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wreck than a sculpture, and the
second, the infamous Fire and
Water eyesore, known none too
fondly by some as "the revolving
wedding cake."
It all started back in 1934,
when the city council decided to
honor Tel Aviv's first (and, at that
time, still-serving) mayor, Meir
Dizengoff, by renaming Street
187 after him. In 1938 the square
was built as a lovely street-level
plaza with a garden and a mod-
est fountain in the middle, and
named after the mayor's wife,
Zena Dizengoff.
The 1940s saw the blossoming
of the cafe culture. This was the
era in which Dizengoff was occa-
sionally likened to Paris' Left
Bank.
"The side of the street on
which Kassit sits [the western
side] became Tel Aviv's prome-
nade," recalls Dunevich. "Most
people lived in small apartments,
even one-room apartments, and
there wasn't any air condition-
ing, of course. An evening's en-
tertainment in the summer was
to sit outside, on the beach or on
Dizengoff Dizengoff belonged
to everybody."
The heart of Dizengoff was the
small section between Frishman
Street and what is today Ben-Gu-
rion Boulevard (then Keren
Kayemet), but the "heart of the
heart" was, of course, Kassit.
Today, Kassit is an unre-
markable eatery featuring the
same menu found at any of Tel

Businesses may not
be able to wait.

H

Aviv's many unremarkable
eateries. The yellow awning is
dirty and crooked, the mural on
the back wall, featuring many of
the cafe's former patrons, a sad
reminder of the influential fig-
ures who once frequented its
small tables.
But back "then," during that
fuzzily defined period in the '40s,
`50s and '60s in which it ruled the
scene, Kassit was the center of
Tel Aviv's universe, and its own-
er, the legendary Hatzkel, a mi-
nor deity.
Famous for feeding actors and
writers who didn't have an ago-
ra (penny) to their names,
Hatzkel also provided his crowd
with what was, in those days of
national poverty, an incompara-
ble luxury: sausages.
"On long Kassit nights," writes
Shlomo Shva in the 1989 book A
City Rises, as if he were watch-
ing the scene unfold before him,
"Alterman drinks glass after
glass, surrounded by fans and fol-
lowers, and Hatzkel sees to it
that those sitting in his cafe are
content ... [Poet] Alexander Pen
and his gang find their own cor-
ner and drink as if it were a reli-

gion And there goes Avot
Yeshurun, passing the cafe
quickly, looking inside and mov-
ing on, because the waiters have
insulted him ... and the regulars
do much to pacify him and bring
him back into the cafe ...
"And Moshe Dayan, then the
chief of staff, would come to Kas-
sit in the wee small hours of the
night during the 1950s ... in or-
der to meet Alterman, to report
to him or hear what he had to
say, and have a cup of tea."
Tel Aviv native son Mordechai
Arieli, lecturer in the sociology of
education at Tel Aviv Universi-
ty and former Kassit regular, was
a young boy when the state was
established. That same year, his
family moved to an apartment
one block off Dizengoff.
"I felt proud to live so close," he
remembers with a smile.
Arieli entered the Kassit cir-
cle as a teenage poet, was quick-
ly drawn into the group around
Pen, and got to know a number
of younger writers, such as the
now-classic Natan Zach and
David Avidan.
"I developed a habit: If I wasn't
out with a girl, I would go to Kas-
sit, or to [rival cafe] Kan-Kan."
Hazel Arieli, Mordechai's ex-
wife, met the young poet in 1959
and joined the cafe scene.
"You know, it didn't look any-
thing special," she says, referring
to the simple tables and chairs
crammed into the tiny space that
was Kassit. "People would sit and
wait for Alexander Pen, drinking
and reminiscing and then when
he would arrive — it was as if the
sun had come out!"
At the time, Mordechai Arieli
says, each of Dizengoffs cafes
served a different sector of the
population. "There was Pinati
[which still exists, on the corner
of Frishman], where the soldiers
who fought in the War of Inde-
pendence would sit — not the in-
tellectuals, the younger people.
It was always very busy, very
hard to find a place. Across the
street was Ditza, the chess play-
ers' cafe.
"Three buildings north of Kas-
sit was Beitan, which became
great in the late '50s and early
`60s. Yonatan Ratosh [father of
the Canaanite Movement which
tried to create a non-Jewish Is-
raeli culture] would sit there
every day, drinking hard liquor
and eating an egg. We argued
once, and he dumped his glass of
cognac here," Arieli points down
the collar of his shirt, grinning.
"I don't even remember what it
was about!"
He fondly recalls Royal — to-
day a messy store crammed with
toiletries, T-shirts and kitchen-
ware — as home to "the city's
bourgeois, and in the afternoons,
middle-class women who didn't
work. I remember some of those
women as the best-groomed
you'd ever see! The whole concept

FADED DREAMS page 100

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"I low To Veep
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With Sunie Levin, author of
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Thursday, July 31, 1997
7:30 P.M.
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Maple/Drake Building

There is no charge for this program.
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Please call (248) 661-7649 to register for this program.

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