barbara mann – Lavender's Blue

Scion of Sion

“Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure, because You will not abandon me to the grave, nor will You let your Holy One see decay. You have made known to me the path of life; You will find me with joy in Your presence, with eternal pleasures at Your right hand.” Psalm 16:9 to 11

Every ridiculously smart place has one. Paris possesses Père Lachaise. Buenos Aires revels in Recoleta. Savannah boasts Bonaventure. Newtownstewart, Pubble. Tel Aviv trumps them all with Trumpeldor. A stylish resting place steeped in sublime presence and subliminal absence. A three dimensional requiem. An architectural danse macabre. A spectral spectacle. A necropolis in the metropolis. Amazing mausolea. A sepulchral sculpture garden imbued with meaning and nostalgia.

Trumpeldor Cemetery was established by Jewish settlers on empty land in 1902. Jerusalem stone on stone on stone. Today, it is surrounded by downtown Tel Aviv. The cemetery is named after Joseph Trumpeldor, a Zionist originally from Pyatigorsk in Russia who died in 1920. Noa Tishby lionises him in Israel: The Most Misunderstood Country on Earth (2021) as “a decorated Russian military war hero and former POW in Japan … a Jewish Russian idealist.” Joseph Trumpeldor’s biographer Pesah Lipovetzky eulogises in his biography (1953), “He fought for the establishment in the Holy Land of a free society of Jewish workers, and in defending the frontiers of his country met his untimely death.” The cemetery is the burial place of Hayim Nahman Bialik. His 1996 poem After My Death contains the lines: “There was a man – and look he is no more. He died before his time. The music of his life suddenly stopped. A pity! There was another song in him. Not now it is lost forever.”

In Decay and Death: Urban Topoi in Literary Depictions of Tel Aviv, an essay in Tel Aviv The First Century: Visions, Designs, Actualities edited by Maoz Azaryahu (2012), Rachel Harris compares the city that never sleeps with the eternal rest: “The narrative of Tel Aviv as the White City with new, modern buildings contrasts with the decay of the city – through the image of death. Death takes two forms: that of the city and that of individuals. Death is represented in the city by its cemeteries. Shabtai’s novel and Amos Gitai’s adaptation Devarim open with a surreal hunt through the city’s graveyards to find Goldman’s father’s funeral.” Historian Barbara Mann writing in A Place in History (2006) views any cemetery as “a mnemonic space through which the visitor moves and activates images linked to a collective memory.”

“Madame de Valhubert died suddenly the very day she was to have left Bellandargues for Paris,” writes Nancy Mitford in The Blessing (1951), adding with a sparkle of graveyard humour, “She made the journey all the same, and was buried in the family grave at the Père Lachaise.”