Free Verse And A Good Cappuccino

By day, The Little Prince’s habitués unfold laptops on antique desks, and by night they stretch out with a beloved volume and read and gossip until the wee hours.
Photos by Joshua Mitnick

By day, The Little Prince’s habitués unfold laptops on antique desks, and by night they stretch out with a beloved volume and read and gossip until the wee hours. Photos by Joshua Mitnick

by Joshua mitnick
Israel Correspondent

Tel Aviv — Situated on a hidden cul de sac just off the grunge of King George Street’s second-hand clothing and antique shops, walls of used books and a leaf-canopied outer deck make The Little Prince an island of serenity amid the cacophony of central Tel Aviv.

Part used bookstore, part literary workshop and part café, the Little Prince, or HaNasich Hakatan in Hebrew, named after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s charming 1943 children’s book, has become a salon for Tel Aviv’s young bohemian literati. By day, the café’s regular habitués unfold laptops on antique desks, and by night they stretch out with a beloved volume and read and gossip into the wee hours of the morning.
“You can sit with one cappuccino and work the entire day and they won’t bug you to order [more]. If you’re here a lot, you’re less alone,” said Yanai Pery, a comic strip artist who says he can be found here when not at his day job creating strips for the Maariv newspaper. Pointing around the cozy café, he says, “This person is working on a novel, and that other one is working on a screenplay, and they all bring their friends.”

Next to volumes of Jewish poets Shaul Tchernichovsky and Shlomo Ibn Gvirol, one can also find the pocket-sized literary journals published by a generation of young poets who call the café home.
A couple of the leading lights who make their homes at The Little Prince home are Yehuda Vizan and Oded Karmeli, both 24, who co-founded the Tel Aviv Poetry Festival as well as the literary journal Stain - The Journal of Daily Poetry. Shlomo Kraus, who published the literary journal Plonit and who was selected by Yediot Achronot as one of the leading figures on the Tel Aviv poetry scene, also can be found at the bookstore-café.

“The Little Prince is the center of the new renaissance in Hebrew poetry,” said Roy Arad, who started the poetry journal Maayan. “For 25 years poetry was dead; now it’s become the hottest art in Israel.

“Instead of forming punk or hip-hop bands, kids are turning to poetry and are publishing poetry magazines or fanzines,” Arad, himself a poet, continued. “The core of this movement is at the Little Prince,” where, he said, groups of poets “fight” over philosophy, content and style, and hook up in relationships.

Arad has published the poetry anthology “Aduma” or “Red,” celebrating socialism, as well as another, “Latzet,” or “Get Out,’ which contains works calling on the government to pull troops out of the Gaza Strip. Other journals represent divergent ideologies that prevail on the political left, he said. Arad’s main criticism of the new movement is that it has yet to find its own defining language.

“The barmen and the workers are sometimes poets themselves,” Arad said of The Little Prince’s staff. “We sell Maayan there very successfully. And young people come from all over Israel to see the young poets arguing or talking.

The high-ceilinged café, which has aged wood floors, is housed on the ground floor of a building from the 1920s. In previous incarnations the space served as an art gallery and a vintage clothing boutique.
Even before The Little Prince opened three years ago, neighbors say, there was a buzz that the new café would become the new Kasit, the Dizengoff Street café that serviced the founding generation of intellectuals in the first Hebrew city.

The Little Prince’s proprietor, Naim Cohen, was known in the neighborhood even before he opened his current store. At the tender age of 19 the stamp and antique collector’s son opened a used bookstore just a few storefronts down from The Little Prince’s current perch on King George Street. Opening up The Little Prince is part Cohen’s vision to fuse used books with a café-cultural center.

“The world of second-hand books is a world unto itself,” said Cohen before a patron interrupts with a question about the location of a book of the poetry of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi. “There’s nowhere you can go to learn about the value of second-hand books.”

Cohen says he’s still trying to add a lineup of cultural events, and he admits that many book seekers are put off by having to search for volumes in the work space of other patrons. But it’s the atmosphere of openness that draws people here.

“There’s an atmosphere of welcoming everyone happily,” he said.

In one corner, the café’s “parliament,” a triumvirate of older patrons, gives a running commentary on the young patrons’ latest works and career moves. Elsewhere a soldier, on break from reserve duty in Hebron, recommends an “essential” novel by the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury. At the tables, patrons exchange gossip, in a time-honored literary tradition, about who is sleeping with whom.

Oren Gerstein, a 32-year-old social work student who rides 10 minutes from his Jaffa apartment to work in central Tel Aviv, says that unlike the “industrial” café chains spread throughout the city, The Little Prince has “soul” and compares it to New York’s Strand Book Store.

“It’s like a university library but without the rules of having to be quiet,” he said. “It’s a friendly place. I’ve never sat here alone and not talked to somebody.”

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