Over the years, I had the chance to talk quite a bit with the man, mainly because of the movie “Shlager” in which he and my father, Assi Dayan, collaborated and brought into the world, among others, Ofra Haza and “The Flower Song” (all the songs in the movie were written by my father and composed by peak). We talked about turning the film into a stage musical. It didn’t happen during my father’s lifetime, and now it won’t happen during Pick’s lifetime, but it will happen sooner or later, and “I want to shout: I’m a flower” will be a piece of shouting every night in a different hall.
My conversations with Peak introduced me to a superhuman machine of pursuit of a goal and action that does not stop for a moment. I met a man whose creation is an integral part of his definition and he worked at being Zvika Peak non-stop, around the clock. His life was the most professional and polished production there is. But it was actually one of his children who revealed a side to me that I didn’t recognize when we talked not long ago.
Sometime during the conversation I told him that his father, like my father, must have been busy with his career all the time and had no idea what grade he was in or what his friends’ names were or what his favorite TV show was. This is what I knew from my father, who was immersed in his work all the time and was not so interested in things unrelated to it.
“Absolutely not,” my interlocutor told me, “he was actually an amazing father.” He would take us to school in the morning, came to all the parents’ meetings and was at all the graduation plays and knew our teacher’s name and everything.’ I was surprised. I did not expect this. Here is a side of Zvika Pick that I didn’t know and deserves no less praise than the professional side. It is important to always remember that while we are eulogizing Omen, there are people who are eulogizing father and grandfather.
And we will return to the professional side: Zvika Pick was the prophet of Israeli fun. He wore what he wanted, said what he wanted, sang what he wanted and was what he wanted at any given moment. The spirit of fun blew into his songs and turned his songs into songs of freedom and liberation and “pan”. Zvika Pick, the prophet of Israeli fun, may his memory be blessed.
Everywhere, from all sides, in the public space, it jumps out at you: huge ads that shout “Loan, now, under favorable conditions.” It’s on top of buses, through the billboards, during the commercial breaks on the radio, from everywhere. This way, all day we are dripped with optimism in the form of a better financial future that should help us calm down the challenging financial present of most of us. And it’s not just that the public space has been full of loan advertisements for a long time. It’s not for nothing that even in polls leading up to the elections that reveal to us what the issues that most bother the public are, the cost of living stands out as the issue that most bothers Israelis.
The truth is that we live in a bubble that is going to burst. Almost everyone I know my age has become a little dankner and living on loans upon loans. They all have one thing in common – they move on the basis of hope. I hope it will be better, that reality will be kinder and less predatory. But no one has any idea what the hope is based on, because the evidence on the ground, in practice, in reality, does not support this optimism at all. On the contrary, day by day the price increase is felt more and more. And not only in the supermarket. But no one knows what to do except to express hope that it will be better, that something will happen. But nothing is happening, and I am willing to bet that nothing will happen after November 1, when we have a new Knesset.
Some of the faces in the plenary will change, but even the new faces will not really have anything to say, and the prices of gas, milk, electricity, and gardens will continue to soar. And they, the same people with the title “elected officials”, will continue to sit in Jerusalem with their bureau and their parliamentary assistants and not understand that under the surface everything is burning and igniting and there is an entire generation here that cannot live and another second it erupts.
It is clear that this will happen, and I want to turn right now to the current elected officials and those who will be elected and tell them: Gentlemen, this will blow up in your faces. One day suddenly everything will blow up on you, and you won’t understand how it happened. And the explosion will be stronger than anything you have ever known. His push will kick you out of the Knesset along with your parliamentary assistants and the 45,274 gross NIS you receive every month, back to your little life and you will face the reality you neglected. You will no longer have endless breaks and you will have to find a normal job, and then you will meet us, the ones you neglected and lead a life of financial acrobatics to survive another month.
Moving between the sale pages, paying for payments, inhaling brutal interest rates, calling parents again and asking for help, looking at the paycheck and trying to find hope through the numbers that have remained the same for years – while the numbers for rent and weekly shopping are skyrocketing. There is an entire generation here for whom the laws of mathematics go against him and he is in a perpetual minus.
You may not really understand it, but wait, it will come. It’s only a matter of time. And then it will be too late for small solutions that don’t really address the problem properly but only serve as a temporary band-aid. Suddenly you will hear the real soundtrack of life: phone calls from the bank, fights between spouses because of the lack of money, and of course calls from the operators of the credit companies who offer you a loan and unfortunately this is the most logical offer in your reality, because nothing else really makes sense. It’s the same soundtrack that you don’t hear from the Knesset building. But wait, wait, you’ll see how everything will turn on you, and in one moment the country will burn and you’ll go back to your little holes while reality goes up in flames. you have been warned.