On the shelves of my old bedroom, I found another treasure - one of my collection of books by Ephraim Kishon. Ephraim Kishon was a Hungarian immigrant who arrived in the early days of the Israeli state and made the Hebrew language his own, to the extent that he added words to the language. He even turned the name of a street in Tel Aviv into a verb. Dizengoff Street is one of Tel Aviv’s major streets, where people wander around, shopping, going to restaurants, going to the theatre and the movies. His verb, “to Dizengoff” means “to wander around Dizengoff Street.” People use it.
His humorous stories appeared for many years in the Jerusalem Post. Some of them were filmed. One was The Big Dig, based on a short story of the same name. A lunatic escapes from a mental hospital and steals a drill, with which he starts drilling on Allenby Road, another major Tel Aviv Street. Nobody knows who he is, but everyone assumes it’s legitimate roadwork and that someone else ordered it, so he is not only allowed to get on with it, but his way is cleared and traffic diverted. In the end, he hits the sea, which gushes into the trench, forming the new Allenby Canal. (And, in the short story, Tel Aviv is declared “the Venice of the Middle East”). It was a hilarious film too.
A favourite of mine was one in which the author discovers there is only one box of chocolates in the entire country, and it’s well past the use-by date! You know how you get chocolates for a gift and don’t open the box, but end up giving it away? Well, what if everybody else did the same?
I don’t know if you’ll find any of his collections outside ABEbooks these days, but it’s worth looking them up there.
Meanwhile, I’ll happily settle into this one!
2 comments:
I've always thought it would be pretty cool to have words you've created slide into regular use. And he had more than one!!
Oh, yes! And there he was, a migrant who made the language his own...
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