Once Upon A time in Jerusalem,
and this time –The summer vacation in Jerusalem
Dedicated to the generation that was and still remembers.
Like all children, we waited all year for the big summer vacation.
The heatwaves and the sun took over the streets, air conditioners were just a rumor then, the parents were busy with the hassles of making a living and the signs of boredom appeared already on the first day of the summer vacation.
When we told our parents that we were bored, they suggested we turn on the TV and left the house for their daily routine.
In those days, the question of which channel did not arise, because the meaning of turning on a television was to watch only one channel.
And so we sat sprawled in front of the television that broadcasted in black and white educational programs for children who were left alone at home and left their mark on the children’s tender souls for many years to come.
In order to alleviate the abandonment anxiety of the children whose parents went to work and left them alone in an empty house, they relaxed every day with Marko, a cartoon character of a boy with a monkey on his shoulder and a squeaky voice who chased for the entire long summer vacation after his mother, who ignored him and systematically left, an hour before, any place reached by Marco and his monkey after an exhausting journey on ships, on donkeys and a horsedrawn carriage .
Every morning we woke up with a renewed expectation that maybe today poor Marco would already find his mother and free us from the torment, but every day she left again to another place, and Marco and the monkey continued to chase her, without a change of clothes, food, wallet or pocket money.
In order to root the trauma, the episode where Marco already finds his mother always came after the end of August and the end of the summer vacation, when the series was no longer broadcast, and so year after year the trauma was burned into the tender souls, and the anxiety of abandonment would later support generations of psychologists.
Every summer we also spent with the five children from “The Lost Islands” whose ship was lost at sea and who ended up on a deserted island, and they survived alone the hardships of the island and waited to be saved, and were not bored like us on the sofa.
We learned English with a strange group of people who danced in the square and taught us that in English they call a banana – banana, only with an accent.
With Yermi Kaplan who worked in the cinema as a remote control on a ladder, without safety measures in place and at an age where it is still forbidden by law to work, and his every task ended by falling off the ladder along with the letters.
We learned that the cactus plant can talk in the form of a sock puppet with spikes andthat “you don’t take the key of Habitush out of the lock without permission from Rega and Dudley”.
The channel was also ahead of its time with the pioneer of today’s sexual revolution and binary sexuality, which started already 4 decades ago in the character of Rega and Dudley, a breastless woman who talks like a male, with jeans overall and huge shoes
All this was many years before the era of smartphones and Tik Tok, when the Wi-Fi at home drops and the children wander around the house like satellites, helpless and uncommunicative.
Back then when the TV set would go haywire and would broadcast “snow” in black and white we would simply knock on one of the wooden pannels of the television, whichweighed as much as the refrigerator.
Most of the time the picture would return, but if that didn’t help, we would adjust the “butterfly” antenna that was placed on top of the TV until we reached the right angle that would enble the return ofthe picture.,This would usually happened during the last minutes of a Maccabi Tel Aviv game which took place on Thursday evenings when they were down to the last minutes of the game.
There would be someone who would holdthe antenna and remain frozen in place next to the screen and at the right angle, until he began to show signs of progressive necrosis in his hand, until the final whistle of the game.
In the case of overtime, we all knew by tacit agreement that the antenna holder’s hand would never function the same way again.
My favorite characters in particular were Gabi and Debbie, two children without parents or family who found a Magic Stick in a lost dump, and would use it to point to any point on the map, would hold hands, a bit of a flicker of the broken fluorescent would flash, and then they found themselves at another destination in the world which they marked with the stick.
There was no need to ask if “did you pack alone?”, or waiting in long lines, no worries of if they packed suitable clothing for the weather at the destination, no coffee for NIS 30 in duty free, and also no worried parents who ask where the children have gone.
And so, for years, we saw during the entire summer vacation reruns of all the programs and series we saw last summer as well, and we didn’t understand how the unfortunate Marko didn’t learn his lesson – year after year, and didn’t run and get to his mother faster, at least in one episode, for an exciting reunion and removal of abandonment anxieties. A whole generation of kids kept their fingers crossed.
Shabbat Shalom to the near and far from Jerusalem
May all the hostages return NOW and safely, along with all IDF soldiers, and may all the evacuees be able to return to their homes on the boarders of Israel.
