A serious satirist

Ephraim Sidon has been firing broadsides at practically anything that moves in this country’s upper echelons for decades

By BARRY DAVIS
‘Li La Lo Aleinu'521 (photo credit: Berney Ardov)
‘Li La Lo Aleinu'521
(photo credit: Berney Ardov)
Ephraim Sidon has been firing broadsides at practically anything that moves in this country’s upper echelons for decades. The boyish 67-yearold political satirist, journalist and children’s author has been a mainstay of the darker and tongue-in-cheek facet of our entertainment industry for many a year and has a show called Li La Lo Aleinu running at Tzavta in Tel Aviv. The title is a play on the name of satire- and revue-based theater company Li- La-Lo, which was established in 1944 and was one of the leading exponents of the influence of European cabaret in Israel until it closed in 1954.
The name of the current Sidon offering targets various areas of life in Israel with which the writer is clearly dissatisfied. The show hits at the national soft underbelly, featuring several iconic items from the Israeli Songbook but with trademark Sidonesque twists. “Kalaniot” (Anemones), for example, is a case in point. The song, the lyrics to which were penned by Israel Prize laureate poet and playwright Natan Alterman to music by Moshe Wilensky in pre-state Palestine, is a stirring number made famous by late velvety-voiced diva Shoshana Damari. The original lyrics paint an idyllic scene of a young girl who takes a stroll along an anemonefestooned valley and extols the everlasting beauty and properties of the flower in contrast to the fickle nature of love.
Sidon’s new stanzas to the song bring us rudely up to date as we meet the young girl many years later as a senior citizen who can no longer revel in the beauty of the red flowers. The valley has been taken over by luxury apartments, a shopping mall and swimming pool, with the sole reminder of a world now lost in the form of the highly marketable pastoral-sounding name of the upmarket neighborhood. Another Alterman oldie but goodie, “Laila Laila” (Night Night), gets the Sidon treatment in the show as does “Hakrav Ha’aharon” (The Last Battle), penned by Haim Hefer.
The sexagenarian writer enjoyed a formative experience with the crème de la crème of the British parody parade when he spent some time with the members of the Monty Python gang in the mid-1970s. He says while he was wowed by coming face to face with his heroes, he isn’t so sure they were quite so amazed to meet him.
“I think for them, being a satirist in Israel was probably like me meeting a satirist from Bangladesh. They might have some great satirists in Bangladesh, but it was the combination of ‘Israel’ and ‘satire’ that seemed totally incongruous to them,” he says.
Sidon was also delighted to chew the fat with another fabled member of the pantheon of British comedy.
“I met Spike Milligan, too. He was even crazier than the Monty Python guys. At least they had some sort of method to their madness. Spike was just mad,” notes Sidon with undisguised glee, chuckling at his recollections of the late member of the legendary 1950s radio comedy program The Goon Show.
Sidon’s foray into the epicenter of cutting-edge British comedy of the time coincided with his role as a writer for a milestone effort back here. Between 1974 and 1976, the state TV channel – the only one around in those days – ran a late-night satirical show called Nikui Rosh. It was a no-holds-barred program that delighted and shocked the nation and shook up quite a few of its captains.
“We really did make waves,” Sidon recalls. “There were all sorts of politicians who tried to find out what was going to be in the next show, and if they discovered there was going to be something uncomplimentary about them, they’d try to get a court injunction to stop us doing the sketch. Obviously, if they were that worried, we were doing something right.”
BUT THINGS are very different these days.
“Don’t forget, there was only one TV station back then, and everyone watched it, so whatever was on TV had nationwide impact,” Sidon notes.
But it is not all down to numbers.
“Yes, there are all these channels today, but now politicians just clamor for media exposure. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s positive or not. It was like that with Hartzufim.”
The latter refers to a hard-hitting puppet show that ran on Channel 2 in the early 1990s for which Sidon was the main writer. Hartzufim mercilessly ridiculed politicians, but the shock factor had faded since the heady pioneering days of Nikui Rosh.
Interestingly, while the TV satire show was busy slaughtering sacred cows with gay abandon, something was happening on the music front, too. Seminal Israeli rock band Kaveret began pushing the frontiers of local commercial musical exploration, laced with generous helpings of humor, mostly of an absurd nature.
Something obviously happened in this part of the world back then that shook up the established order.
“It was the [1973] Yom Kippur War,” says Sidon.
“There was a total collapse of the old Israel. Before the Yom Kippur War, we were heroes, we were strong and victorious. The state’s founding fathers had proven their worth, and the facts were on the ground in full view. The war cut the so-called empire down to size, and we could get on with slaughtering the sacred cows in public.”
While Sidon fed off the bare-knuckled antics of the Monty Python team, the leader of Kaveret also brought a whiff of extraneous culture to these parts.
“Danny Sanderson lived in the United States for quite a few years, and even when he was in an IDF band, he brought something different to the act,” says Sidon. “The most basic thing, nonsense humor, had never existed in IDF band repertoires before Danny. Before that, it wasn’t a song if it didn’t have some kind of moral to the tale.”
Sidon has certainly honed his nonsensical humor over the years. After completing his army service, he spent several years living on Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak in the southwestern Negev near the Egyptian border. The Six Day War found Sidon and his fellow kibbutzniks anxiously waiting on the kibbutz to repel the expected attack from the other side of the border. Thankfully, in the end, there was no attempted invasion by the Egyptians.
Sidon subsequently relocated to Jerusalem, where he received a degree in history and theater at the Hebrew University. It was during his student days that he got his start as a satirist when, along with B. Michael, Kobi Niv and Hanoch Marmari – later to become editor-in-chief of Haaretz – he made regular contributions to the Pi Ha’aton student newspaper. After completing his degree, Sidon took his burgeoning writing skills to the radical Ha’olam Hazeh weekly and combined that with his work on Nikui Rosh.
At that stage, Sidon was mining a rich seam of darkly humorous intent, also creating several satirical cabarets, such as 1972 effort Eich Anahnu Nirim (How We Look) and Hamilhama Ha’aharona (The Last War) in 1974. The material may have been designed to raise a smile or two, if not downright down-and-dirty raucous laughter, but there was a point to it all.
“All us satirists were political animals,” Sidon declares, adding that in those days there were rich pickings to be had. “Everything had a political slant to it back then. You were either a Revisionist or in favor of rural settlement, or something else with a clear ideological theme. The worst thing you could call someone was a member of ‘the espresso generation,’ those guys who didn’t wear khaki pants and spent their days lounging about in cafes rather than doing something for the good of the country. I don’t think my dad ever sat in a cafe.”
SIDON SCOTCHES any notion that his long career in caustic comedy is fueled by angst borne of social deprivation in his formative years.
“I came from a ‘good’ family and went to Hashomer Hatza'ir [youth movement]. Mind you, I should have gone to Hanoar Ha'oved [left-wing youth movement] because we were Mapainiks [supporters of the left-wing Mapai political party], but Hanoar Ha'oved charged membership fees back then, and I preferred to save my pennies for felafels.”
So Sidon grew up with strong ideals and ideas about how an egalitarian society should function, but his dreams of utopia were shattered by the Six Day War.
“Things changed for me after that,” he explains. ”It was like [philosopher Prof. Yeshayahu] Leibowitz said: ‘What have we become?’” But Sidon had still not joined the ranks of those who looked askance at the machinations of the Establishment.
“When I went to see a play by [outspoken playwright] Hanoch Levin, for the first time I felt terrible. How could he disparage the state like that? Here we were, after the great victory of the Six Day War, and instead of celebrating the miraculous event, he talks about widows and orphans.
I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach,” he recounts.
Gradually, Sidon began to encounter some unsavory incidents and his opinions shifted.
“I went off to reserve IDF duty and experienced all kinds of things. You know, Levin was considered way out back then, but no one imagined for one moment that over 40 years later, for example, we would still be occupying the West Bank. I began to write satirical material about the situation. I can’t say I had any grandiose ideas of actually making a difference on a wider scale, but it was a sort of release for me,” he says.
Pi Ha’aton opened the floodgates for Sidon, who progressed to writing biting material for cabaret shows, albeit initially still within the cloistered confines of academia.
“We wrote things that were even more way out than Hanoch Levin,” says Sidon, “but it was only within the walls of the university. It was amateurish, but it was a good start.”
Indeed it was, and his and his colleagues’ efforts soon reached a wider consumer hinterland. “There was a fourpage article in Haaretz with the headline: ‘There Is Satire in Jerusalem,’” Sidon recalls. “Then [impresario] Yankele Agmon came over to see the show and then took us to the [satirical cabaret vehicle] Theater Club, and the rest is history.”
WHILE SIDON maintains a sunny countenance, he says there is still plenty of room for improvement here on a social as well as a political level. His latest creation is a children’s book titled Aba Gavrhana, which he wrote in collaboration with Ethiopian-born actress Meskie Shibru- Sivan, with illustrations by Sidon’s pal and longtime sidekick Danny Kerman.
“Look at it. I think it’s beautifully produced,” he exclaims, “but I was in a bookstore in north Tel Aviv a few days ago and I told them I had a new children’s book out, and they were very enthusiastic. But when I told them it’s about Ethiopians and showed it to them, they said there were all sorts of people who were initially happy to hear I had a new book out, but when they saw the illustrations with people with dark skin, they weren’t so happy. You know, people in north Tel Aviv don’t say ‘We are racists,’ they say, ‘What can Ethiopians possibly teach our children?’ It’s just like [iconic Jewish prankster] Hershele.
The stories in my book are basically the same as Hershele stories.”
So in this multi-TV channel, media- and Internetsaturated age, has Sidon’s job become any easier? Are we more able to appreciate his craft today? Even though Israeli humor has taken on a more nuanceoriented feel, Sidon says that, in fact, his job has become tougher.
“We don’t have the attention span we once had,” he states. “In Nikui Rosh, sketches lasted seven minutes; with Hartzufim, it was three minutes for a joke. Now on [TV satire show] Eretz Nehederet, jokes are maybe one minute long.”
After all these years spent poking the Establishment in the eye and rubbing salt into festering national sores, has Sidon found release? Is he, in any way, at all optimistic about the chances of a better future? “I don’t know. I come from a privileged background. I wasn’t sprayed with DDT, and all the marshes had already been drained by the time I came along. But when I look at what awaits my children, on the one hand we have found reserves of natural gas, which is wonderful; but on the other hand, the world of hi-tech has taken over. Every day there are two or three murders between mafia groups, and the super rich are so much better off than the rest. We are second in the world in terms of income inequality only to the United States, and there are hundreds of thousands of children living below the poverty line,” he says.
Sidon also does the rounds of schools up and down the country with Kerman, giving storytelling sessions about all sorts of topics.
“I see which schools will produce air force pilots and which schools will produce manual laborers, and people seem to have lost hope and just try to get through each day. No young person, if he doesn’t have wealthy parents, can hope to buy his own apartment, and I don’t see any help coming from the political powers-that-be,” he laments.
Sounds like excellent raw material for a new satirical show.
The next performance of Li La Lo Aleinu will take place at Tzavta in Tel Aviv on July 17 (8:30 p.m.), followed by shows on August 15 and September 11 (both 8:30 p.m.). For tickets and more information about Li La Lo Aleinu: (03) 695-0156/7 and www.tzavta.co.il.