The boxes from Tel Aviv arrive at Stanford University every few months. And when they do, Zachary Baker can’t wait to see the treasures inside.
One contained the certificate of purchase for what would become the Egged bus terminal. In another, a 1929 poster announcing (in Hebrew) the opening of a new Rin-Tin-Tin movie.
As curator of the Judaica and Hebraica collections at Stanford, Baker never tires of receiving materials by the boxful from Eliasaf Robinson, a leading Tel Aviv bookseller and antiquarian.
Robinson’s collection, which stretches back to the founding of Tel Aviv 100 years ago, forms the basis of “The First Hebrew City,” a new exhibition saluting Tel Aviv’s centennial and on display at Stanford’s Green Library from April 23 through the summer. The exhibition is co-sponsored by the Israel Center.
Baker notes that the Robinson family has been amassing Tel Aviv memorabilia for four generations. “He has very good connections,” he says of Eliasaf Robinson. “You walk into his store in Tel Aviv and you see all kinds of curiosities: posters, photographs, even a Hebrew version of ‘The Swiss Family Robinson.’ ”
A few years ago, with funding assistance from the Koret Foundation and the S.F.-based Jewish Community Endowment Fund, Baker sealed a deal whereby Stanford receives from Robinson a steady stream of documents, photographs and ephemera, most from before 1948 and the founding of modern Israel.
What constitutes ephemera? Let’s just say one man’s dumpster leavings is another man’s ephemera.
Baker culled several choice items from the collection to put on display. Among them: a late 1920s poster advertising a “Great Clearance Sale” at Jaffa retailer M. Schonberg & Son; a socialist tract from 1930 decrying Tel Aviv’s neglect of its poorer citizens; a vintage postcard depicting a tree-lined Herzl Street, a horse-drawn carriage parked in the sand.
Then there’s the 1936 official announcement of the funeral arrangements for Tel Aviv Mayor Meir Dizengoff, whose surname graces the city’s most famous boulevard.
An underlying theme for the collection could be “Tel Aviv: Boomtown.” Baker says the display reflects “the growth of Tel Aviv through the business establishments and the civic institutions created by the founders, who were largely businesspeople.
‘There’s an awful lot that represents the business enterprises — retail, wholesale, industrial — and that shows people were creating a modern consumer culture.”
To underscore the point, Baker includes in the exhibition a 1910 list of the members of the Tel Aviv town council, scrawled on the back of a business receipt.
Baker also put on display two huge, bound volumes containing the original plans for Tel Aviv’s first sewer system.
“They had used septic tanks,” Baker says. “You had these beautiful Bauhaus buildings, but no pipes. These diagrams indicated, street by street, where they were going to be installing [sewers].”
Per the agreement between Stanford and Robinson, Baker has begun digitizing much of the collection, and will soon make it available for all to see on a Web site. Until then, visitors can see the real thing at the Green Library exhibition.
From these materials, what can one infer about the pioneers that built modern Tel Aviv? Baker says the collection shows they were both idealistic and practical.
“You can build the Emerald City,” he says, “but it won’t work unless there are streets, a municipal government, a town council, police and firefighters — and sewers.”
“The First Hebrew City: Early Tel Aviv Through the Eyes of the Eliasaf Robinson Collection” is on display beginning April 23 at the Green Library, Stanford University. For more information: (650) 725-1054 or library.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/jewish/jewish.html.