Lacking a regular night-club editor, COMMENTARY drafted J. L. Teller, who has, so he assured us, a more than reportorial interest in night life, and assigned him to visit Habibi, New York’s new—and only—Israeli night club.

_____________

 

The owner of the Skazka, a Russian night club on West 46th Street in New York, recently gave his patrons food for thought, with no extra charge. He effaced the ferocious-visaged high-kicking sword-swallowing Cossacks on the murals of his basement establishment and replaced them with silhouettes of minarets and meandering uphill alleys, painted in the buff-color of Mediterranean rock. He then wished Godspeed to his gypsy dancers with their ample bosoms and dangling Woolworth’s earrings, unfrocked his waiters of their rubashkes, had his five-piece band play horas in place of kazatskes, engaged new entertainers, some of whom are real Israelis, and painted a new name, Habibi, on the awning. Thus was born New York’s first Israeli night club, even though the soul of Russia still whimpers from the menu through shashlik and vodka (re-named “Vodka Collins,” possibly to deflect the suspicions of the authors of Red Channels).

“Habibi,” the master of ceremonies explains, speaking a medley of Yiddish, Hebrew, and exhibitionist poor English, is the Hebrew for “darling.” Actually, he was simplifying somewhat. The word can also take on the meaning of “honey” in the unctuous, noncommittal inflection of an Israeli Tallulah Bankhead. Other meanings are “pal,” and even “listen here, smart aleck,” depending on who addresses whom. However, it was clear that visitors to the club preferred their new Hebrew vocabulary without complication. So, in this time and this place, Habibi means darling. Nor does one’s introduction to the genius of Hebrew stop there. Painted over the interior entrance, as you descend the stairs into this new Israeli annex of Broadway night life, is the word “Shalom,” a word you hear quickly repeated, in true Linguaphone fashion, in the native voice of a German-accented host, the former manager of Café Pilz on Tel Aviv’s boardwalk.

Your Hebrew lesson begins in earnest as you turn to reading the menu. Printed in Hebrew letters, alongside some of the courses, is the Hebrew equivalent for the English word. Appetizer is manah rishona, which translated literally means: first course. Soup is marak. Listed between chicken consommé and onion soup au gratin is Ukrainian borscht, which although good is not indisputably a soup. Beitzim (eggs) is the pokerfaced translation of Eggs and Omelettes. Only way down the list do you come across a native, not naturalized, Israeli course—falafel, “crisp spiced vegetable balls,” and still further down, khoumouss, “spiced pashette of chick peas,” eaten by sabras, Yemenites, and Kurds, but generally shunned by the East European adult.

Israel being an assembly of the dispersed, Habibi’s claim to being an Israeli restaurant could not be impeached even if the menu included chow mein. In any case, the Oedipus complex of the Israeli pioneer does not include Diaspora cooking among the targets of his homicidal wish-dreams. The dominant note on Habibi’s solemn menu is set by vareniki (for the Skazka’s soul goes wandering on), kreplach, kneidlach mit neshomes (specialty of the house), Wiener schnitzel, and cudet Kiev.

Skip the cocktails, scotch, rye, and bourbon, if you seek a native Israeli drink. The sabra, nourished on milk and weaned on spring water, would be surprised to learn his favorite drink is the sabra cocktail, a drink about the size of a Zombie, combining Oriental spices and French liqueurs, and served flaming. The wine list includes some of Rishon l’Zion’s best, but why have the excellent Israeli cordials been omitted, Habibi?

_____________

 

Habibi may claim the honor of being an Israeli night club, and indeed there are actually many such in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. However, the blunt truth is that night clubs in Israel are extra-territorial, patronized exclusively by American tourists, Gentiles, and those who vote to the right of Mapai. A Laborite of any standing would no more be seen in a night club, or even peeping in from the sidewalk, than he would be found applauding a speech by an opposition party. When my colleagues on Davar, Israel’s Labor daily, threw a modest party at the relatively sumptuous Café Pilz on the newspaper’s twenty-fifth anniversary, hoary pioneers were shocked into speechfulness.

No mere puritan streak accounts for this. The true Israeli’s pastime is shmoos or chat. Still working on a wartime schedule, he is not inclined to squander his rare evening leisure hours listening to a master of ceremonies talking at him. The principle of self-help is extended even to the entertainment field: the Israeli thinks it preposterous to relax at a ringside table while performers exert themselves to make him laugh. In his kibbutz, entertainment always involves audience participation; he makes exceptions only of music and theater involving high performer’s skill. This attitude is less strong among the young, Oriental zoot-suiters with their hair done in pompadour fashion, and among army veterans with an addiction to the tango (Israel has some fetching native tangos) who have been conditioned by the Israeli USO to the idea of being entertained. The Oriental adolescents, lacking the price of admission, ride side-saddle on the fences of garden cafés (the climate necessitates outdoor entertainment) and unnerve hap less entertainers by paying their tribute in the dubious coin of Bronx cheers.

Israeli night clubs feature Hebrew crooning, Eastern and Central European Heimweh songs, and the usual wisecracking master of ceremonies. A reasonably uninhibited sex life, free of morbid repression and sordid clandestine promiscuity, has made the Israeli unresponsive to salacious innuendo. The program, at times, is potluck, featuring “internationally famous” obscure hams. My wife and I spent a painful half hour in Tel Aviv one night watching the “latest sensation from America,” a fugitive from amateur night at the Academy on 14th Street, exhaust his pathetic routine of the usual claptrap—tap dance, juggling, and crooning in a voice that sounded like a screw driver boring into tin.

_____________

 

One can report that Habibi’s entertainment follows this authentic Israeli pattern in most ways. The master of ceremonies mugs, wisecracks, hugs the microphone, and pounds the piano, though he is never really offensive. The American audience’s collective face expresses the tentative confusion of persons who find themselves fumbling with their keys at someone else’s keyhole. The Jerome Weidman garment manufacturer, accustomed to having a throaty female pat his bald pate as she wiggles suggestively past the ringside tables, fidgets and is inexplicably unhappy, and hopes that this is only the come-on and that the “real stuff” is yet to come. It never does. Israeli love songs are naive and young; not even Mae West could nasalize suggestiveness into the simple tunes and ingenuous words. As in all Israeli entertainment, emphasis in the Habibi show is not on female pulchritude but on youth, on Galilee and young love, and the program includes English and French ballads and a Yiddish lullaby. Some in the audience mellow as the evening wears on, others pay their checks and stride out in disgust, and will probably never take that vacation trip to Israel. Those who stay on in the jammed room are the younger couples, who glow incandescent through an evening of kneidlach, horas, and the sound of the Israeli tongue.

The real Israeli stars at Habibi are Hillel and Aviva, husband and wife. A tall, gaunt, sharp-featured war veteran who walks with a limp, his white shirt open at the collar, Hillel constantly switches from his shepherd’s reed flute with its haunting sounds to a pleasant baritone. Dark, Semitic-featured Aviva, reaching to his shoulders, addresses the audience shyly yet firmly. She accompanies her husband with cymbals when he sings, and in voice when he plays his flute, but hers is always the accompaniment, and she glances at him in a studied, deferential, Oriental fashion that is not at all the way between man and his maid in Israel. Most of their melodies are in the tradition of the socalled Mediterranean school of Israeli composers, headed ideologically by the novelist Max Brod, who seek to retrieve a regional music by mining in the caverns of Hebrew liturgy, Arab melodies, and Oriental Jewish folk music. Hillel and Aviva encourage audience participation by calling on the audience to sing the refrains, clap their hands at appropriate intervals, and join in dancing the hora.

Hillel and Aviva’s performance is in the spirit of the annual folk art festivals arranged at some of the kibbutzim. The rest is usual night club routine, without the usual vulgarity. Zamira Gonn, who came here with the pre-Israel Peter Bergson émigrés and has stayed on, swings the Hasidíc dance like a kazatske, in true Rumanian wine-cellar fashion, and performs a Hindu dance as Hindus would not. It may well be that when Aviva with her cymbals and Hillel with his flute return to Israel soon, the Vienna waltz will reclaim Habibi once again, even if manah rishona holds its own on the menu.

_____________

 

When we left close to midnight on a Saturday evening, the audience had changed twice, the place was still jammed, and adolescent youngsters waiting to get in formed a human puddle on the sidewalk outside the club. They were not the kind who usually frequent places with a minimum cover charge. It is more natural to them, one surmises, to gobble frankfurters and popcorn and climb to the balconies of the neighborhood movie. It may be that they have been attracted to Habibi by the same vague curiosity and longing that caused their seniors by several years to join up with the Israeli air force not long ago. An awning in blue and white with tall Hebrew-looking letters may mean more to them than you and I can fathom, Habibi. It may be their streamlined version of the Wailing Wall.

_____________

 

+ A A -
You may also like
Share via
Copy link