“Far away the ships sail / A thousand hands unload and build / We conquer the shore and the wave / We build here a port, here a port”, this is how “The Port Song” opens, which Leah Goldberg wrote in 1936 with typical enthusiasm for the days of that time on the occasion of the inauguration of the Tel Aviv port And Rebecca Levinson composed. 30 years later, kindergarten teacher Ilana Devash taught this song to her kindergarten children in Moshav Hatsev, in the south. One of them improvised a stage made of cubes, climbed on them and dragged her friends to sing the song with her, which has been quite forgotten over the years.
“It was my first solo,” notes Einat Shrouf, then Halfon, the girl from the cube stage in the garden in Moshav, who as a singer became the first to lead public singing, in addition to being in recent years a sought-after actress and TV star. The “Song of the Port” will be conjured up in a public singing show for the whole family, which will open the “Sounds of Childhood” festival on October 11 at the Holon Theater, for the first time under the artistic direction of the cellist and singer Maya Belzitzman.
The sounds that permeated Shroff’s childhood stemmed from the house where she grew up in Moshav as the daughter of parents who immigrated in their youth from Tripoli in Libya. “On Saturday mornings, my father (Ben-Zion Halfon, who was the Deputy Minister of Agriculture) liked to play on the phonograph with the first coffee the songs of Farid al-Atrash and Abd al-Wahhab and when my mother, Malka, would join him, she would play the songs of the Chizbatron, The Roosters, Shoshana Demari, Eric Einstein and more. She sang with the records on loudspeakers and made sure that our ‘Susita’ car had tapes for trips and infected me with her love of singing.”
Hatzav veterans remember Shroff as a thin-guy girl wearing gym shorts with tight elastics and a t-shirt, standing on an empty cucumber crate and singing to the children of the moshav the songs of the singer festivals and the military bands. So she was the student who stood out for her singing in the ceremonies at the regional school in Be’er Tovia and on trips to the annual trips. “I would sit next to the bus driver, grab the microphone from him and make him happy,” testifies Shrouf, who was the soloist of the Ora teacher’s choir and remembers from there the string of “Shiri Rishonim”, which she remembers one by one.
From the songs of the past, which she loved then, she is still moved by “Lonely Lantern”, a song by Haim Guri and Sasha Argov, which melted hearts when performed by the Roosters. “If we’re talking about an Israeli song that expresses my childhood, this is the song,” she says.
Now – in sharp transition to the Sukkot festival. “Tamir Harpaz, my partner and my musical director, and I put together the childhood songs for the show, which he grew up listening to in Kibbutz Marhavia and I grew up listening to them in Moshav Hatzev,” says Shroff. “We joined forces, with the conclusion that it doesn’t matter where we grow up in this country, the songs that accompany us are similar. We’ll start with the songs of the past and get to the songs of the present, including a Mediterranean rhyme, which will make the children and their parents jump, even if unlike usual at my concerts, this time there will be no tables to dance on “.
Among the other shows at the “Childhood Sounds” festival will be a performance of Alon Olarchik’s songs with his participation; A performance of poems and stories by Hillel, edited and written by his daughter, Tal Omer; A performance of the children’s festival songs, whose participants will be Tali Oren, Avi Greinik and Sivan Talmore; Maya Belzitzman, the show’s artistic director, will appear in another show with Daniel Salomon and Dana Adini. For dessert, a new musical performance by Tomer Sharon is expected.