It certainly rivals them in diversity. An east African bride makes her way, accompanied by her violet-clad bridesmaids, among makeshift stalls offering everything from second hand shoes to pots and pans and from statuettes of the Virgin to stereo systems and boxing gloves. Bustling eateries offer Chinese dim sum, Eritrean injiras and plenty of Israeli and foreign beer.
This is Tel-Aviv's International quarter, but is not known as such formally, nor even commonly. Israel itself is greatly in denial of its growing population of refugees which number over 30,000 within its boundaries, and of work immigrants who overstayed their work permits, which number over 90,000.
Gaining a legal status or even asylum is nearly impossible. Of 856 asylum requests filed in 2009, Israel approved only 2. A special policing force named the Bravery Unit was formed to deal with work immigrants who overstay their official welcome. The authorities treat these two populations with a bureaucratic hostility that sifts down to the public at large. It often transcends bureaucracy and leads to prison terms and to deportations. Recently, Israel began deporting hundreds of children born on this soil to members of the two groups.
Not everyone, however, feels this threatened. It is left for grassroots organizations to offer a welcome and a helping hand—sometimes a practical helping hand, sometimes a symbolic one. In one case merging the practical and symbolic, Jewish history may have made another appearance. The volunteers, bred in a culture which holds education and the written word in the highest esteem, chose to offer the neighborhood's population a library, and a fairly atypical one at that.
Architect Yoav Meiri set up home and office in this neighborhood sixteen years ago and has known up and downs since. During the course of a more difficult spell he even contemplated career change "I asked myself what else I would have liked to be, and realized that I always wanted to be a librarian," he recounts. "While looking into it I realized that the neighborhood had none. It has no library, no community center, nor any real public building. I started asking myself why that is and realized that there really is no public in this neighborhood, not anything that has the rights of a public. There are people here but not a public."
The tiny library is a sight to behold. Set in the middle of the populous park, it is frequented on this afternoon by more than a handful of children. The kids are sprawled on wooden inner surface of their bookcase, playing chess and checkers, reading and drawing.
Then, local performance artist Hadas Ofrat came to him early in 2009 in search of new ideas. Ofrat represented a task force named "Artim" that set out to find educational and artistic solutions for social matters and which featured also artists Romi Ahituv and Marit Ben Israel and curator Tali Tamir. Meiri spoke of a library and the idea was embraced.
The city offered help and proposed locations inside the bus terminal itself, a labyrinthine leviathan featuring over 1,000 commercial spaces, many of which are vacant due to the terminal's dysfunctional qualities both as a shopping mall and as a bus depot. Meiri opted for the open air. Across from the terminal is Levinsky Park, a true hub for the borough's various communities. Rather than placing a new structure in the park and distracting its flow, he drafted an open-air library that has neither walls nor roof. Indeed, it can be said to be made up mostly of the books themselves.
Two steel bookcases were placed across from one another in the gap separating two low existing structures—bomb shelters intended to serve the population during a possible air strike. One of the bookcases is taller and holds books for grown-ups. The other is sorter and holds children's books. When the library is closed, both are shut with firm lids. When it is open, the adult bookcase's lid is stretched above the gap between the cases, offering a shading pergola. Since it is made up of steel bars shielding panes of glass, the overstretched lid reflects the ribbed pergolas of the city's famous Bauhaus buildings.
The lid of the kiddie's bookcase opens towards the ground. Padded with cushions, it then offers sitting room for young readers. In effect, the library only exists when it is open to the public, and even then it is fully part of the park itself, allowing free access for all who wish to pass through it or visit it.
The books themselves were donated through the joint efforts of bookshop owners, embassy employees, friends and neighbors. The library contains over 2,500 volumes in Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, English, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Mandarin, Nepalese, Romanian, Spanish, Tagalog and Thai. The children's section is far richer with Hebrew books.
Coming in from the boxing gloves and bridesmaids gowns of Neve Shaanan St., the tiny library is a sight to behold. Set in the middle of the populous park, it is frequented on this afternoon by more than a handful of children. Nearly all are of African, Indian or otherwise of foreign origin, but nearly all speak Hebrew among them. The kids are sprawled on wooden inner surface of their bookcase, playing chess and checkers, reading and drawing.
Waterman came upon the position by being the artist-in-residence at the bomb shelter. The city offers these shelters as studios for artists at time of peace, and volunteering with the initiative seemed like a good way to give back. Planned activities, many of which are proposed and organized by a number of independent volunteers, include a screening of Disney's "Lion King" on a screen stretched over the adult bookcase's lid.
That bookcase is busy as well. Ted, an Eritrean, came here in search of a novel in Amharic of which he had heard a fond radio review. The novel, "To long till Death", isn't present among the library's several-dozen books in this language, but the search led Ted to pile three other books and he's heading with them to the makeshift librarian's counter.
In Meiri's studio, a mere three-minute walk from the library's bustle, he praises the park itself as a superb hub for the various communities and explains the project's intentions of merging with it, drawing on its energies and adding to them. I ask him whether he knows of precedents to the project's various innovations. While he is confident that such things do exist elsewhere, Meiri can't recall another open air library nor another structure that comes into existence only by virtue of being active.
Does the choice of an open-air structure relate to a claustrophobia of which this community suffers? After all, they are being hunted, and often are kept in custody.
Architecture deals a lot with boundaries: the boundary between interior and exterior, physical boundaries and mental boundaries. We thought that psychologically, if we intend to turn to a public that could be paranoid, a public that is wary of security guards, of doors that close behind one's back and of anything having to do with the establishment, having the library be in itself an open public space would be a way to overcome such difficulties. We doubted that our audience will not come into an enclosed space for political and social reasons.
And you did not worry that it wouldn't end up being an actual library?
Once you perform an unconventional move, and this one is unconventional in several respects, you assume that you'd have to put together an unconventional program of action for the place, and the program of action for this place is indeed very unconventional and very dynamic. There are activities taking place there that aren't typical to a library. There are people who come to borrow books, and there are kids who hang out there to pass the time, and that's perfectly fine. The library answers to very diverse needs and it is meant to provide this flexibility.
One important aspect of the project is its very temporality. It looks like something temporary and it is indeed a temporary structure. I can show you photos of how it was brought to the site on a truck, all ready to use, and lowered by a crane. We drilled holes and bolted it to the ground. It is a mobile structure in the full sense of the word. I can lift it up now complete with the books and within an hour you wouldn't know that there was ever a library there.
But maybe by constructing something that isn't temporary you could have made a different statement: that the people are not temporary, that they're here for the long haul.
I see the transitory populations as a legitimate part of the city. Some areas are given to strong currents of gentrification and it is possible that this international quarter as you call it will drift away from here. The library will then drift with it. In its current state it can also grow. We are currently discussing using a nearby space to create an extension.
Then again, the temporality is also a statement—one that has to do with such dynamic areas that constantly change. We state that there is no need to wait for things to be set in stone, as far as legal status for example, in order to answer cultural needs. We must act in this very fluid reality. I don't think that viewing this as a stable place, or one that maintains steady characteristics over the long run is necessarily optimism. I like this sense of change and the library is very likely to change as well.
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