You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. — attributed to Abraham Lincoln
Whether Abraham Lincoln said this or not the truth of this observation is indisputable for me. I have personal experience. Only for this story I will substitute the word “please” in place of “fool.”
In the 1970s I was responsible for picking a weekly movie for a village of 500 people. It was at the kibbutz in Israel where I lived for seven years. Tuesday night was movie night and we screened a 16mm print in the communal dining hall in the winter and outside on the lawn in the summer.
A list of movies available for rental was updated every few months and to schedule your preferences required making a trip to Tel Aviv as quickly as you could. The small office of the distributor was besieged by representatives from small communities like mine desperate for entertainment.
For much of the time I lived on Kibbutz Gat the community had only a half dozen televisions so radio was mostly all there was for culture from the outside world unless you ventured from your apartment to one of the bomb shelters where the TVs were.
I had arrived in 1972 and hadn’t done my army service yet when the Yom Kippur War occurred the following year. Overnight I became one of the few men left on the kibbutz under the age of 50. For several months I milked 200 cows twice a day and became the designated projectionist for the weekly movie which expanded to a twice weekly movie. The films were a diversion from the stress and uncertainty and most of all shock and mourning. During this time five men from the kibbutz were killed in combat.
In the fall of 1974 I began my own military obligation in the regular army and after being posted to an artillery unit facing the Suez Canal I was able to use my movie projection skills one night to get out of guard duty when I was the only one in my unit able to mount an anamorphic lens to make Barbra Streisand appear zoftig (voluptuously plump) instead of ridiculously skinny for watching a cinemascope print of Hello Dolly.
I returned to the kibbutz an army corporal and was drafted again to be the movie night majordomo. Now I was choosing the movies for the kibbutz, a privilege not without a price and best described by another Yiddish word that applies more to unhappy Jewish comedians than buxom performers… Tzuris! I found two definitions under tzuris in my Yiddish–English dictionary.
1. Daughter pregnant with child of an unemployed bartender.
2. Son loses job and moves back home.
It was seldom that somebody on the kibbutz didn’t complain to me about my movie selections. Full disclosure. I admit I scheduled movies I wanted to see after reading Pauline Kael’s New Yorker reviews– My parents bundled their issues and sent me monthly shipments. Sometimes I even went further and ordered a movie I just wanted to see again.
Such was the case with Citizen Kane. I knew I was taking a risk with something that old but since to this day I still consider Orson Welles’ masterpiece my favorite American film. I went for it and believed it had been a success after one kibbutz member began talking to me effusively about how much he had enjoyed it.
“Who was that guy who played Kane?”
“That was Orson Wells and he was the director. It was his first movie.”
“Amazing! What a genius!”
I was glad the film pleased this man. His name was Zvi Nahor and he worked as a bus driver for over 30 years with Israel’s largest bus company. Zvi was also an accomplished photographer who always took his camera with him and some of his best shots were taken from his driver’s seat.
Just as Zvi finished praising Kane another member of the kibbutz came up to me nearly as excited.
“Why did you bring us a black and white movie? Weren’t there any color ones available?”
Yes, you most certainly cannot please all of the people all of the time!
*Below is a picture of Zvi Nahor and several of his photographs. He kept snapping into his 90s.
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