The Hannans: Anita, 70, Yakir, 34, Olga, 28, Moshe, 70; live in Tel Aviv and Bat Yam, flying to Dubai
Hi, where are you off to?
Yakir: My father turns 70 in a few days, and until a few minutes ago he thought he was on his way to Eilat. He just found out he’s flying to Dubai for a week.
Mazal tov!
Moshe: I’m in a dream. I am thrilled. Thank God I have a son like this and a family like this.
Yakir: He wasn’t expecting it.
What did he actually know?
Yakir: Nothing, basically. When I told him we were flying to Eilat, I saw he was a bit disappointed. He couldn’t understand why we needed so many suitcases for a weekend. When we got here, I told him it’s not a weekend, it’s a week, and he was really happy. And then I told him that it’s not Eilat, it’s Dubai, and he was even happier.
And what do you have to say, at 70?
Moshe: I was born in Israel, I had a business, I lost the business, and thank God, for the past 20 years I had a salaried job and I was happy. Now, like everyone, I was put on furlough and then I was fired. Can’t do much about it, but I have no worries, as long as I’m healthy.
Anita: We have one son, who lets us enjoy life.
Moshe: He’s great support for us. We know we can rely on him, we’re very close.
Where did you get the idea to surprise him?
Yakir: I’d wanted to do something special for my dad’s birthday. I started thinking about it even before the coronavirus. For my mother’s birthday, I organized a big surprise event. That was just before the first lockdown.
How was it for you, Anita?
Anita: No one told me anything, not even my hairdresser. I was there the same afternoon, and she didn’t say a thing. They said we were going out to a restaurant, and I didn’t want to, because the talk about the coronavirus had just started. But they made me go. In the end, we got to a banquet hall, with 72 people, and it was an incredible evening. Half a heart attack.
Yakir: I made a special video clip with pictures from her whole life. Since then there haven’t been any group events. I wanted to find a different way to surprise Dad. Just then the whole Dubai thing started, and I thought that could be interesting. In the end, we were able to make it happen.
Anita: He found an original way.
Was it complicated?
Yakir: There were a few difficulties along the way. My partner is a foreign resident, and it’s not simple for someone who isn’t an Israeli citizen to leave the country and come back easily. We had to get a special permit.
How did you meet?
Yakir: The last place I worked, we had an R&D center in Kiev. I flew there for an annual company event and that’s when we met. We were in regular contact after that, and later we also flew to Rome together. That was also a surprise I organized for her. After that I was sent to Kiev again, and we met again, and then she came here for a visit two years ago. She’s been here since then, which was also a surprise.
A real serial surpriser.
Yakir: I manage a product in a high-tech company – and you need a lot of improvisational ability.
What do you like about surprising people?
Yakir: It’s a lot of fun. Especially if it’s my parents or people close to me – there’s nothing like seeing them at a moment of happiness that they weren’t anticipating. I try to think what I can do that will make people happy in a way they didn’t expect, and that will be comfortable for them. I think of how to suit it to the person, the event, the time and the period.
Lev and Lea Rubinchik, 73 and 74; live in Nahariya, arriving from Bansko, Bulgaria
Hi, what were you doing in Bansko?
Lev: We were having fun – we have a house there.
Lea: And we skied. The season finally got underway, after we had been there for seven months. And if it’s cold for you in the snow, you can go into natural hot springs. But that’s dangerous, because it’s 70 degrees [Celsius; 158 F.]. And we picked mushrooms, too. There aren’t a lot of tourists in the forest now, so there are mushrooms instead of grass. White mushrooms, the fanciest kind.
Lev: Locals collect them and sell them to companies in Italy that make pizzas with them.
Are there poisonous mushrooms?
Lea: Of course, plenty of them. But we’re from St. Petersburg, so we know about that from childhood.
Why did you choose Bansko?
Lev: Because of the climate – we looked for a normal climate.
Lea: A climate with four seasons. Not like here.
Where do you live in Israel?
Lea: We’ve lived in lots of places: Tel Aviv, Holon, Shoham, Yad Rambam. We had to move because of work. But now it looks like it’s final, in Nahariya. We have a garden and land there, too, and we’re 30 meters from the sea.
Which is better – Nahariya or Bansko?
Lev: Both – you need variety in life. If we’re here a long time, we miss being there, and vice versa.
Had you planned on going for so long?
Lea: We wanted to go for a month, but a lockdown started in Israel, and there you don’t feel it. We waited and waited until the year was almost over, and we still hadn’t been back in Israel.
What did you miss in Israel?
Lea: We have family here, grandchildren, a daughter.
Lev: We even missed speaking Hebrew – even though there were a lot of Israelis there. There are people who have been living there for five years without going back to Israel.
Lea: My girlfriends called to see if we’d forgotten our Hebrew. I didn’t forget, but I didn’t learn Bulgarian.
Lev: The problem is that Bulgarian is similar to Russian, but the same words have different meanings. For example, the way you say “chair” in Russian is the way you say “table” in Bulgarian.
What was it like for you to learn Hebrew?
Lea: Children taught me. With fairy tales by Andersen and songs, and that’s how I learned. Half a year after we made aliyah, there was a party at work and I was asked what it’s like to move to Israel. All I knew were children’s slang words, so I said kef [fun].
How did you meet?
Lev: We met before you two were born. We’ve been fighting for more than 50 years, but we always find a compromise.
Lea: Through laughter. We studied airplane instrumentation. Then we were sent to the Caucasus together, to [Mt.] Elbrus, where it was full of snow, ice and lightning.
What drew you to each other then?
Lev: My laziness. I lost a few laboratory assignments and I wanted to copy the reports from someone. She let me copy, but it cost me plenty.
Lea: There weren’t many girls at the university, so there was great competition among the men.
When did you come to Israel?
Lea: In 1991. I came to work on something very secret in computers. My Hebrew wasn’t good yet, and the first thing I was told was that they knew everything about me. They told me, “If you don’t tell, we’ll take you on.” So they took me on. And I had thought that if I couldn’t find any other sort of work, I would have to work in cleaning.
Lev: I started to work in the field of environmental quality. Our company manufactured a system for monitoring the air around the country.
Looking back, is there something you would do differently?
Lev: Maybe have more children.
Lea: We’re always working, nonstop. Work was also our hobby, 13 hours a day sometimes. Our daughter, who has a PhD in economics, probably got it from us, because she also has one son. So we’re not rich in children. Now we would have liked to have a larger family, but before there was no time. Most of the good things that happened to us are simply a miracle from above; many things happened that we didn’t plan or decide on in advance. They just happened.
What’s the next event?
Anita: Now we need to plan Yakir’s wedding, with God’s help.
Do people ever give you surprises?
Anita: I made him a lot of surprises in life.
Yakir: I think it was when I was 12, my birthday. We went to Pizza Hut and there was no one there. I thought, “Wow, none of my friends showed up.” And then suddenly I saw the whole class, everyone came. That’s how it is with surprises: At first you’re upset, and then boom, everything changes into happiness.
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'I was looking for a way to surprise dad. Just then, flights from Israel to Dubai began' - Haaretz.com
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