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Last update - 22:43 18/01/2008 Photo Eclipse By Aviva Lori Tags: Israel, Maxim Salomon  In the late afternoon of October 18, 1991, Maxim Salomon breathed his last, in Yoseftal Medical Center in Eilat. At his bedside were three of his four children: Iris Milner, Tamar Lavi and Gur Salomon. His firstborn son, Raphael Prag, did not go to Eilat to part with his dying father. "He was never a true father," Prag says today, "and I don't say that disparagingly. I feel no bitterness in my heart. He was Maxim Salomon, but at the age of 35 I decided that I had had enough and I broke off all contact with him. That did not especially interest him, and grandchildren never meant anything to him. He was a Bohemian, a hedonist and an egoist, but you can't take away the good eye he had." Maxim Salomon died at the age of 69, from cirrhosis of the liver. In the 1950s he was one of Israel's leading photographers, a pioneer of photojournalism in the country and a meticulous, obsessive documenter of local reality, particularly that in Tel Aviv. He was zealous of his work, his cameras, his wives and his children, but never for long: When he got tired of what he was doing, he dumped everything and went on to the next project. His next wife, his next place. He lived in Tel Aviv, London, Tiberias, Eilat and New York. He had four official wives, four children and numberless girlfriends and passing flirtations. Last week, an exhibition of his work - "Maxim Salomon: Contemporary Photojournalism Pioneer 1947-1957" - opened at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv (initiator and curator: Guy Raz). The show casts a soft, nostalgic and romantic light on life in Israel during its first decade of existence, and restores to public awareness a forgotten artist who was slightly mad. Advertisement "All of us in this profession are a bit mad and crazy," agree veteran photographers Shlomo Arad and David Rubinger. Maxim Salomon, though, took the photographer's license to be mad a bit more liberally than others. Although Salomon's name has something of a foreign ring to it, he was born in Tel Aviv in 1922 to a veteran family in the country: His great-grandfather was the brother of Yoel Moshe Salomon, one of the founders of Petah Tikva. That lineage was magical and gave a certain significance to his life. From it he forged the legend of Maxim Salomon, a lord of this land. The progenitor of the dynasty, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Zoref, was among the group of followers of the renowned rabbi, the Gaon of Vilna, who immigrated to the Holy Land from Lithuania at the beginning of the 19th century. He was one of the first Ashkenazim to settle in Jerusalem, in order to restore a synagogue that lay in ruins - Hurbat Yehuda Hehasid - and hasten the coming of the Messiah. His grandson, Yoel Moshe Salomon was among the first Jews to break out of the confines of the Old City of Jerusalem. He founded the Nahalat Shiva neighborhood (now a trendy area in central Jerusalem) in the 1860s and a few years later became one of the founders of the city's ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood. Maxim Salomon's father, Aryeh, forsook both religion and city, moving to Tel Aviv. He joined the German army in World War I and was assigned to an air squadron as an aerial photographer. After the war he was an employee of the Anglo-Palestine Bank (now Bank Leumi) in Beirut and subsequently became the manager of the branch on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. In the 1930s the bourgeois family built itself a small villa with a large yard at the corner of Rothschild Boulevard and Sheinkin Street. An apartment building now stands there, but the palm tree that grew in the yard sticks out of the ground in front of the building, twists around the first floor and continues upward. When Maxim was five, his mother, Tova, a kindergarten teacher, took him with her to Beirut, where she worked in a kindergarten for Hebrew speakers and also attended a school for nurses. Salomon liked to tell people that he had been raised by nuns. Mother and son returned to Tel Aviv two years later, and Salomon attended the Halperin elementary school, where one of his classmates was Arie (Lova) Eliav, the future Labor movement activist. "We were good friends," Eliav relates. "He was a very mischievous boy, gifted and alert." After attending Gymnasia Balfour high school, Salomon returned to Beirut, entering the American College there. Whether he graduated is not known, but in any event he joined the British Army at the age of 17, at the start of World War II. "He was very proud of that," recalls his daughter, Iris Milner. "He always hung the medals on the tweed jackets he loved to wear so much." He was posted to Alexandria but apparently did little beyond guard duty. "He had stories from here to Be'er Sheva," says the journalist Menahem Talmi, who worked with Salomon on the Israel Defense Forces weekly Bamahane and afterward on the mass-circulation newspaper Maariv. "Things were never boring with him. He would regale you with stories about whorehouses in Cairo. Everyone went to the whorehouses looking for young girls, he said, 'But I went to the soldiers' welfare place, looking for aunties with spectacles, because they were the best.'" The photographer Shabtai Tal recalls the British accent Salomon adopted: "He would laugh at the British and at the British Army, but he himself was an Anglophile who adopted the British curses and made fun of the yekke [Jews of German origin] photographers who were then dominant in the country. He was an anomaly. He wore an old jersey, but always had a silk cravat around his neck." After the war, in the wake of his father, Salomon was appointed manager of the Anglo-Palestine Bank in Lod. Bored there, he soon returned to Tel Aviv, where he began to take pictures. One of his first assignments, in the service of the Haganah (the forerunner of the IDF), was to document the arrival of the illegal immigrant ship "Exodus." His impressive photographs opened doors for him. After seeing combat service in the Golani infantry brigade during the War of Independence, he returned to Tel Aviv and resumed his photographic work. He married Sheila, a truck driver he met in the British Army; she converted to Judaism and the couple went to London, to live with her parents. Salomon studied photography and their son, Raphael, was born there in 1949. Two years later they returned to Israel and separated. Israeli photographer Micha Bar-Am met Salomon around a campfire after the War of Independence. Baram was then part of a group that fused Bohemians with former members of the pre-state Palmah commando unit, which met socially and liked to sing together. "Maxim showed up occasionally and took our picture," Baram recalls. "He wasn't exactly part of the group - he came more for professional reasons." What kind of photographer would you say he was? Baram: "A hybrid of a field and sports photographer and a paparazzi. Most of the photographers then were German speaking, yekkes, whereas he was frenetic, a native-born photographer with a temperament, a news photographer who went where the assignments and events took him. He had good instincts." In 1950, Salomon went to the editorial offices of the muckraking weekly Haolam Hazeh and declared that he wanted to be the magazine's house photographer. "A fellow of about 28 showed up, thin, bearded, scowling and edgy, and proposed himself as photographer," remembers Uri Avnery, who became the magazine's editor-in-chief that year. "We spoke for a minute or two, he showed me a few photos, and I knew he was the man." Salomon thus became the first house photographer of a media outlet in Israel. "In those days photographers took pictures on spec," Avnery explains, "and then made the rounds of the papers to show their wares, and the editor chose pictures in order to enliven the huge body of text. Our concept, though, was that the photograph becomes an integral part of the article and the photographer takes part in all the decisions." Salomon fit in well into the nonconformist atmosphere of Haolam Hazeh, which defied the local establishment. He was always the first one at an event and always came back with a good shot. "He wasn't afraid of anyone," Avnery says, "not of God and not of his family. He looked like a press photographer out of the movies. He had a beard, he was jumpy, rough-hewn and opinionated. He stuck to his guns and nothing stopped him from doing his job." Salomon stayed with Haolam Hazeh for only one year, during which he did almost all the cover photos. There were lots of beautiful women and also fashion spreads, one of them starring his wife, Sheila. Avnery can't remember why Salomon left, but says it was likely due to an argument or a quarrel, since "it was generally hard to put up with him." Tel Aviv life was then a bubble of idleness centering around cafes, and large, raucous parties whose echoes could be heard as far as Jaffa. Journalists, poets and writers hung out at the legendary Kassit cafe and at Abie Nathan's restaurant, California. There was lots of eating and drinking, especially the latter. One could always see Salomon with a bottle of beer in hand. In contrast to the Bohemian life, family life was never Salomon's strong suit, to put it mildly. "The truth is that I didn't see him much," says his son, Raphael, a member of Kibbutz Degania Bet. "We met once every few months, even though we lived in the same city, me in Afeka [a Tel Aviv suburb] and him in town." His mother, Sheila, who went on to manage the British Airways branch in Israel, soon married Yehuda Prag, the chief of the Tel Aviv police, who adopted Raphael. "I didn't much care for the fact that he gave me up so he wouldn't have to pay alimony or that it didn't bother him that I would be named Prag and not Salomon," Raphael explains. "But from the little I saw of him, I actually have pleasant childhood memories. Being with him was a lot of fun. He took me to Kassit and to California [the restaurant], and everyone knew him - Maxim, Maxim [the word means "charming" in Hebrew]. But when I grew up I chose to stay away from him. Because to be a father is a right, not a duty, but he saw it as a duty. I thought he could have made a bit more of an effort to see his son." After his army service, Prag decided to reassume his original surname and restored Salomon in his ID card. At the age of 55 he changed his mind again, however, and went back to Prag. "He was a big disappointment. He did not fulfill his role as a father," he says. "That is why I didn't go to see him before his death." After leaving Haolam Hazeh, Salomon worked for Bamahane and also did free-lance photography for all the newspapers. But wherever he went, his work was always accompanied by a certain drama. "He was very industrious," Menahem Talmi recalls, "always ready to do everything for a shot - climb a tree or stand on a roof - and then to make sure someone took his picture in the tree. He was a theatrical type, he liked to fantasize." His daughter, Iris, remembers an incident from February 1953: "A bomb exploded in the Russian embassy in Tel Aviv and the police kept all the photographers away. He entered the building next door, said he was a security man and jumped along the drainpipe into the courtyard of the embassy; through the window he photographed the Russian ambassador lamenting the destruction." Around this time Salomon bought a showy sports car, a red MG convertible, and the women of Tel Aviv swooned at his charms and those of the car. In 1954, he met Lucy, a new immigrant from a small town near Czernowitz, in Ukraine. She was on holiday, attending a film festival on Mount Carmel. "He was there for work, it was a small hall, and that's how we met," she relates. "When he wanted a particular woman, he knew exactly how to get her. He used everything you read about in the books." After a time they were married and took up residence in a room in the backyard of his parents' home on Rothschild Boulevard, where Salomon dug a swimming pool and planted lemon trees. Lucy, considered one of the most beautiful women in Tel Aviv, worked in the Cameri Theater and afterward had an import-export business. Salomon was working for Maariv. Yosef Lapid, a former Maariv journalist (and later justice minister), laughs when he recalls Salomon: "He was an excellent photojournalist and a charming, social individual - one of those people with charisma that has no logical explanation. It was just there." Lapid remembers vividly a specific article he did with Salomon. "There was unrest in Hatikva neighborhood" - a working-class quarter in South Tel Aviv - "and I was sent to do a report and he came along as the photographer. But when we arrived, there were no disturbances. Then a group of children came to a bus station and Maxim told them, 'I will buy each of you a drink if you pound the sides of the first bus that shows up.' The children did what he asked, he took the pictures, and he had disturbances in Hatikva." Lucy recalls another episode from Salomon's professional life. In 1957, journalist and later resort owner Rafi Nelson was released from jail in Egypt, having been imprisoned for trying to pass through the Suez Canal as a sailor on a Danish ship. "All the photographers and journalists waited for hours at the border crossing," she relates. "Maxim suddenly disappeared. An hour and a half later, a jeep showed up carrying two people - Maxim, and Rafi Nelson next to him. He was the only one who burst through and got to the heart of the story. He always had ideas. His brain came up with things that no one else thought of." On one occasion, Salomon accompanied Talmi on assignment, covering the Syrian shelling of the Hula Valley. On the shore of Lake Kinneret he saw the home of an Arab boat-maker, which was up for sale. He bought the house on impulse, dropped everything and moved to Tiberias. Lucy, who was pregnant at the time, came with him. To lend the occasion some drama, Salomon took a boat to the middle of the lake and later said that he had hurled all his cameras into the water. The story became a legend. "I didn't see it," Lucy says. "I am sure he said he did it; in my view it was a metaphor for the fact that he was throwing away everything and starting over, and in a certain sense that is true. Maybe he didn't throw his camera into the water, but he didn't touch it much, either. On the other hand, when he got into a rage, he threw other things into the water, such as classical music records that we both loved. He was unstable and it was hard to live with him." Why did he leave Tel Aviv? Lucy: "That was a method with him, first to create and then to pass it on to someone else and do something new. He wasn't capable of consistency and he didn't make do with what he achieved - he always wanted more." Lucy and Salomon were married 10 years. Their daughter, Iris, was born in 1958. In Tiberias the Salomons established a famous nightclub that they called Minus 206 - because of its altitude, 206 meters below sea level. But even though the idea was to leave Tel Aviv behind, that isn't what happened. Every weekend the whole Tel Aviv Bohemian scene showed up at Salomon's place in Tiberias. "He brought a few racing boats and water skis and set up a charming bar, and there we lived," says Milner, a former journalist who now teaches Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University. "All the faces from Kassit moved to Tiberias. All kinds of important people came. I had a photograph of myself with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward when they visited Israel. Everyone sat around under the eucalyptus trees and there was music and people drank and drank and water-skied, and he and my mother ran the whole show. We lived there four years." Michal Weizman, daughter of Reuma and Ezer Weizman (the late president of Israel), remembers Minus 206 as a major hang-out on weekends and holidays. "It was terrific fun there," she says. "Dad was the commander of the air force at the time, and every Shabbat they would pack us up and we would go to Tiberias. We sat on the beach until dark, eating St. Peter's fish and enjoying ourselves. It was a beach where you could really be laid back. Maxim and Lucy were charming hosts. For me, if I look back, he was the Rafi Nelson of my childhood - a beatnik in the positive sense of the word." Four years later, Salomon moved on. "They were building the National Water Carrier and decided that it was necessary to cut down the eucalyptus grove," Milner recalls. "He got really furious and sold the place to Rafi Nelson for a pittance. Anyway, he had enough of it, because at some stage he always had enough of it. We moved to Eilat. My mother worked for the Swiss company that built the port there and my father did photography for them. Those were his waning years. "My parents separated in 1964," she continues. "My mom and I moved to Ramat Gan. He was obnoxious on a personal level. His relationships with his children were turbulent, as they were with his surroundings in general. It was impossible to live with him. It's not by chance that it took so many years before this exhibition became possible. People needed time to regain their composure, and be sure he wouldn't show up at the last minute and spoil something. It's terribly sad, but that was also his tragedy. After [my parents'] separation I was not in ongoing contact with him." What kind of father was he? Milner: "He loved his children very much in his childish way. When I was little, we played for hours. He had a tremendous imagination and great sensitivity. When we came to some new place, he would tell me to close my eyes, and only after he placed me in the right spot, would have me open them and see the marvelous view. The drama of the frame: that was the thing. It was an integral part of life. Like the photographs he was always taking. I can still remember the sound of the click. All the time with his head bent down, looking into the camera. Nothing was just a plain event, it was all part of a gigantic history that was unfolding day after day." Salomon stayed in Eilat, as a photographer and writer for a local weekly, using the nom de plume "Maxim Abu Iris" (Maxim father of Iris). Occasionally he went to Tel Aviv, looking for work with the big dailies. "I told him I needed a sports photographer," says Natan Dunewitz, then editor of Haaretz Magazine. "He started to work and got shots that others didn't. He had a convertible sports car, in which he took a ladder to the soccer games. He placed the ladder behind one of the nets, and when the players drew close, he photographed them, like on television. The other photographers sat on the grass and waited for a goal to be scored. He didn't wait. He went for the frame and didn't wait for the frame to come to him. His photos were excellent and always from unusual angles." Salomon worked for Haaretz for about two years, before returning to Eilat. Dunewitz also recalls his outbursts of fury. "When he drank it was hard to communicate with him. You had to make sure not to hurt him in some sensitive spot, because then he would go wild. Still, if you were good to him, he was good to you." When Israel Television first went on the air, in 1968, Salomon was the news department's correspondent in the south. He also ran a "photo safari" for tourists in Eilat, taking them into the desert for a day and teaching them basic photography. In 1969, he met a young soldier in a Tel Aviv cafe and less than a year later married her under a palm tree in Sinai. Esther Salomon, his third wife, still lives in Eilat, where she runs Esti's Photography Center, which belonged to both of them. "He was a well-known photographer and the most charismatic person you can imagine, a man who captured women's hearts," she says. "He had an extraordinary personality and a high IQ, and he was a born storyteller. Even on his deathbed, he had young girls around him who were fascinated by his stories." About a year after the marriage their daughter, Tamar, was born, and a year later their son, Gur. But the Salomonic charm began to crumble in earnest. "He was like the two sides of the moon," Salomon recalls, "with one side illuminated, the other dark. Out of the house he was charming and charismatic, but at home it was different." They were divorced in 1974. She says he cheated on her; there were rumors of violence. "If he had been such a good father and such a good husband, I would not have divorced him," she says. "I am not willing to talk about violence, but faithfulness was not his strong point, and that is what broke the camel's back." Esther waived alimony in return for a divorce and went on with her life. In the early 1980s she married an American man she met in Eilat and took the children with her to Florida to be with him. A few years later, the whole family returned to Eilat. Salomon always had to be courted and married. Even before the divorce from Esther, he met a Jewish American woman on the beach in Eilat - a lecturer in fashion who was in Israel on sabbatical - fell in love with her and moved to New York to be with her. Gur Salomon, the youngest son, now 37 and a journalist and press photographer, does not have good memories of his father. "Once every year, or year and a half, he would show up for a visit in Israel," Gur says. "Actually, he was more of a father-by- correspondence. He wrote about his experiences in New York and we wrote about missing him." Salomon's life in New York was a Cinderella story, but with a bad ending. His wife, Rosalie, had a small place in the Village and a dream house in the Hamptons. "It was a wooden house of the kind you see in magazines," Gur remembers. "We visited him there once." Amos Ofer, a friend of Salomon's from Eilat, who visited him in New York, recalls mainly awkwardness: "He liked to fantasize. He introduced me to his friends as a general in the Israeli army, while actually I had barely made staff sergeant, and I didn't know where to bury myself from shame." Iris Milner was a student in New York in this period, but her connection with her father did not improve. "On the one hand he lived very well there, but on the other hand he did very little, mostly lamenting his glory years, which were behind him," she says. "Those were years of deterioration. Afterward there were apparently problems relating to economic affairs. He never provided for his children or his wives, and in the end everyone got fed up." Salomon returned to Israel after nine years in New York, divorced and emotionally shattered. But not for long. He met a woman in Tel Aviv and moved in with her. He opened a gallery-shop on Ruppin Street, printed his photos of Tel Aviv and sold them. Later, he met a former girlfriend who had served with him in the British Army and lived with her in Haifa. The wonderful years of fame were erased as though they had never happened. Few people remembered Maxim Salomon. His mother was still alive then, and in the background a deal was struck for the house on Rothschild Boulevard, which was sold to a contractor for a very tidy sum. No one in the family knows what happened to the money, but at the end of the summer of 1985, writer Yoram Kaniuk found Salomon sleeping on a bench in a Tel Aviv park. He was a vagrant with style: In one pocket he had Camembert cheese wrapped in thin paper, and in the other a ring with a fairly large diamond; it belonged to his mother, who had died a few months earlier. Kaniuk sat with Salomon for a few nights and heard his life story. This produced a lengthy article in the now-defunct glossy weekly Monitin, done in the best New Journalism style. The result was that Salomon got a hotel room paid for by the Tel Aviv Municipality. Kaniuk portrayed Salomon as a tragic director of a farce, as someone who constantly complained about his children and about his third wife, who fled with his two small children to America. What Salomon forgot to mention was that before she went to America, he went to New York with his fourth wife and left her with two toddlers in Eilat. "He has turned his impotence into potency. Everything he does is spontaneous, but calculated," Kaniuk wrote. "He is capable of making a melodrama out of a fuse box. All people are negatives for him. He possesses an innocent crookedness and can draw tears even from an enemy. He lives in a movie." As soon as the article appeared, Salomon sued Kaniuk for libel - and lost. "He claimed I decided to become famous at his expense," explains Kaniuk. "It's not his fault. He fell in love with some mad woman who persuaded him that he had to take action against me, but the judge disabused him of that idea." In the summer of 1991, Salomon was seen at the music festival on Kibbutz Kfar Blum, in the Galilee. He said he had a free ticket coming to him because his father had been the first subscriber to the Israel Philharmonic. They didn't allow him in, so he tried to force his way in. Three months earlier he had broken up with his Haifa girlfriend and decided to return to Eilat. He was already sick, and now tried to orchestrate his death, as he had his life. Amos Ofer received a postcard from him: "He apparently sensed that this was the end of the road and wrote me: 'Amos, my friend, shalom. If you are alive, if you are in Eilat, I am planning to come, please reply right away and write to me." A month later Ofer learned that Salomon was in the hospital and went to visit him. Ofer recalls Salomon's obsessive envy of Rafi Nelson, who had bought his Tiberias club from him and was by then managing a very successful resort village in Taba, on the Egyptian side of the Eilat border. "One day he calls me from the police station and asks me to come quickly," Ofer relates. "I prepared the checkbook, thinking I would get him released on bail. I enter the police station and see that he is free. It turns out that he was driving between Taba and Eilat, and thought he saw Rafi Nelson behind him, trying to assassinate him, so he went to the police to file a complaint. I got him out of there and convinced him that it couldn't have happened." "He was always the director of his life," Iris Milner says. "It was all a theatrical show, like the story of sitting on a park bench with a diamond ring in his pocket. He lived on the razor's edge, always at the extremes." Three days before his death, he called his children from the hospital. Despite the lengthy break in their relationship, Milner went and stayed. Gur and Tamar also came. "I got there 17 hours before he passed away," Gur says. "Iris and my sister, Tamar, were already there. The three of us were present when he took his last breath. For me it was a unique moment. At the end I can say that I love my father. I always loved him, and I am very proud of this exhibition." Maxim Salomon was buried in Haifa, his last official address. At the grave, Milner said: "Dad, we all wanted to be your children, we wanted to love you, but there was a missed connection somewhere." Bookmark to del.icio.us   Holocaust row U.K. Tory chief draws fire for calling school visits to Auschwitz a gimmick. 5 Stops in Galilee Rock hares, peach orchards, a taste of the past, and walking the Jesus trail.   1.   Magnificent Article 23:44  |  Jude Davies 18/01/08

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