What is a cigarette? "On one side - fire, on the other side - a fool, and in the middle - dry grass". This is one of the many Hebrew linguistic jokes and neologisms coined by the national poet Hayim Nahman Bialik (which is also rhymed in Hebrew).
Bialik's poetry for children is known to every child in Israel, and is a remnant of a time when poems for children were mainly nature songs, game songs, lullabies, songs of experience and songs of Jewish tradition and manner.
Today, the nature's place has been taken by the child's consciousness and mind, and while old songs describe how the world looks to the child, contemporary songs describe how the child is portrayed in his own eyes, as he displays his personality for a show.
Bialik – a poet, essayist, novelist, translator and editor – was born in 1873 in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) and lived in Odessa. In 1921, following the personal intervention of Russian writer Maxim Gorky and a special order of Lenin, he was given permission to leave the Soviet Union. He relocated to Berlin, where he published books in Hebrew, and among other things established a publishing house of Hebrew children's books with the painter and children's writer Tom Zeidman Freud, Sigmund Freud's niece.In 1924 Bialik moved to Eretz-Israel. The house built for him in Tel-Aviv by architect Yosef Minor, was built in an eclectic style - the style prevalent in the 20th in Tel-Aviv: The rear balcony's arches are styled as the arches of the Doge's Palace in Venice, the living room is styled like a European synagogue and the eastern scent is provided by the dome and the front wooden balcony.
Bialik initially opposed construction of a balcony at the front of the building, but the architect insisted on building it, claiming that "a house without a front balcony is like a face without a nose".
Around the house a garden was planted, containing plants characteristic of different regions in Eretz-Israel, including Four Species (palm, myrtle, willow and etrog – a kind of citron tree) and Seven Species (wheat, barley, grapevine, fig, pomegranate, olive and date), and soon the house was the center of the literary and cultural life in Tel-Aviv.
After Bialik's death in 1934, his widow Mania kept living in the unique house, and in 1937 she donated it to the municipality of Tel-Aviv.
Today Bialik House serves as a museum and a meeting place for cultural and literary events. It displays paintings and sculptures of the poet made by Israeli artists, as well as a large clock hourly playing the Israeli anthem - Hatikva, original manuscripts of the works of Bialik, and a large collection of letters written by children to the poet.
On the entrance floor there are ceramic tiles made in Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, describing the twelve spies Bible story, the twelve tribes of Israel and the Ark of the Covenant.
When the child Hayim Nahman imagined to himself the distant Eretz-Israel, as hearing the stories of his parents about the promised land, he might imagined scenes like those on the ceramic tiles inside the house, but he surely did not imagine that this would be the external look of his "eclectic" Tel-Aviv home.
