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“I don’t look for anything specific. I’m just curious and my eyes are open. Consequently, looking surprises me each time anew. I see a lot of things other people don’t”
But Friedl didn’t stop at merely looking; she wrote and illustrated a series of articles in which she disguised herself – concealed herself – and then focused on the relevant scene and documented the events.
As a girl she deliberated between drawing and an acting career:
“I have an inclination for acting. When I was in the British army I used to surprise my friends with humoristic sketches and portrayals of different characters”.
The idea to become the “other” stemmed from the principle she endeavored to adhere to: “Don’t judge anyone until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes”.
“One day I witnessed a heated argument between a bus conductor and the passengers. I immediately decided to be a conductor myself, even for just a few hours, to see things from the other side of the glass”.
That was how Friedl began dressing up as different characters and documenting what happened to her and what she learned in a newspaper, both in writing and illustration. “As a journalist I could be an actress as well. I was intrigued by playing with reality, without my surroundings being aware of who I am. It enables me to know what really happens there. It allows you to identify with the character and provide the reader with information that is far more credible and a lot more interesting”.
The articles were written between 1955 and 1972 for At magazine. The phenomena and problems raised in the articles are highly relevant for their time: acclimatization and livelihood difficulties of new immigrants; a new immigrant from Morocco, a student at a Hebrew ulpan, or a woman looking for work in the domestic-help market. She tried her hand in a series of professions, as a waitress in the Knesset cafeteria, a bus conductor, a hotel chambermaid, and experienced different types of situations: a singer, a stewardess on a passenger ship, a beggar, an American tourist in Israel, a volunteer on a kibbutz, or an elderly lady in an old-age home.
How I changed my sex and went out to pick up girls
“I consider myself an expert on men. My whole adult life I’ve been studying this interesting subject. From a woman’s perspective of course. Now I decided to study men as a man”. This is how Friedl opens the article for which she disguised herself as a man, “a good looking man”, according to her. She borrowed part of the disguise from the Habima National Theatre, and completed it with items from her own wardrobe. “At home I added my own pants to match the color of my tie, with the zipper in the front (these days there’s not much difference in appearance, only in content)”.
“It was more complicated to conceal what I have in abundance and which a man doesn’t have at all”, she describes her feminine figure in an illustration, not divulging all her measurements: “I’m not telling”.
Friedl describes in minute detail how she disguised herself as a man:
“I completely removed the holder of the business, thus causing a certain change in position. I filled the hollow beneath them with a small, folded towel. I covered it all with another towel reinforced with scotch tape, which I wound tightly around several times. It felt like being in a suit of armor. I barely managed to sit or breathe, but it was important! Symbols of my femininity completely vanished, and a small (towelly) paunch appeared, like in men of a certain age”.
Friedl doesn’t stop at masculine clothing, but also adopts a beard and thick masculine eyebrows, which Habima actor Yitzhak Bareket paints on for her. “A very interesting beard gradually appeared on my face, a mustache that covered my typical wrinkles, and thick, dynamic eyebrows. I combed my bangs to the side. With a paintbrush I added some white to my hair, to match its color to that of the beard. Glasses perched on my nose, and in the mirror appeared an interesting, intellectual, special man… I almost fell in love with him!”
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“My body measurements – I’m not telling!”
“In the mirror appeared an interesting, intellectual, special man…”
“Not so fast!”
As a man Friedl goes for a drink in a popular pickup bar and asks the waiter where she can pick up a girl around here. When she goes to the nearby park, instead of pretty girls, she encounters a man who’s actually interested in her as man.
“The scotch tape that held my femininity in like a tight hoop started to itch terribly. A girlfriend of mine got a terrible fright when a man showed up at her door so late at night. She got even more of a fright when that man addressed her in her friend’s voice…”
Friedl sums up the experience with the sentence:
“Now I pray every morning: Blessed is He that did not make me a man”.
From the personal collection of the late Friedl Stern, which was donated to the Israeli Cartoon Museum
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