During Iftach Leibovich’s childhood in Jerusalem, the family would play a board game called Havila Higiya (“A Package Arrived”). The premise was this: You receive a letter stating that something reached the post office and to come pick it up. Along the way, you confront obstacles to attaining the package: missing identification papers, needing a new photo for the ID and so on.
The game was all too realistic for Israelis used to the daily struggles of accomplishing basic tasks in a bureaucracy-laden society.
“It was the stupidest game and the most brilliant game,” said Leibovich.
Havila Higiya was created by Ephraim Kishon, still acclaimed as the greatest humorist, satirist and social commentator in Israel’s history. Kishon, who died in 2005, was born 100 years ago this month.
One of his legacies is that Leibovich is the artistic director of the Israel Comedy Festival in Honor of Ephraim Kishon, a week-long celebration held each August at Jerusalem’s Incubator Theater.
The event includes lectures and stagings of Kishon’s work, along with contemporary comedic plays and stand-up appearances.
Experts tie Kishon’s keen observations of society, from the perspective of an average Israeli, to his being an outsider. Kishon was a Holocaust survivor from Hungary whose name — he was born Ferenc Hoffmann — was Hebraicized by a port official upon immigrating in 1949.
He quickly learned and mastered Hebrew and soon was penning columns in the language in local newspapers. He went on to write books and screenplays and make films. Two of the five movies he directed, Sallah Shabati (1964) and The Policeman (1971), which he also wrote and co-produced, earned Academy Award nominations as best foreign-language films.
The Family Book (titled in its English translations as My Family, Right or Wrong), Kishon’s 1977 collection of essays and fiction stories about home life during his early years in Israel, is said to be the second-most-purchased book in Hebrew after the Bible.
Both Leibovich and Ziv Hermelin-Shadar — who at the festival hosted podcasts discussing each of the films screened daily, dubbed “Kishoncasts” — cited The Family Book as a key influence.
It was the first book Leibovich’s father gave him — the boy was about 13 — and, “from that, I became a big fan of Kishon,” he said.
Hermelin-Shadar was about 10 when he first read it. “It’s a book that’s very Jewish and very family-oriented,” he said. “It makes me laugh. Kishon, in his stories, is trying to live life, and other people are ruining it for him. He succeeds in capturing the wackiness … of Israeli society.”
Such wackiness arose recently over a play scheduled for this summer’s festival. The play’s promotional poster unintentionally sparked a controversy Kishon might’ve enjoyed.
The poster shows the faces of three men and the play’s title, Naked. The word is meant as a metaphor for the show’s theme as a behind-the-scenes look at how a circus operates. No one is nude. But some Jerusalem residents presumed indecency and pressured the mayor’s office to withdraw its funding for the festival and to shut down the show. Leibovich wrote a long letter defending the work and stressing that no one appeared naked.
“It’s poetic that this happened at a Kishon festival,” he said. “To make a big deal about it was a farce. There was nothing for me to fight against because there was nothing to censor.”
The show’s three performances proceeded as scheduled.
Kishon’s accomplishments went hand-in-hand with insecurity. Alongside placards of his films and plays on his office’s walls appeared articles written by critics.
“He felt he wasn’t appreciated. He wanted more love from critics,” said Hermelin-Shadar. “He was a great success, but felt that he wasn’t accepted here as [such].”
Following his father’s death at his summer home in Switzerland, Rafi Kishon was asked to develop a one-man show for Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theater. As a veterinarian, he’d spoken about animals on numerous television programs and was comfortable appearing before the camera. But writing and performing in the show, Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Ephraim Kishon, was extra-gratifying, he said.
He performs it monthly at the Cameri — it’s now titled Ephraim Kishon: Humor, Life and Films — and accepts private bookings from groups. The appearances involve screening movie clips and telling stories about his father.
“What I say is unique about Ephraim Kishon’s humor is that it unites Israelis of all types,” he explained.
“I take it as a compliment when I perform and people say, ‘The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.’ It’s a good feeling to walk in my father’s shoes.”
Leibovich, too, has walking in mind. For a Kishon festival, he’d like to organize an interactive version of Havila Higiya, with participants following the game’s instructions to traipse around Jerusalem in an effort, challenging as it promises to be, to pick up a package at the post office.
“I’ve dreamt of it,” he said, “since the first festival.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected]
