Touring in Tel Aviv with Reyna and Maura... and Liat

As a family we have family stuff to take care of- grocery shopping, touring with Reyna- who makes travel so much easier since we now have a translator. 

we ate at a great brunch place, went to a great grocery store and returned home. 

On Monday we took a walk and met up with Liat.  She recommended we go to the Chaim Bialik house;  Bialik is the Israeli National Poet. A home was built for him in the 1920s in Tel Aviv on a street that now bears his name; His home has been preserved as a museum and is around the corner from where we live.

The home is beautiful; a true Bauhaus, beautifully decorated.

here is what I read about Bialik:  Chaim Nachman Bialik, combined in a unique way his own wish for love and understanding and his people’s desire for a homeland.

He was born in the Ukraine in 1873, and died in Vienna, Austria on July 4, 1934, following surgery. Fatherless at the age of seven, Bialik received an Orthodox Jewish education. In his youth he studied at the Volozhin Yeshiva in Belarus, while leaning toward the enlightenment movement, an attraction that led him to move to Odessa at the age of eighteen. There he devoted himself to studying Russian and German, and the reading of secular literature. Two years later he married, working for a living as a Hebrew teacher, and a coal dealer, for a decade.

In 1901 Bialik’s first book of poems was published in Warsaw, where he lived from 1903-1905, editing the journal Shiloah, and later founding the Moriah publishing house for classic Hebrew textbooks. In 1904 and 1908 he visited Palestine. Throughout these years Bialik turned increasingly to writing and translating, publishing in Hebrew works from the European literary canon: the poetry of Heine, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In 1921 he founded the Dvir publishing house in Berlin and moved to Tel Aviv three years later, where he occupied himself with cultural activities and other public works.

Ever since that time, to this very day, Bialik has been considered the foremost modern Hebrew poet. His poetic oeuvre is small, but broad in its themes: Bialik often depicted the suffering of his people, but to his contemporary readers he offered mainly a direct approach to doubt, desire and the isolation of human existence. In contrast to his lyric and epic poetry, his stories excel at their movingly realistic descriptions, often touched with humor, and characterized by their author’s rich imagination, and a blend of joy in the every day with the sorrows of life.













We also toured the City of Tel Aviv museum in the old city hall.  This building is just a block from the Bialik house. 




Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 by a group of 136 families. within just a few years the growth was over 100,000 people.  Tel Aviv was always a cosmopolitan and very European city; the people who settled the city were transplants from western Europe seeking to live in a community with many of the cultural and educational enjoyments of living in Europe.