This is how a legend is formed. Late 72 ‘. Unsurprising storm in rehearsals for the show “Champions of the Season,” by Jason Miller, at the Cameri Theater. As has happened to him more than once, sparks flared between Hi Kilos, a genius but short-wired New York Jewish director, and his actors. The rest, as they say, is history.
“Hey, just threw some of us away,” Yosef Carmon, one of the greatest actors in Israel, who passed away last night at the age of 88, recalled eight years ago, in a final interview before sinking into his illness. “Since then I owe a thank you to Hi,” Carmon, or Corman as everyone affectionately called him at the time, said in his subtle Polish humor. “Thanks to him, my entire professional and artistic world changed, when from his play I was transferred to rehearsals for the play ‘Yaakovi and Leidenthal’, by Hanoch Levin and directed by him, where I was added to Zaharira Harifai and Albert Cohen.
“I connected with Hanoch from the first moment,” he said. “As a Holocaust survivor, I was able to express myself and respond to what I went through through his texts, since I played with him Leidenthal, a very simple man, a city official, whose cultural world is limited and without many ideologies in mind. “Salty and brown bread. He would never raise a voice, probably not shout. He also would not demonstrate how to play. He would just talk quietly. To this day I have not met a director like him.”
Although Carmon’s career has been intertwined with roles such as Macbeth, Fleischer and Michael Koolhaas, there is no doubt that he will always be identified with his Levin roles, including Zingerbay in “Rubber Traders”, Motke Tzahori in “Luggage Packers”, Solomon in “Solomon Grip”, Pozna in “Everyone wants to live”, Teiglach in “Hefetz” and also Job in “Job’s anguish”, a role for which he was willing to take off his full clothes – and he never regretted it.
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When we skipped rehearsals for the show “Eshkava”, in ’99, in which he trembled in the role of the old man, Carmon burst into bitter tears, not for the only time in this interview. “Rehearsals for this show were very funny and also very sad,” he testified. “We all knew he was going to die, but rehearsals went on as usual. For rehearsals of his next and final show, ‘The Weeping,’ we would have already reached him at Tel Hashomer. Enoch was already in bad shape. He was lying in bed and could barely speak. We could not resist. We would go. Sideways and cry without him seeing us in it.
“When we were informed that Hanoch had died, I felt as if my father had died a second time. He perished in Treblinka and had no companion. At least I could cry over Hanoch’s grave.”
I met “Corman” on his 80th birthday. Shorts. Eternal visor cap. Bristles on the face and a somewhat dreamy look in the eyes. For a moment we broke away from the vague present and sailed on the ship of memories to his childhood in Radom, Poland.
He was born into a wealthy tanner family. Son after four daughters. Early in his life the actor appeared in it. One day he put on his father’s coat as a cloak, held a stick in his hand like a wand and so went out into the street, reading aloud a poem by Adam Mickiewicz, the national poet of Poland. The rags thrown at him by the neighbors were his first “reward.”
This idyll was quickly interrupted when his parents and three of his sisters were taken to the killing valley in Treblinka. He and his sister Ilana survived after his parents paid the Gentiles for their hiding. Carmon later closed an account with the murderers and their collaborators, when in the performance of “Michael Koolhaas”, during the Cameri’s tour of Poland, he, the lead actor, played the final monologue of the Messenger of God to the seekers of justice and oppressors in the world, in Polish. “The Poles had a lot of involvement in the Holocaust,” he was convinced.
In 1946, he arrived in Israel with a group of Holocaust orphans and was absorbed into Kibbutz Degania B., where the boy Yossi studied and also worked in a coop and carpentry shop. Later, when the economy refused to allow him to study acting at the Cameri’s Dramatic Studio, they lost not only a gifted actor, but also … an excellent carpenter.
Carmon came almost missing to the studio. For a living, he ironed a baby clothes factory, repaired blinds, cleaned carpets, washed stairwells and dreamed of a theater.
While studying in the studio, he had a Cinderella case in ’55. Carmon jumped on the night of his wedding to his first wife from a role to Orlando’s lead role in the play “As You Like It” instead of the show’s star, Yitzhak Shilo, who was rushed to a hospital. So buy his world. However, the sudden stardom as Orlando did not turn him, the actor hit satellite, into a Shakespearean actor, even though he played Clarence in “Richard III”, Brutus in “Julius Caesar” and even Macbeth. “Me, a rather short actor, was usually seen in popular and non-classical roles,” he remarked.
Carmon left in ’58 with a scholarship from his theater to study acting at Lameda, London. One of his classmates was the great Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, “a nice guy with a lot of humor and very talented.”
When he returned to Israel in 1961, Carmon responded to Yosef Milo’s call to join the founding nucleus of the Haifa Theater and compared to other actors, he did not acclimatize there and left within a year. “Set up a new theater with patterns of old theater,” challenged the actor who fainted in the play “Andorra,” by Customs Frisch, who “reminded me of what happened to me in the Holocaust.”
He was absorbed back into the Cameri in ’65 and remained loyal to him to the end, as befits a follower of the Permanent Institution. If it was Hanoch Levin who arranged his career, then his competitor, Nissim Aloni, allegedly arranged his life, when he shared his play “Napoleon Alive or Dead”, where Carmon met the actress and singer Tami Eshel, daughter, in a divorce crisis from his first wife. Kibbutz Hazorea and the Nahal life team and the “Banot Hava” trio.
“When Nissim brought Tammy to sing and frolic in the role of the blue punchinella, even though there were no other pieces missing there, I fell in love with her, the modest kibbutz member, ignoring the 17-year gap between us,” he said. “‘Do not forget that I married you,'” Aloni would say.
The role of the old man in “Eshkava” was Carmon’s last major role – which also moved in film and television – including four theater tours in China. “The Chinese were enthusiastic and were sure that Hanoch wrote the play based on a visit to them,” he testified. “We had to convince them that he had never visited China and written the play following Chekhov.”
And your next job? He asked.
“Enough, now to rest,” he replied.
If you were allowed to run a theater? I added and asked him to finish.
“I would throw the keys to the Sea of Galilee and go to Switzerland,” he replied playfully, explaining: “Because there is not enough money in the country for a theater.”
When we were about to say goodbye, I added a question – if a young actor comes to you and asks for your advice?
“Then I advised him to choose another profession,” he closed an interest with a close veiled look of sadness in his eyes. “An actor is hard work, which requires you 24 hours a day and you have to sacrifice your life for it.”