ABSTRACT
The knowledge of cities is a decoding of their images, ones uttered thoughtlessly, as if in a dream. Spatial images are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image are deciphered, there the basis of social reality presents itself. In Yeshurun Keshet's writings, the cafe emerges as a kind of Jewish urban space' but also as a place whose 'regulars' are a cultural elite full of decadence, smoke, and the syncopated rhythm of the metropolis'. The narrative poems enabled the Hebrew and Yiddish poets to create spatial images and explore topographies of Berlin, as well as to successfully engage diverse and competing modernist artistic and poetic trends which they encountered in Berlin The suspicion and doubt that existence in the pension elicits are closely related to illicit sexuality and the elusive presence of the female body, which appear in these works as another example of visual surface that requires deciphering.
