Page 21 - Kol Bogrei Habonim - Winter 20

I was very unhappy, because I loved the smell member of the Habonim youth movement.
and texture of wood, and what you could do There, he was persuaded by the shlichim
with it. So that was my life at that point: from Israel to not go to medical school.
living in wood, but not being allowed to have "I was told, ‘We've already got too many
anything to do with it." doctors. They're cleaning shop windows on
Allenby Street. We need pioneers.’"
Nevertheless, Denis credits his father with
instilling the basics of his artistic vision. "My Denis left the university—"It almost broke
father had a wonderful method of teaching my parents' hearts," he says, and went to a
me, because he was something of an artist Habonim training kibbutz, where members
himself. He said that one has to look at things were taught the value of hard physical labour,
not merely to see them, but to see what they agriculture and cooperative living, and were
really are. When I was a small boy, we used instilled with the burning desire to build a
to go walking through parks. All of a sudden new country in the Jewish homeland.
he'd tell me, ‘Stop. Don't turn around. Tell me
what you just saw.’ If I said, ‘I saw an old
lady’, he'd ask me what she was wearing. I'd
say, ‘orange shoes.’ This taught me how to
look at things and record them."
As the years passed, Denis retained his
passion for art while acquiring a strong
interest in another field. He recalls, "Just
before university, there were two things I
wanted to do with my life: one was to become
a doctor, like a lot of Jewish boys at that time;
and the other was to be an artist. I think I
started drawing before I spoke. My parents
weren't very happy about that. They said I
couldn't make a living in art."

So, Denis went to medical school, hoping at
one point perhaps to be a doctor and an artist
at the same time. He imagined himself
becoming a medical artist, of the type who
illustrated medical textbooks like Grey's
Anatomy and now, medical websites on the
Internet. But life, as the old saying goes, is
something that happens to you while you're
busy planning something else.
By the time he got to Liverpool University,
Denis was already a confirmed Zionist and

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