Eakin, , Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 213–26Google Scholar.

86. See for example Barthes, Roland, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (New York: Moonday, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87. Barthes, Roland, “To Write: Intransitive Verb?,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Macksey, Richard and Donato, Eugenio (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 134–45Google Scholar and especially p. 143; Vulcan, Daphna Erdinast, “The I That Tells Itself: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Narrative Identity,” Narrative 16, no. 1 (2008): 1–15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88. This sense is particularly keen in Yizhar's description of the Purim masquerade and of the fear it arouses in the narrator.

89. Thus Yizhar returns eventually to the possibility of a harmonious home similar to the half-transparent sheets of the orange tent in the novel's prologue.