I first heard Teddy Kollek‘s name, when I visited Jerusalem in 1993, the year he retired from being the mayor of the city after 28 years. Up till reading Ruth Bachi-Kolodny‘s Teddy Kollek. The Man, His Times and His Jerusalem book I didn’t know much more about him, besides that he was a “larger than life” figure. Bachi-Kolodny’s book filled most of the gap in my knowledge. This book is a translation of the extended version of a previous book by the same author, that she wrote in 1995 for the Israeli Ministry of Defense. This is important because she clearly had access to confidential archives. The kind of resources she quoted and summarized are impressive and I suspect some of them would not have been available to her without cooperation from the government. Unfortunately this cooperat6ion also resulted in a work that often has the feel of propganada.
Kollek’s passing away in 2007 gave an opportunity for Bachi-Kolodny to (re-)write the biography covering his whole life. The book’s 200 pages now contains 33 chapters, most of them 3-5 pages long. These short chapters lend good structure for a life so complex. Each chapters with one political situation after the other. That is my biggest complain: The book deals almost exclusively with Kollek’s work and we learn very little about his personal life. I understand that for a public figure this is important, but I was hoping for a more well rounded biography. I guess though that I should have suspected this orientation from the subtitle (The man, his times and his Jerusalem). It also felt out of focus for me that there were 3-4page long segments where background informations were given with no mention of Kollek. Again, these segments gave an overview of the relevant history and introduced Kollek’s role in them, but would have preferred more of the latter.
I was also disappointed that only positive aspects of him were mentioned. Surely, he was not a superhuman, but you would know it from this book. Readers of the book are hammered over and over with the description of how charming he was, how well he built and used his social capital, how well he could drink, how well he could intuited the future and how well he served his country. I have no doubt these were all true, but surely there was more to him.
Having said the above I admit that I enjoyed the history book. Had I approached it from the beginning as such it would have even better for me. It was simple, straightforward, and informative.
The 16 pages with approximately 40 black and white photographs, the comprehensive bibliography and index at the end. The half dozen copies of documents throughout the book added to the usefulness a book great deal.