Writing a Home, Reading a Town: Three Novels about Bat Yam

Abstract

According to French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, spaces of stability in human experience are those from the childhood home, where memory and the unconscious reside. However, what if these spaces are remembered from the childhood home of second-generation immigrants in an overcrowded and stigmatized Jewish-Israeli town? Does home under such circumstances function as a space of stability? And what of the town that surrounds the home, is that a stable space or one that destabilizes? This article examines the relationship between domestic and urban spaces in three Israeli novels written over the past decade featuring protagonists who grew up during the 1970s in Bat Yam, an immigrant town. The descriptions of home take us from the spaces of the characters’ childhood, created by people who have been torn away from their native land, to their present homes in a city which is about to undergo a massive urban renewal project. Using Gabriel Zoran’s three-dimensional model, the article examines urban re-construction and considers whether the three novels favor demolition and renewal over urban preservation. The analysis of spatial representation here facilitates an understanding of how the urban environment is imagined and the interrelationship between urban and literary studies.