Izik Yosha, Senior Cultural Reporter for Israel’s largest newspaper, Yedioth Achronot, knew Ofra Haza very well. Through the years he met her many times. He managed to earn the trust of Ofra and her manager Bezalel Aloni which allowed him to visit Ofra in her home several times and join them on a European tour, while other Israeli journalists were not allowed to enter her home. Yoav Hoffman spoke with him.
“Even in my personal meetings with her, she was one of the singers that ‘what you see is what you get’”, said Yosha. “She didn’t have two faces like many other singers we know have. All of my meetings with her at her home were very warm, very friendly and very kind. She wasn’t wild or an adventurer in the way we know from the lives of other singers. And besides, I never saw her sad or in an extreme mood. Everything with her was always very balanced somehow”. Yosha said Ofra did come to events, “but it was very measured, and only to places she felt it was important for her to be, events of people she wanted to respect and make happy, not so that she can be seen in an extravagant way”.
Despite his special connection with Ofra, Yosha admits, Ofra spoke more about her music and less about her thoughts and feelings. “She very rarely spoke about things that were not connected to her work. Today I know that many of these things she wanted to hide, many tensions and conflicts in her family. She was torn between her very strong personal and professional needs and the relationship she had with Bezalel – and the way her family treated him”. But he also said she had a good bond with her family: “I know she was very generous to her family. She would give them many presents, go shopping with them…”
In October of 1988 with Ofra’s huge international breakthrough in the charts, Izik Yosha joined Ofra and Bezalel in Italy and England and published his impressions in a Yedioth Achronot article titled: “Ofra Haza, What You Hear”. He wrote, “For a few months now the skies are smiling wide smiles at her. Smiles that spread all over Europe, and threaten to spread over the rest of the globe”. Maybe this kind of article made Ofra trust him rather than other journalists. “It took her a long time to feel free and relaxed in her approach toward me, because she was really very suspicious of the press, which, I think, was also because of her character, her very closed way of life. When you are that closed, you are suspicious of anyone who tries to enter. I really tried for a long time to show friendship, to show her that I really wanted to know her and cherish her work. I think she really did suffer for some time from the main press in Israel, from some kind of contempt. Even her first success abroad was received with much caution and coolness, and that was something I tried to fight against. That was the main reason I convinced my manager to send me to Italy, because many things were happening with Ofra abroad, and there was nothing about it here in the press. It irritated me! In Israel they didn’t really want to see that. In the end they had no choice, when they realized she was breaking boundaries. It was no longer in one country, and went through the entire world, in so many ways, in so many styles. She wrote rock and performed in San Remo and wrote music for movies; she did a million things! And then her range of skills as a singer and as a songwriter was discovered, and it should be said that with ‘Yamim Nishbarim’ (‘Broken Days’) she became a writer and a composer and not merely a singer. Together with Bezalel, she had a lot to offer”.
Yosha said that when Ofra was open with him she was very warm. “She always had many gestures. For example, she called me on my birthday every year, no matter where she was, even if she was in Australia, Hong Kong or Los Angeles, and if I wasn’t home she would always leave me a message on my answering machine, singing ‘Happy Birthday’, or something like that. She had very warm human gestures”.
Yosha tried to answer the million dollar question – could either of them succeed without the other. “I can understand why she was torn. She wanted to move forward, to leave the poverty of the Hatikva neighborhood. Meeting Bezalel was definitely the fateful encounter in her career, and without him she would have stayed there. Their once-in-a-lifetime bond was so unique, so original and so unusual that it’s hard to believe either of them would have gone such a long way on their own. I mean, his part and her part are inseparable. She was the singer and he was the force behind the scenes that made everything work. This is fascinating because these are two artists, not a ‘regular’ manager with a singer that gets all the credit. This is not a common occurrence. There are very few relationships like that in Israel”.
During the 1980’s all of Ofra’s encounters with the Israeli press circled around her love life. “I guess there was really nothing to report on that subject”, says Yosha. “If there was, she would have spoken. But there wasn’t. Why? I don’t know. I have no clue. In retrospect, I know of many suitors and dating attempts that she didn’t accept. There were pilots, businessmen, many others. But I really don’t know what happened there”.
Yosha also tells about Ofra’s professionalism, that it wasn’t limited to singing. “She made a big effort to learn languages. When she was in Italy she learned Italian so she could at least speak a few sentences, and she had a great skill for it. And of course, she was a heavenly musician. I remember her improvisations that weren’t recorded. It was wonderful to hear her improvise!”
He smiled as he told another story about the connection he had with Ofra. “When their plane crashed in 1987, they told me later that while they were walking all night in the rain and mud, Ofra said: ‘We’ll get home, and Yosha will wait for me there, and I look like this, with my hair like that’, and that was true! I did wait for her near her home with many other journalists, but I was the only one they let enter her home”.
Yosha also talks about his impressions of Ofra’s house. “Her house wasn’t ornate, it wasn’t extravagant. It had her gold records framed on one of the walls, a very functional kitchen. She had two floors, but I was never on the second floor”.
Yoav reminded Yosha about a critique he wrote in 1982 after watching her first tour, ‘Temptations’: “The musical management is very lacking, the lighting looks like it was taken from a cheap nightclub, we see her doing the same boring movements of kneeling and waving the top of her clothing over and over again, her words were recited childishly…” “I really wrote that?” Yosha is surprised. “She wasn’t a great performer then. Everything was very simple and very moderate. After that it really wasn’t important, because her material was much more interesting”.
In the end, Yosha tried to guess what would have happened if Ofra were still alive: “She received great international appreciation everywhere she went. I think she definitely would have done many, many more big and important things.”
