30.10.1987

THE FEASTING BEGAN 10 YEARS AGO


The nightly movable feast shifts around like the sand dunes on which the city was built. Openings here, affairs there, the same crowd attends all.

They've been at it for exactly 10 years this week.

They are people wearing masks, something which the nostalgic say is a relatively new phenomenon in this relatively new city.

The masks show boredom and curiosity, either sexual or commercial. Practised laughter responds to carefully practised routines. Conversations begun at an opening three nights ago resume at the opening tonight. Usually the conversations are flirtations, whether sexual or commercial. Those are the kind of masks these people wear.

There are, of course, other people. The new owner's family, sitting in a corner and elbowing each other to point out a face familiar from the media, or the invisible workers from invisible places working in what is supposed to be the invisible kitchen, producing food that is usually also invisible to the tastebud.

There is, after all, no real celebrityhood in this city. No limousines pull up in front of doors opened by doormen who can keep out those who will never ride in a limousine.

Here, the closest thing to a limousine is anew BMW sedan originally designed without the chrome that the local purchaser pays extra to install, making the car look like the gold signet rings and chains that symbolise what happened exactly 10 years ago.

Ten years ago is when the whole business of night life and pubs and goose liver at four in the morning in Hatikva began. It's a big business nowadays, with a successful joint able to net receipts of upwards of NIS 50,000 a month.

Before 1977, it was a much smaller business and a much smaller circle moved in short zigs and zags up and downtown between Frederika's and Rafi's and Mandy's, and that was about it. Ten years ago, Yirmiyahu Street consisted of one movie theatre, one taxi drivers' all-night cafe and cigarette stand, and one Hungarian-language lending library.

But then, 10 years ago this week, a spectacle-frame manu-facturer turned finance minister went on television and announced that this country would be the Switzerland of the Middle East. He said anyone could buy dollars, no questions asked. It was called in Hebrew Ha'mahapach, which means something between "revolution" and "topsy-turvy". For a lot of people, it means "binge".

The Hungarian-language lending library turned into a bar named after the Austro-Hungarian journalist from Vienna. It was not the only faded curtain sidewalk shop in the city to bloom into a pre-dawn leisure spot.

The spectacle-frame manufac-turer, who had completed high school in Poland, was the first of this country's finance ministers who believed his job was to make things good for the people. That's what the prime minister promised, because the prime minister at the time said there were 47,000 people living seven to a room.

Nowadays, there are still some 40,000 people living in what the jargon calls the "bottom percentiles". There probably will always be about 40,000 such people in this country, just as there are such people everywhere.

In any case, what appears to people from places like Afula, Dimona or Jerusalem to be a nightly Tel Avivian bacchanalia, began 10 years ago.

That's when people started wearing ties and jackets and suddenly it wasn't considered elitist to wear a fur stole to the Philharmonic, which is another of the places where people wear masks. Suddenly, 10 years ago this week, gambling came off the Bat Yam porches and into the bourse.

Ten years ago, the feasting began.

The finance minister ended up blinking a lot behind the thick, polished glass of his spectacles, which suddenly became the fashionable kind of spectacle for all the members of the government who needed them.

He was a master at wearing masks, though not the sexual kind. He once was heard saying to an interviewer, "I always tell the truth, even when I'm not telling the truth".

He eventually had to resign, of course, but the feasting continued, until it became practised, routine, traditional and all the other synonyms for something completely normal.

But, of course, there's nothing normal in a country in abnormal circumstances.

How normal can things be when the man who regularly opens a new avante garde nightspot catering to the fashionable, whether hip, bohemian, punk, new wave, neo-new wave, or just plain rich-whether with new or old money-is a former police detective? Or the most fashionable saloon in town is a place full of drunken ex-spies, drunken ex-generals, and drunken leftist poets all competing to be heard over then chanson singing of a drunken ex-French resistance fighter who is now also an ex-waiter and whose back-up band is made up of drunken former Russians?

There are those who are very worried that the events on the real bourses of the world, as opposed to the toy shop on Ahad Ha'am, will turn into a tail spin.

But old-timers say that when the world plunged into a recession in 1929, the brand-new city of Tel Aviv continued jumping.

Buildings rose, art was made and so were quite a few fortunes, mostly by people who had enough faith in the future to buy up land outside what was then Tel Aviv, which barely consisted of the area now in the shade of the Kol-Bo Shalom. It's been a long time since anyone in this city other than toddlers have been impressed by the Kol-Bo's escalators.

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