Mami- Sociocultural Analysis

Before 1986, Israeli writer Hillel Mitelpunkt was known mainly for political satire and realistic drama, writing about the margins of Israeli society. He decided to challenge himself and write and direct a political rock opera “Mami” became a cultural landmark. It was revived in 2002 to lukewarm response its moment had passed. This essay is in part an exploration of how a piece of theatre - musical theatre especially - was such a galvanizing moment in Israeli society how it not only expressed a moment of transformation but, in a sense, was that moment itself.

The play is about a waitress called Mami from a “development town” (a poor area). “Mami” is similar to the word mommy it is mainly a metaphor to name your loved ones. In Israeli context it also means: “everyone’s favourite”. She is designed to be identified with. After her wedding, her husband is sent to war and becomes a vegetable. Realizing she is ruled by greater forces, Mami decides to relocate to the “Big City”, Tel-Aviv, where she goes through a hypnotic treatment that turns her into a tyrant. She is eventually sent home, not to be heard from again.

The play was produced with musicians, not actors, as a supporting cast. He joined forces with the established Yossi Mar-Haim, who composed and produced the music with the promising Ehud Banay. It included participants like Yossi Elephant, with a facade of an American rocker plus the drugs and the attitude Mazi Cohen, the lead singer, a strong belting voice who was known as the “Girl Next Door”. And the only actor, Arye Muskuna .The blunt texts, loud music and lack of actors was new to the theatre scene then. Producer Nissim Zion invited soldiers for free, and it spread by word of mouth, eventually turning it into a cult success. (Livneh,2002)

Musicals allow us a glance into society’s codes and lifestyle, “Mami” like” Oklahoma!” belongs to that genre. I will use “Oklahoma!” As a comparison, since both are dealing with a society in a change. (Filmer, et. al, 1998)

“Mami” reflected the revolution in Israeli society, brought to the stage issues such as: periphery, unemployment, the tension between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, and the sacrifice of the individual to the collective. When it was revived in 2002, co-produced by “Habima” and “Hakameri, the two biggest theatres in Israel, known for being a cult hit, it didn’t make the same impact, or as reviewer Dan Shadur(2002) wrote: ” what supposedly was an anti war production is now seen as stigmatic and conservative...” I believe that there are many political and economic reasons for this, but my arguments will mainly focus on one.

“Mami” was on the verge between ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ bashing the old myths while adapting to the ideas of a new era, even with its fluidity. By 2002, Israel had completed the transitional process to a postmodern culture. To distinguish between the two I will use the theories of David Gurevitz and Gadi Taub on postmodernism in Israeli society. Gurevitz belongs to an older generation, while Taub is an integral part of Tel Aviv’s ‘nineties bohemia’. I will explain that the initial success was by addressing the changes occurring in the nation, expressed usefully in Menachem Moutner’s article “The Eighties- The Years of Anxiety”.

Although Israel is a compound of many cultures, until the late seventies there was a strong hegemony. Moutner,(2002) following Gramsci, defines hegemony as one group controlling a country’s institutions, without forcing a regime. Paul Filmer(1998) highlights that the relation between the dominant group and the non-elite ones, serves the existence of high culture. In that sense the dominant group establishes its ideas in a silent, non-aggressive way.

Moutner suggests that Israel after 1977 is in a state of ‘anxiety’ as a result of the “collapse of the hegemonic system”. (2002, p.645) From the second half of the late thirties to the late seventies, The “Avoda” movement (the liberals) was the dominant group, representing mainly secular Ashkenazi (eastern European origin) people, controlling the main institutions. It enabled them to establish a ‘melting pot’ mentality, and creating the ‘new Israeli’. The ‘new Israeli’ is based on the term “Sabra” (prickly pear). It was attached to Jews that were born in Palestine by the first immigrants in the thirties, this refers to the plant that can be easily duplicated yet its roots in the ground will become strong. This image went through a process I will explain with Gurevitch’s analysis of Gimbattista Vico’s ‘periodical phases’.(1997)From a metaphor it developed into a synecdoche, separating newborn Israelis from new immigrants or non-Jews, and then it was known not only as the place of birth but also meant the ‘salt of the earth’. Today the usage of the word is often ironic. This trajectory is also seen in “Balashon” website. It quotes Oz Almog, explaining how ‘Sabra’, after a while, described Israelis to be sweet on the inside but prickly on the surface, the article ends with an ironic statement: “it is ironic that a synonym for "patience" became identified with Israelis. That is not one of the traits they are generally said to be blessed with!”(2008)

The collapse of the hegemonic system led Israeli papers to declare the ‘end of civilization’. The headline in “Koteret Rashit” in 1983 was “the disappearance of the Ashkenazi world”, discussing the evaporation of Ashkenazi contents from the culture. (2002, p.724) Moutner quotes Ari Shavit who articulated: “The emotional leftist archetype is similar to the story of the right wing: it’s us against them. The leftists tell themselves that the right wing is vulgar and rude, and that’s why they are fighting external enemies whereas the leftists are aristocrat and morbid, and they have to fight their own people , after the 1977 split, the feeling of solitude went to the next stage, the left media thinks in dramatic terms of black and white” (2002, p.736) That reifies the fear of the ‘other’ values that were considered to be solid were suddenly gone. (Moutner, 2002)

The polarization got worse in the 1982 “Lebanon war”. A.B Yehusua wrote: “After the war what was mainly an intellectual split, during the last year gained a bloody element” (Moutner,2002, p.729) It was the first war since the establishment of Israel that the disagreement between groups was this harsh. Yonatan Shapira suggests the”politics of status” as a reason. “Avoda” were associated with the first immigrants, hence they are the builders of Israel .After the election of 1977, the “Likud”(the right wing, conservatives), implemented the guideline doubting the contribution of the “Avoda” to the establishment of Israel, argued that they will lead Israel to lose. In a sense the argument became about the myths of society not addressing its actual and current problems, leading to an “emotional symbolic discussion”.( Moutner,2002, p.716) Gurevitz through his understanding of Foucault explains that ‘discussion’ through the theory of ‘exclusion’. The power of persuasion lies in the demand for “indisputable truth”.(1997,p. 41,42) it seems to me like a way to understand the rise of Messianism movements back then, Sephardic religious parties like “Shas” and the extremist violent movement known as “Kahanism” Movements that perpetuated the biblical connection of the Jewish people to the Israeli land. (Moutner, 2002)

A young soldier accompanied by a group from the periphery told the playwright after a show in”Mami’s” first version: “The text irritates me but there’s something there that does it for me” (Lahav, 2001, p.3). What makes an explosive content to touch will be, in this case, the emerging of multiculturalism into a culture founded on the idea of “melting pot”. The rise of the” Likud” allowed new voices in Israeli society to be heard. Ester Yogev wrote: “More than it was a political revolution it was a cultural one” (Moutner,2002, p.672). Moutner added that now there was a chance to see the ‘second Israel’: nationalists, religious Zionist, orthodox, Sephardic Jews and the periphery. Shlomo Ben-Ami described that “the division of Israeli society into sub-groupings means there’s no more a collective ethos, and Israel lost its agreement over the basic rules”.( Moutner, 2002, p.663) Moreover, a majority of the ruling class was now inspired by America’s “capitalist way of life” neglecting the idea of the collective. (Moutner, 2002) Characters from the entire scale of Israel will get a second audition, “The culture is directed against the canaanite myth(An israeli ideology from the 1940’s) and towards cultural pluralism reflecting particularity and locality “ (Gurevitz, 1997 p.288). To insert the “other” into popular culture we need to locate the common ground between periphery and local groups (Filmer, 1998 ). The way Mitelpunkt found it is epitomized in an interview he gave to Neri Livneh in 2002: “Everybody’s screwed up”(pg. 5) , in “Oklahoma!”(1998), the society is different but all gathered under the ideal of civilization. In “Mami” this ideal is ‘chaos’. The question is if this idealism remains an answer (Filmer, et. al 1998) ‘Chaos’ is the postmodern outlook in “Mami”. ‘Chaos’ in the war that turns Mami’s husband to a vegetable, in Tel-Aviv where she is being consoled by the old Ashkenazi Jews ( Batya Classa, professor Copmachine) and “the Kahanists” - The Worms, who save her from being raped yet call her Arab’s Sharmuta (whore in Arabic).

‘Chaos’ or as Gurevitz calls it “the swinging existence of Israeli identity” (1997, P.289) is dealt a lot with then nonetheless there were two approaches: The older generation, referred to as the “modernists”, part of the segregated elite grieving for their lost popularity, and the new generation that will be observed as the “postmodernists”, who refused to take the old myths as a source of salvation and started tackling the absence. “Mami” exemplifies the middle-ground, a hybrid between two worlds, one that lost its grip and one that abandoned it. Taub, in his book “A dispirited rebellion”(1997), characterises the nineties generation as one that acts different from the former generation. He connects the general vibe to the lack of ideological and cultural discussions. His analysis of Uzi Vail and Etgar Keret highlights a consistent dealing in the individual as an enduring act. Taub explains that the older generation were born around ‘the six day war’ or right after, an era that is characterized in an ‘end of ideology’, linked with anxiety a reaction to a traumatic past, and aspiring for an optimistic future. Ideology made everything seem coherent, but once the buzz of winning reached its peak, and the threat lost its volume, the downfall of the adrenalin is launched. Even those, who rejected it, were still referring to that intoxicating sensation... For the new generation the sensation is gone and there are only shreds of it. Taub shares 17 year-old Ohad Pishof’s saying(1997, p.19), the former bass-player of “Nose’y HmiGba’at”: ” the paranoid assumption, even if true, is that we are always under a threat, is a scheming technique to keep us united ,and a great excuse for the things we didn’t do after 40 years” . Taub epitomizes that politics counters innocence and youth, a crucial stage in our development. He elaborates: “ the never ending emotional effort to the benefit of society is creating a chaos , politics is there to secure the mundane where people get marry bring children eat and breath , we are not breathing to make politics we make politics to breath , we are suffocating”(1997,p. 13) Gurevitz(1997) reckoned that Zionism was now depicted as constant struggle of the individual with the collective .To me it seems that in his book Taub, is more concerned with the new tools that society had armed itself with, whereas Guervitz deals with how librating it is to renounce the old myths . The former observes that pessimistic reaction, while the latter makes it his manifest (Taub, 1997) “Mami” is on that threshold. Mami is running from the obligating stance of being an Israeli victim, running away from the “hole” as she calls it , on “Mami is leaving “(Mitelpunkt, 1986), proudly declaring that “no one will reach us”, only to find meaning in building a Hebrew circus and establishing the “new force”. Mitelpunkt, who belongs to the older generation, takes a quick splash in the pool of postmodernism, and realises that it is too cold and lonely. He responds to the old myths without trying new ones .Maybe it is because he is aware of Israel’s sensibilities. As shown in the “hypnotic knowledge machine”(Mami, 1986): “I was in the field, a blind scarecrow, a terrified victim of the birds of madness” -excepting the ‘nothingness’ as a postmodern model. “Want to reborn differently, want to learn how to fly” -express the search for a meaning in modern thinking. Israeli society is alternating between those outlooks, so does Mami who starts the play with modern optimism the same way “Oklahoma!” does. In the opening song, the character performs an everyday deed, chanting” oh what a beautiful morning” (Filmer et.el, 1998, p.8). Mami sings: “the weather is good and i feel very good” (“Mami”, 1986) Furthermore, “Mami”(1986) perpetuates the completed relations between god and the individual, in songs like, “You are the one they called god”, “The war”, also handled in the stories of Jewish modern author Sholem Aleichem (Swain,2002). However, there is a carnivalesque call to unshackle our totalitarian ideas from the past without actually knowing where the future is (Gurevitz,1997) best shown in the songs ,”The New Force”, “Mami’s Circus” and the “Mami Superstar” song where Mami trashes every aspect in Israeli society, in Mami’s words, “the hourglass is running the book has no end, burn that book! Burn that book!” (1986). The problem that occurs though that she doesn’t do it to liberate her listeners she does it only to tell them in the chorus of the “New force” to join her. When the war fails, Mami goes back to the periphery and Israel to war, “The tribe goes back to the fields of red”,(“Mami”,1986) to symbol the vicious cycle it is in. Although that is a post-modern, pessimistic look on the term ‘home’, it is still what Taub(1997) named an ‘older generation’ approach to the myth of home. Musically, “Mami” is a postmodern multicultural festival as Jewish folk has obtained so many different tunes among the years. (Swain,2002). Mixing American western rock and roll and Arabic tunes like in “You Are The One They Call God” ,seventies American folk with a simple melody(If I Could), Kurt Weil style ( The Pub) song ,the mesmerising “All The Streams” which sounds like an old biblical Jewish prayer , the blues song (Batya Classa) and “The Rape” song which combines Arabic tunes and melodic American/Israeli rock and roll.( Mami- rock opera, 20 November,2011)

Embracing postmodernism in Israeli society is problematic since it is not allowed to tackle issues like the death of the subject it is preoccupied with the death of soldiers and citizens (Gurevitz,1997) This ‘escapism’ caused a rupture when prime-minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered Ma’ariv”(Taub,1997 p.18) wrote:” Suddenly from people who were detached from an idea, with no path or story we are revealed that there is an ideal and it’s murdered. The possibility that our mundane world carry more than what is “immediate” baffled us. We started crying not for the loss, but also for our culture”. Raanan Shaked wrote: “this is our life and we are landing, we truly believed we can fly away from here, but we were always aware it’s an illusion and the ground is waiting”. Mitelpunkt in his interview in 2002 labelled the feel of the time in this way: “after ‘Yom Kipur war ‘people finished fighting... and went out to demonstrate and the government fell. Now when something happens instead of demonstrating they light candles ,and sing along with the guitar .The assassination of a prime-minister should have done a lot more than bring youth from all political movements to the same square ,so they all could sit together and sing along .... But an entire generation that is good at gloominess, has grown up here” (Livneh, p.5)

The image of the modern hero in Israeli literature in the eighties is an individual Ashkenazi “sabra”, one that lives the cliché of ‘shooting and crying’. ( Gurevitz,1997) “Mami” alters that image in that she is a Sephardic women working as a waitress in the periphery for her the “Israeli Dream” is to go to Eilat for her honeymoon “and if not – it’s not a big-deal” [the song-“Very Good”](1986). According to Walter Benjamin following Brecht(1966) ,if the spectator identifies with Mami’s destiny it can misrepresent a condition: in order to uncover a situation we need to interrupt it. Two examples of that in the play are “The Rape” song and the character of the Vegetable(1986), “The Rape” song is the only song that holds an actual dialogue, a battle between the characters like the “King and I”, it is indicated in two different musical styles, ethnic tunes interrupting western harmony and vice versa. Intertwining two different styles is what created Rodgers and Hammerstein’s dramatic statements (Swain,2002), by that logic it is understood why “The Rape” song became the anthem of this musical. Second “interruption” is her husband, a reminder that she can’t run away and there’s no real redemption. (If I could). The final song raises a question: “All the Streams” (“Mami”,1986) sung like a silent prayer: “We became the dreams that our children will never see, they will pass by in uniforms and we will not see them” It might be another “interruption” showing the tension between Mami and the actress, educating us in a form of confession, or maybe Mami shows regret to redeem herself. Either way some confusion appears when we witness the silent scream in “Mothers Courage” (Baker,2014) In the Brechtian sense,”The rape” song reflected something that was underlying in society. ”People asked me where I got such an idea, they said the situation is not like that, the Palestinians aren’t suffering so much – they’ve come to terms with the situation and aren’t about to revolt, the play was a little bit prophetic about the first intifada, which erupted not long afterward”(Livneh, 2002) The “Intifada” was another call to face the myths of a multicultural society, letting the demons out and getting rid of the guilt (Gurevitz, 1997) As a rebellious act, language is a weapon to release those demons and protest against the “modern parents” as Gurevitch describes Kastel-Blum writing: “ schizophrenic language , a broken one reflecting the agitated movement of the character, a testimony to a world [..] torn apart from the old metaphysic comfort ”( 1997,p 288,289) . Pishof addresses the fact that the language derives from a broken immigrant society, motivating him to write an album in Hebrew where the connection between words has no meaning (Taub, 1997). ”Mami“(1986) also revolts by combining contemporary street slang , metaphors of the ‘Sabra’, swear words in Yiddish and Arabic when Mami gains power, she starts to speak like other elitist characters such as Batya Classa and Professor Copmachine and from “Mami Superstar” till “The New Force”, Mami suffers from a ‘verbal diarrhea’ of empty slogans, and aggressive nihilist statements. She sings: ” Prime minister General In an elephant costume Shoves up his ass A whole government. Agents, pilots Jurists and what not Assessing the audience... Come to Mami’s circus Forget the future Forget the past, Come to the magic, come to the experience.”

in Kastel Blum’s “Dolly city”, a sacrifice is being performed nonetheless, Blum clarifies that the city is numb, and the desired catharsis is prevented. Violence is a mundane thing and will not purify us.Same epiphany is at the end of “Mami”(1986) however the difference is the tone where Blum’s writing faces the ‘absence’a bottomless city, no infrastructure the craziest city on earth “(Gurevitz, 1997,p. 291). Mami in “the War” song sacrifices her country for god, sending it to war: “Take the human beings we were Take, and we will send you more Because our lives are insipid and gloomy And death is extremely beautiful.” Mami expects the downfall to be transcendental much like the Marquis de Sade, in his goal to liberate the individual from societies’ taboos Sade is still part of the modern pursuit of happiness. (Gurevitz, 1997).

But the new generation of the beginning of the millennium wants to be truly liberated, maybe when it was first on, before the first Intifada, Mami was innovative but stronger pieces failed to crack the apathy, and Mami turned out to be a case of those who need to cure their guilt.(Shadur,2002) It seems to me that Shadur is describing the revival of Mami as an act of redemption, but as mentioned before, this generation is pleased with pessimism, not to be redeemed, so what makes the two biggest theatres in Israel to unite to revive this production? Taubs’(1997) critical explanation on ‘political correctness’ may give us a reason: he defines P.C. as a general accusation to a chaotic society, the complex is too profound for some of the intellectuals hence they created a new wlite, one that secures their righteousness. Articles which promoted the revival wrote: “The new hall of ‘Habima’ and ‘Hakameri ‘is bringing back the mythological opera” (Peri,2002) Shay Lahav gushed over how “Mami” was the repeated record in his army base, four pages were dedicated to the mythology of “Mami”. Stories of how everyone from the periphery, to Ehud Barak, the former prime-minister knew it by heart (2001). “Mami” in 2002 is equal to the character that goes from being a simple waitress to a terrifying leader. This two-edged swords is the gist of ‘postmodernism’: as in Jameson’s analysis(1991) of Munch’s “Scream”, this canonical piece became commercialized and was deconstructed to the point that the effect vanished, leaving only a resonance, an amplified fragment of the original meaning. Blum writes in her story “There” of a character about to commit suicide: “I opened my mouth like the scream of munch”(Gurevitz,1997 p.295) Gurevitz explains that the scream derives from a cultural place and it’s not authentic, i.e. the flow of symbols becomes a representation for the detachment we feel (Taub, 1997) “Mami” turned into that symbol . It is interesting to compare Mami to the symbol of the ‘Fiddler’ from “Fiddler on the roof”: represents the drama in the play the tradition is what keeps the fiddler playing the violin out of balance, (Swain, 2002) Mami is a symbol for how the optimistic intentions of Israel turned to be self-destructive. And In 2002, the symbol of Mami is no longer a model of that tension, there is a generation that has not required the optimism of the sixties, takes the failure in consideration and sceptical about the solution (Taub, 1997) Moreover, now “Mami “is a part of a co-operative, a play that at the beginning was banned from being listened in the national radio (Lahav,2001) is now performing in the north of Tel-Aviv next to the hippest clubs, restaurants and coffee shops it becomes an industrial mass production, according to Filmer(1998) that leads to massification of the product . Taub (1997) highlights that art under the hands of democratic capitalism is unable to rebel, and Gurevitz(1997) claims that postmodern thinking creates the avant-garde, while the system embraces it only to find new ways to sell more. “Mami” in the second production is portrayed by Orit Shahaf , Merav Yodilevitch(2002) believes the casting symbols the “detached white trash society we turned into”. To me it seems like a choice of aesthetics over content: officially it does seem right, Shahaf is the lead singer of a popular punk-rock band, but when she sings “The Rape” song with this North-American style of spreading the words, something in the conflict Cohen portrayed disappears (YouTube 2010) and” Mami” becomes a hollow shell and a nostalgic excuse. Like a postmodern quote integrated in a new surrounding (Taub,1997). “Mami” in 2002 failed to touch the same depths it did 16 years ago. but isn’t that what postmodernism does to myths, it overdecorates them till it gains a stimulating influence, eventually developing into ‘kitsch’ (Gurevitz, 1997) Nostalgia for an old aesthetics is responsible for the huge success of “Mery-Lu” in 2002, performed simultaneously with “Mami”, a new Israeli musical collecting songs mainly from the euphoric era of the 1970’s in Israel. “Mami “wished to set new ideals, however,” idealization inevitably oversimplifies the complexities of containing heterogeneous political in stable”. (Filmer et. el,1998, p 4) As a counterpoint Gurevitz asks(1997, p. 239): “If the ideal is the enemy, isn’t art becoming the puppet of a political status quo that is interested in cultural nihilism to create the mask of evil and inequality?” To summarise, “Mami” is a substantial landmark for the dynamic Israel that wishes to create a stable present when past is still unsolved and future is unclear, it is craving for mythologies. Hopefully “Mami” will remain in Israeli pantheon, and will be revived in a way that justifies its place in history, like others who deserve it. Not for the reason mentioned in the final song (“Mami”,1986): (“What you will not scream/No one would say) but for reasons expressing joy for the diversity we share, as sung in the opening song: “The weather is very good And I feel very good The tar shines in the sun We are also on the map Love you, really do How much i love you”.