Where did the question words go?

The poem KEN LATZIPOR (A Nest For the Bird) performed by Noga

Children literature, like any literature, is a mirror that clearly reflects social and cultural transformations. Looking at Israeli children literature one can see a substantial reduction of issues: While Bialik's Poems and Songs for Children contains poems about nature – such as A Nest for the Bird (KEN LATZIPOR), game songs, lullabies – such as Lay Down, My Toddler, character songs, experience songs and poems of Jewish tradition and folklore – such as For Shabbat, in the children songs of Yehonatan Gefen, Hagit Benziman and Yehuda Atlas it is difficult to find "sun", "wind" and "trees" and if one finds such objects they are all subjected to the condition of child,  the hero of the song.

If the old songs can be defined as describing "how the world looks to the child", the songs these days can be defined as describing how the child, showing off his personality and wishing to sketch his self-portrait, appears in the world. Hence the change in the status of objects such as "games", "toys" or "aunts" and "uncles". In post-modern children songs they all serve the same goal – exposing fundamental features and typical situations of the child's consciousness.

The language and the style of songs for children have changed as well. While in Bialik's songs there are Aramaic phrases and flowery phrases like "hush lest thou awake" (HAS PEN TA'IR), in songs today the language has been lowered as if it strives to a complete identification with the natural language of children: simple and often incorrect.

In current children literature personification and animation – meaning, ascribing human attributes and skills to figures of still objects, plants and animals – are very rare. The question words "what", "who" and "where", which Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky and Ya'akov Fichman frequently used for dramatization – disappeared, replaced by the abundant "why" word – either as a rhetorical question in the framework of a "personal confession" by the child speaker or in order to expose the parents' weaknesses.

In classic children songs there is an emphasis on pathos and drama and  on the child's confusion in front of the world. In post-modern songs the child is presented as smart, knowledgeable, confident and as one who allows himself or herself to criticize the elderly. The topics of post-modern songs are daily life, not top of world affairs, and such matters are "natural" to be commented by a child's opinion.

In The Fleece Festival (HAG HAGEZ) by Anda Pinkerfeld-Amir's from the 30's, we read: "In Tel-Yoseph everyone is glad" – so the emphasis is on the whole, the collective. Children poems nowadays emphasize individualism and difference.

In Miriam Yalan-Shteklis' Michael and Alone (LEVADI) from the late 50s' - there is no God and nature. There are only dolls and bears, lifeless and without a response. Alienation. The poetess has already lost faith in God, but still there is a searching for other people to conduct life together.

Later, the inner spiritual mantel content of Man is going lost and he is willingly enslaved to the sensory stimuli. There is no real conversation. Everyone listens to himself or herself or trying to enforce his or her opinion. So are, for example, the songs by Ayin Hillel (Hillel Omer) about a talk between two girls, in which each of them relates only to herself at that moment, without communication, and the song expressing the certainty of each part of clothing hanging on the clothesline to dry that just for him the sun is shining.

An extreme example of this shift in children literature is the song Lights Out (KIBUY OROT) by Moshe Oren:

Some people sleep
with butt to the wall,
some sleep with face,
and some can not decide
and constantly change phase.

The house at 22 Bialik street

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.