Kofiko’s comeback

At 60, the children’s book series is nowhere near retiring.

By RUTI KADOSH
Haya Weizman and her daughter Michal with Kofiko. (photo credit: YORAM BARAK)
Haya Weizman and her daughter Michal with Kofiko.
(photo credit: YORAM BARAK)
Kofiko, the star of the legendary children’s book series, is celebrating his 60th birthday.
Although he’s turning 60, he’s still running around and being mischievous. The thing is, he’s not a real boy – but a monkey. Well, not a real monkey, but a character called Kofiko.
There’s probably hardly anyone who grew up in Israel and didn’t read – or more accurately, devour – the more than 160 books in the Kofiko series when he or she was a child.
The tireless monkey, the brainchild of Tamar Bornstein-Lazar, claims to have come from a fictional African country called Hontoza, and arrived directly into the lives of the Lazar family of Petah Tikva. From his first moment there, he has been driving everyone nuts with his crazy antics.
Kofiko has had innumerable adventures, finding his way to the kibbutz and the moshav. He’s joined hikes and gone to camp. He did his IDF reserve duty, marched in parades and even participated in the Civil Guard.
Over time, he reached Army Radio and the Children’s Channel, even performing on A Star is Born, and started his own political party.
From the late 1950s and through the new millennium, Israeli children have been fascinated by Kofiko’s not-so-educational adventures, such as when he pretended to be a teacher, a baker, lifeguard, dentist, beauty queen and even an astronaut – as can be seen in the latest book, Kofiko Travels to Outer Space.
Kofiko made his grand entrance in 1954, as the protagonist in a story that was published in the children's supplement of the Davar newspaper. The story begins with, “Little Efrat has an uncle who is a sailor. Just before Purim, he came back to Israel and brought her a monkey as a present. Not a toy monkey, but a real live monkey, from the forests of Africa. All the kids from the neighborhood gathered around and tried to come up with a name for him.
“Little Theresa suggested, ‘Let’s call him Kofiko.’”
Noga Barak, Bornstein-Lazar’s oldest daughter, who appears as a character in the Kofiko series and is currently the director of business operations for the Kofiko Group, claims Kofiko actually made his debut even before the 1954 story was published. She says she has a story in her mother’s handwriting from 1950 that is titled “Kofiko.”
Whether he is 60 or a bit older, Kofiko is no shrinking violet: 250,000 Kofiko books have been recent years, and since the outset, more than 3.5 million copies have been sold. And unlike other creatures from the olden days, Kofiko has not gotten stuck in the past, but skipped naturally into the modern world of digital technology.
The Kofiko character has managed to keep up with the trends. In 1993, for example, when cable TV was becoming popular, the Kofiko TV show was aired for the first time on the Children’s Channel. This was made possible mainly due to Barak, who was part of the team that created cable TV in Israel.
“At first, my mother was very concerned about what would happen to the Kofiko character, which up until now had existed only in children’s imaginations,” says Barak. “She was very worried that the authenticity of the two-dimensional, drawn Kofiko character would be in jeopardy. She had a very hard time accepting the fact that Kofiko was going to be turned into a 3D character.
“We went through many versions until we were able to close on a final version of the Kofiko costume, which was manufactured by an American company. We added the suspenders at the last minute to give him an extra feeling of naughtiness.”
Then, after a 16-year break, the second season was produced in 2009, and the third two years later; the fourth began being broadcast in 2013, and is still running today. In addition, tens of thousands of episodes have been downloaded via video on-demand.
Today, if your brand is not known, you don’t exist. This idea is not foreign to the Lazar family, which six years ago founded the Kofiko Group, which has been responsible for promoting the family monkey in a variety of ways. There’s a Kofiko smartphone app which has been downloaded 250,000 times, a site on Walla and an interactive book called Our Guest Kofiko. A Kofiko YouTube channel created at the beginning of the year has had 20 million views so far; the group is also filming a movie and a play.
“When I was a young producer, I wanted to produce the Kofiko show, but the author was locked into a contract with a very experienced producer who in the meantime died,” says Arik Uri of Misgav Uri Productions.
“Four years later, my life has come full circle and the show will be performed on stage.”
Kofiko accessories such as kids’ clothing, board games, sheet sets, bags, dolls and even food items are being successfully marketed in stores. It appears the group is planning to make the most of the Kofiko brand.
Why should Disney be the only one to use its brand to sell products?
Indeed, “international companies are continually turning to us in search of joint ventures,” Barak says. “We’re taking it step by step. Even Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
Long before anyone ever thought of making money from a hairy monkey, the story was forming in Bornstein- Lazar’s mind. All she wanted to do at the time was to tell children stories.
The daughter of pioneers who made aliya from Russia, she was born and raised in Tel Ganim, which used to be a moshav but is now part of Petah Tikva. To this day she lives in her childhood home. The entire series of Kofiko books lines her shelves, and her garden is home to statues she modeled. Her daughter and son-inlaw live upstairs.
Bornstein-Lazar uses every spare moment for writing. She never waited until she was in the mood, writing more than the publisher could possibly print. She never wrote in a room with the door closed, loving the clamor of kids around her. “We used to stand behind her and every time she would finish typing a page, she would pluck it out of the typewriter and hand it to us to read,” says Barak.
Today she is 87. Ever since her husband, Shlomo, died she has not been in the best of health. “Mother is very weak,” Barak says. “She suffers from heart problems and has a caregiver. But she is still very involved, and continues to write.”
Bornstein-Lazar’s stories always reflected the real world in which she lived. She even gave her characters names from her real life: the parents Tamara and Shlomke, the children Noga, Orna and Yoram, the children of her oldest sister Hermona (in the book known as Aunt Mona).
Everyone lived together in the same complex. In 1963, the twins Odelia and Zohara were born, and the book Kofiko and the Twins followed soon after. “I was always portrayed as the little sister in the books – the good girl who was mischievous and cute. I was Kofiko’s best friend. I was always trying to cover for him after he’d play a prank,” Barak says about herself.
And neither were the neighbors Shoshana and Avram left out, constantly suffering from Kofiko’s antics. Kids from the neighborhood also found themselves starring in the Kofiko stories – including the redheaded Nira, who still lives in the neighborhood, and the boy Yaniv, who was killed in the Yom Kippur War.
“It seems completely natural for me that my mother wrote about everything that happened in our lives,” Barak smiles. “I remember one year - my father bought me a camera for my birthday. Yoram was a very curious kid and loved taking things apart. So he took the camera and photographed animals that lived in the neighborhood, and when we got back the prints from the party, there were only pictures of donkeys, chickens and cats. My father was very angry, but my mother just took the situation and turned it into a story, Kofiko and the Photographer.”
But alongside booming sales and encouraging fans, it didn’t take long for the negative criticism to come. Comments made by Uriel Ofek, the children’s literature writer and editor, were the most hurtful. “Ofek was the one who encouraged and guided my mother early on,” Barak says.
“He urged her to write stories for the Davar supplement. Someone even said that he was the one who recommended her for an award for children’s literature. But when she started succeeding, his negative side surfaced.”
Some people went as far as to suggest the series was racist, that children from Arab families or mixed homes wouldn’t appreciate it. “That was the most ridiculous criticism,” Barak says, rejecting the claims. “All of the stories were written about children in the neighborhood where Kofiko lived, and were devoid of any political motives.
“During this period, most Israeli writers and poets were of Eastern European descent. There were almost no authors who were native speakers. Children felt very connected to my mother’s writing,” says Barak.
In those days, they wouldn’t let the Kofiko books into the kibbutz libraries. And parents from around the country forbade their children from reading Kofiko, saying it was of very poor quality.
“My mother was a teacher and wouldn’t let me read Kofiko,” Ilan from Jerusalem tells me. “So I would read them standing up next to the shelves in the public library.”
“All mother wanted to do was tell stories, to get kids to smile,” Barak says. “Her motto was ‘laughing is healthy.’ She would integrate problematic children into her class, kids that other teachers had kicked out of their classes. She demonstrated to all her students that it was possible to forgive others and to learn to accept people who were different.
“She did this by using a non-human character. Kofiko didn’t play pranks out of a desire to be evil. It’s just that he was always making a mess and creating a big fuss. Kids identified with him because he was always carrying out forbidden actions.”
In the home of Haya Weizman, whose parents made aliya from Morocco in 1963, the children were not forbidden to read Kofiko – in fact, they were encouraged. Her parents, who spoke Hebrew fluently, were more than happy to use the big hairy animal to teach their six children Hebrew.
“My older brothers learned to read Hebrew on their own by reading these books, and when my mother saw how much they enjoyed reading Kofiko, she started reading them to me, too,” Weizman recalls. Years later, her own children grew up on the tales of the mischievous monkey, and now she reads them to her young granddaughter.
“In the past Kofiko was more Israeli, since he lived on a moshav, kibbutz or was in the army,” says Dr. Yaakova Sacerdoti, department head of children’s and adult literature at Levinsky College of Education. “Now he lives in an apartment building, eats humous and felafel, and speaks Hebrew. It’s easier for native-born Israelis to feel connected to him.
“These days, when literature has to compete with iPads, iPhones, TV and computer games, we’re lucky if kids read at all. My colleague, Prof. Miri Broch, considers reading Kofiko a literary snack. These books are accessible and easy to read, providing us with a bit of respite and amusement.”
If we try to think of an international series that would be parallel to Kofiko, we might consider Curious George, one of the world’s most successful monkeys in children’s literature. His parents, Margret and Hans Rey, a Jewish couple from Germany, came up with the character during World War II. The character they created is a monkey that is brought to the US from Africa by a man in a yellow hat, and George gets into all sorts of trouble due to his curiosity and naughtiness. The series has sold more than 27 million copies, and has turned into a multimillion-dollar business.
“We’re living in a global village, where you can visit any country or culture around the world with the click of a button,” Sacerdoti says. “So there’s no reason that Kofiko shouldn’t be interesting to people from other cultures.”
This doesn’t sound so far-fetched.
Two years ago, Shlomo Lazar died.
He had been responsible for the business side of Kofiko, while his wife kept busy writing. When he got sick, he asked his oldest daughter to take over the business for him. Barak agreed, then got the whole family involved.
Today, Barak runs Kofiko Group together with her husband, their daughter Amit Gavish and her sister Odelia.
The successful business brings in more than NIS 10 million a year.
“Just like other authors, my mother’s interested in the written word,” Barak says. “But she also understands that if Kofiko hadn’t developed into other media formats, it would have disappeared. Kids these days don’t read much, but at least they can still connect with Kofiko.”
Barak’s daughter Gavish, 30, is representative of the third generation in the Kofiko family. “I spent a lot of time with my grandmother when I was growing up and Kofiko always had a strong presence,” she says. “I learned how to read from the series and I even had the honor of being the inspiration for one book, Kofiko and the Cockroaches, since I’ve always been terrified of them.
Gavish moved into her new position straight from maternity leave. She’s in charge of all Kofiko Group events, including birthday parties and storytelling around the country. Apparently, she inherited a talent for writing from her grandmother; she currently composes songs and adapts the Kofiko stories for the stage.
“I was very mischievous as a little girl. I always wanted my naughtiness to be understood and forgiven, just like Kofiko’s was,” she says. “Now when I see my grandmother goofing around with my children like she used to with me, it makes me want to be a little girl again.”
Translated by Hannah Hochner.