Ephraim Kishon's Literary Work

By Dr. Chani Hinker

A refugee from two totalitarian regimes that shaped the 20th century, Kishon found fertile ground for his biting satire of the little man against "the state" in the nascent, socialist Israel, with its bureaucratic machinery, making its citizens jump agonizingly through hoops, at the end of which the path always remains enigmatically sealed. Kishon's criticism as the representative of the little man attempts to topple this monolithic, senseless structure.

This supposedly egalitarian  country that Kishon found in 1949, when he came to Israel, reveals itself through the characters appearing  in his works as a bureaucracy-laden country with a reverse-hierarchy, where efficiency is crippled by its public servants. The nurse in the Kupat Holim health fund is all-powerful: no one, from the simple doctor all the way up to the Minister of Health, is going to contradict, let alone disobey her. The ordinary citizen is helpless against employees of all the services: the waiters who despise customers lingering at closing time; the insensitive, unintelligent and ill-disposed police - the reverse of "policeman Azoulai"; the nurse, the postal clerk; the plumber who had to be arrested in order to make him repair a leaky faucet, and many, many more.

The concept of the society as an organized community - cooperative, equal, unified and bland - is an anathema to Kishon's individual who experiences at first hand the dangers of  being ostracized and the injustice that a cohesive group is capable of wreaking on fellow humans outside its ranks, whom they treat as underdogs or undesirables. Kishon also brings the impact of the group on the personality of its members, erasing their individuality.

Kishon's greatest enemies are the establishment and bureaucracy: when people unite in groups to organize their business, this leads inevitably to imbecility, evil, repression and insensitivity. So, when Kishon's heroes observe the idiot who hangs out his laundry in the rain, or tries to kill mosquitoes with a towel instead of a spray, he is immediately identifiable as the target of Kishon's satire: the mindless bureaucratic "expert".

The most despicable creatures in Kishon's world are the bureaucrats and clerks of the establishment  -  which belongs to the government - people without sensitivity, or independent thought. Kishon himself met such bureaucrats when he got off the boat and he brings them in different roles in his works: speaking a grandiose officialese, they personify the corruptible and impersonal face of an impossible bureaucracy.

The only atom that Kishon recognizes as unsplittable and essential is the little man who is independent of this structure and thinks for himself. The only social unit that Kishon recognizes is the family, hence his characteristic preoccupation with the family as subject matter, in distinction from other Israeli satirists over the decades.

There is another partner to the pincer movement squeezing the innocent "little man" in Kishon's satire: the  demagogic politician. Politicians view the public coffers as part of "their body" and do with the money as they please. In a country with a corrupt "public sector" of this kind, managers frequently reprimand their subordinates for not having generated appropriate deficits. Between one imbecilic note and the next, the fate of the public funds is decided. Thus, Kishon's Israel is a "small country that is incapable of producing taxes in the quantity the government consumes."

Caught in this pincer moment - by the unintelligent and the service providers in the one hand, and by the public sector and the politicians on the other - the little man rebels, but the heroic attempt is like tilting at windmills. Not only are the odds against him when he pits his wits against the sheer volume and power of the system, but his individualism and desire to think for himself are perceived as sinful by some, while his success is envied  by others, so they act to bring him into line. 

The battle against corrupt politicians is thus doomed to failure. "Everybody has the feeling that this would be the decisive clash between the minister and the public ... and so it was. On the eighth day, the public submitted its resignation."

But Kishon's heroes use their misery to work the system, too: Sallah Shabati takes money from various media bodies for the right to tell them about his troubles; Arbinka declares he is going to search for oil, in order to get rich, and finds the coveted deposits in the fuel tanks of cars he stops on the road.

Kishon was a patriotic satirist possessed of an incredible insight into the human and political minds of the real Israel, from the early years until his death. He wove his perceptions and characters brilliantly into ridiculous scenarios that were based in reality, poking fun at manifestations of bureaucracy and politics. His beautifully honed literary craftsmanship created a unique genre in the Hebrew language and in translation; its testimony and messages may not have been appreciated by the Israeli establishment, but he spoke to ordinary people in Israel and all over the world - through his novels, plays, films, interviews, and sculpture.

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