This morning I stumbled onto a treasure trove of pictures and factoids regarding the Nahal troupe, from its beginning until at least 1972. This helped me fill reveral gaps in my knowledge about the 1972 troupe. I realise that probably only a few people are interested in this material, but it's important to me.
First is a picture - captioned, so that one can see who played what - of the musicians from that time.
The flute was almost always used in the band's songs. My friend Benny Negri asked to get him a flautist. I remembered the beautiful girl on the kibbutz, she was a year younger than me (not what you think), the blonde with the bright eyes, who I used to follow as a teenager. When we learned about all the possible types of musical instruments, she started with the flute and did wonders with it. She had another advantage besides being from Kibbutz Sasa, where I came from. Her mother and my adopted mother were twin sisters.
On the left is Danny Pe'er who played keyboards and apparently was a combat medic before he became part of the troupe. He later went on to play three different shows with Yehonatan Geffen, and later played in Gazoz, alongside Gidi Gov.
Another captioned picture that partially solves another lacuna in my knowledge: who was who in the song 'The Ballad of Yitzchak Sadeh" (this coincidentally was the name of the drummer pictured above!). Unfortunately the quality of the picture is poor but sufficient to see who is seated/standing where so that they can be matched in the video. Shimon Weitzman is the one holding the microphone (note that in the video, there are no microphones to be seen; I seem to recall that there were some strung above the performers). I am most interested in who sings the second verse; unfortunately it's not possible to do so from this picture. Had I read the caption a bit better, I would have noticed that the person I am interested is not in the picture! He would have been to the far right, outside of the frame.
Why the second verse? The singer had good stage presence and later told the amusing story (in a mixture of Hebrew and Italian) of an Italian boat captain who is hired to take illegal immigrants from Italy to Palestine (as it was then). The name that I originally considered for this role turned out to be one of the musicians, so obviously I still didn't know who it was.
But the following picture nails the identity. Again, a very poor quality picture but it's captioned and that's what is important. Gidi Gov can be seen here on the far right wooing his future wife (they married in 1977), but I was interested in the second soldier when going left to right. This is Itzik Ben Melech, a name with which I am not familiar. According to Wikipedia, he has been active both as a singer and as an actor, but our paths never crossed.
Shimon Weitzman wrote a book about his days in the Nahal; I'll try and get a copy of this although I suspect that it might be a private printing.
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