“When we got up from the sheba, one of the first things Roy asked was for us to go to the sea,” says Yanai Prisher Gutman about his and the late Amir’s son. The beach is a part of our lives in such a significant way that we could not remain angry at the sea, despite the tragedy.”
And Roy recalled: “It was seven years ago, in July. I am 11 years old, the tragedy happened when I was 4 years old.” Amir was recorded saying to him that day, in front of the camera: “You don’t need buoys because you can’t go into the water alone, the water here is very turbulent.” Not many people have almost their entire lives documented, even the last moments. But Amir Fay Gutman was not like everyone else.
“Amir lived 41 years, of which about 35 are documented,” says Yanai. The camera that was there from the age of 5 accompanied him over the years also on the big stages, at the happy events and in the daily routine, and was also there on the beach on that terrible day. But his story is unfathomable not only because of its ending, but mostly because of what happened to him along the way. “I don’t know who wrote the script for this thing, the scriptwriter went crazy,” said Amir at the height of his cancer treatments.
“one day i will be famous”
“Every time we moved, we had five such ‘archive’ boxes, that’s what he called them,” recalls Yanai. “I never opened them and I would always say to him, ‘Come on, why are you keeping this junk, let’s throw it away.’ A few months ago I opened it for the first time, and what did we not find there: letters he kept, crazy diary excerpts.”
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At Bim, the son Roy says: “I looked at the songs he did with his band, I really like the song Yom Ma’onen. We also used to listen to it a lot.” Father Shmuel recalled: “He always loved the show. When he was filmed in ‘Maariv for Youth’ he was not happy with it and then he said ‘You’ll see, one day I’ll be famous’.”
Roy: “I miss my father and I will never forget him” | Photo: Courtesy of Yes Doku
The chance of a lifetime for Amir Feiger, the boy from Kiryat Haim, came a year after Rabin’s murder. While the radio stations were playing ‘Lavkot Lech’ and ‘That Man’ on loop, a new pop began to be played in the world. Producer Doron (Kofi) Etzioni recalls: “Boy bands started to flourish, that was the very beginning. And the idea came up to do something like this in Israel, so we put an ad in the newspaper.” It happened in January 1996, and Etzioni recalls: “He stood out from the group in a magnetic way, he was absorbed in the frame like a model coming out of a picture. Along with him, four others were chosen.”
Michael Harpaz, a member of the band, recalls: “We were called Project Five at first and then the name changed to Bordeaux and Gold.” Eyal Dessau from the band adds: “There was a shocking name, they called him Ham-Ash.” In the end, Harpaz says, the name came from another direction: “Haim Shemesh entered the room and I said to him, ‘What’s up Haim, Gib who’s a high five’. Then I said – High Five, that’s the name of the band.”
“Tear the earring off his ear”
After they appeared on Dodo Topaz’s show, the craze started: “It was amazing, a feeling that we drank two liters of such a magic drink,” says Idan Yeskin, a member of High Five. And Michael Harpaz says: “We conquered the country. Hundreds of girls chased us, they pounced on us like piranhas. There were pushes and scratches, they tore the earring from Emir’s ear, they tore his pants.” Shmuel, the father, recalls: “There were those who literally engraved his name on their hands.” Amir himself said: “Girls would open the blinds for me at seven in the morning before school.”
“He would tell me ‘when I die young, the diaries will be worth a lot of money'” | Photo: Courtesy of Yes Doku
From the first moment it was clear that Amir was the star, which was less liked by the band members. “Obviously there were egos,” admits Dessau. “Why does this song come out first? Who stands first on stage? Why, say, Amir wears a white shirt and we all wear black? And it bothered us.”
The fight in the band: “Sounds like a gay”
And the first explosion was not long in coming: “We participated in Dan Shilon’s show. Hed Artzi decided that Amir would be the one sitting in the circle,” Yaskin recalls, “and then some of the people in the band said, ‘But you sound like a gay and then they will say we are a band of gays, even so they say we are Gays’. This was the first big crisis in the band.”
Beyond the competition for the front of the stage there was also this matter – the four boys, all straight, were afraid that Amir’s sexual identity would damage the band’s image. “Amir was not in the closet in the band,” says Dessau, Viskin points out: “Amir’s family knew, Amir’s friends knew, but outside, in the media, even the journalists who knew at the time didn’t talk about it. Some of the band members asked him to stop going to gay clubs because God forbid , if a journalist sees you then they will put it in the newspaper and then ‘you’re done with the band’s career’. How can you tell a person ‘don’t be you, be someone else?'”
Amir recorded these moments in his diary, which is also in the archives. “Desau despises me, (Eyal) Shahar still sees me as gay and everything that goes with that, and Michael doesn’t give me what he would give to another good friend. It’s hard for me that the band doesn’t support me,” he wrote.
“Amir is with us every day. His songs are with us, his pictures. It’s part of our existence” | Photo: Courtesy of Yes Doku
In the new series about his life, “Amir Perisher Gutman: The Life and Death of a Pop Star”, which is broadcast by Bis and Bing Plus, they gave life not only to the tapes, but also to the parts of the diary. “The idea was also to hear him tell, and we decided that we might check the possibility of the AI,” says Tzipi Bader, the director of the series. “The guy who actually works at AI, Yishai Raziel, read the letters we sent him, and entered them into the AI software from which he was able to produce Amir’s voice.”
The beatings, the breakup and the offer that changed everything
“There was one day when I wasn’t at the boys’ concert, and I get a call that the boys were fighting,” says Harpaz. Viskin, who was there, reveals: “We started pushing and shouting and cursing, and it came to beatings. I said, OK, that’s it, the band is finished.” The first to break was Michael Harpaz, who left the band in 1999. They tried to continue with the High Four format, but it didn’t work, and the quartet came to a decision – to break up. “Those who see this year’s festival performances are actually seeing us perform for quite the last time,” Gutman said at the time. His close friend Galit (Gala) says in retrospect: “When the band broke up, Amir also had a kind of sigh of relief – now I decide for myself, I’m a free bird.”
Amir was sure that he would be able to recreate the great days of High Five in a solo career. But the reality was much less glamorous, and he found himself appearing in children’s shows – until he received the offer for “Mary Lou”. Yael Bar Zohar, who played with him, recalls: “300 shows or something, night after night, crazy success. I was in love with him. We loved each other so much, and we were there at the peak just like the song ‘The Young Lovers’, we were in such euphoria. We kissed – You can’t describe it at all, like crazy people. You know, in the theater you signal a kiss, you don’t kiss – we kiss and give everything, we don’t even know there’s an option not to.”
High five in 2016, in the announcement of the reunion show that didn’t happen | Photography: Ortal Dahan
In “Mary Lou” he also met Michal Amdorski, who would become his soulmate. “Amir and I were in a kind of relationship without the intimacy,” she says. “He went out with girls and I was disgusted by it, I said to him: ‘What’s the deal? Why are you going out with girls?’ And I remember that at some point I lost patience. I said, OK, come on, the movie is over, we’re changing all of this now, you come out of the closet no matter what.”
“He knew he wanted to be a father”
But it was the meeting with Yanai Prischer, then a bartender and model, that would change his life and give him a home. “We were sitting on the balcony right on the street and a car drove by and stopped at the intersection and the driver yelled at him: ‘Amir, you gay!’, that was the defining moment of the date, because I actually saw Amir out of the corner of his eye,” explains Yanai.
So he felt complete enough to come out into the light in front of everyone – he was one of the first artists to come out of the closet and do it big. “It’s a flag, it’s a statement and it’s your victory, that you defeated yourself,” Amdorski says. “Nothing moved me as much as the fact that I became a father,” Gutman said after Roy was born, and his mother Sara recalls: “We hugged, kissed, cried, he said to me, ‘Mom, I promised you, you have a grandson.'” Yanai recalls: “Amir was an amazing father. He probably knew it from the day he was born that he wanted to be a father. He took care of him and sang to him and laughed with him, was moved by him.”
They failed to continue after Michael left the band Photo: The 12 News, The 12 News
When he is in the happiest period of his life with his own family and a thriving career as a theater director, he decides to reconcile with the past – and unite the High Five. “Somewhere he thought it could produce some kind of correction, from the beginning he realized he made a mistake,” says Yanai Prischer. Yaskin admits: “Shit remains shit. Sometimes it floats, sometimes it sinks, but shit remains shit.” And Dessau agrees: “Arguments about money, arguments about investment, about who deserves it – ‘What, are you doing me a favor?’, all kinds of things like that.”
“Given an order that they not be at the funeral”
But it didn’t end there. “While rehearsing, Amir starts complaining about pain in his legs, muscles, he is in pain. We said: ‘Well, after all, you’re not a boy,'” says Dessau. Later he called to inform Linai that he was not feeling well – and fell down the stairs. “He went to Ichilov because it was the closest, and that’s where our big nightmare begins,” declares Yanai. “The series of tests started and no one knew how to give an answer – what does he have?” says Sara, Amir’s mother.
Amir during the treatment days after the cancer diagnosis Photo: Courtesy of Yes Doku
When they were at the height of rehearsals, the band members did not understand what was happening, they were sure that he was trying to avoid the union. “We had a group of the band, we called it ‘Bli Amir’,” says Dessau. “There were four of us in it and we didn’t understand, and we talked.” Wamdorski tells what happened after he realized that they were talking behind his back: “It knocked him down even more. He had already prepared his funeral and he gave an order that they would not be at the funeral.”
The performance was cancelled, while Gutman remained hospitalized – and the doctor tells him that “it is an aggressive disease, lymphoma”. He asked about the chances of recovery, and answered: “The estimate is that they are talking about 40-50%.” According to Yanai, “These treatments took away from Amir what was always there for him, and that’s how he used to look.” In May 2016, Gutman said: “Most of the time, when you are lying down and you are with your thoughts, then a lot of it is directed to ‘what would you do differently when…’ and I hope that I will get this opportunity to implement.”
In the midst of the difficult treatments, Yanai insists on getting a second opinion from an expert in the United States. The doctor informed that “this could also be a reaction to the drug, an autoimmune reactive process, but in my opinion it is lymphoma.” Despite the doctor’s insistence on Ichilov, Yanai and Amir decide to go to New York following the new opinion: “We got the other answer there that says it’s not (cancer)”.
“I looked at the songs he did with his band, I really like the song Cloudy Day.” Roy with the memory boxes Photo: Courtesy of Yes Doku
“Father is healthy, let’s go to the sea together”
In the exciting meeting with little Roy in Netav, Amir told him that he cried “because we are happy, because father is healthy. We’ll go to the sea together.” Linai said: “Write down July 22 as my new birthday.” Despite the consequences of the chemo treatments, which he said “killed his legs”, Amir did not give up on himself – and rebuilt the Amir of old: he valued every minute, Every day, every week at the second chance he got.
On July 21, 2017, he celebrated one year of recovery at sea. “Atmosphere, happy people and a happy Amir, I’ve never seen him smile like that,” his friends remember. And to the camera he said that day: “Friday purity and excruciating pain in the legs because the water is so hard to control when you don’t have legs, it’s crazy.”
He said to his friends at the Shabbat reception in Bim: “I haven’t hugged many of you in a long time, it’s fun that we live to do it.” Yanai explains: “It’s like he got to tell everyone how much he loves and thanks him, it was a magical moment.” Amir wished himself and Linai: “I wish for us to celebrate here for many years to come on July 22, every year anew, the fact that we have received a new life as a gift. Live as if there is no tomorrow!”.
“What, is he drowning?”
In the docu-series Yanai recounts the last day: “That night he fell asleep on a hammock. Roy didn’t want to come, and I don’t know, I felt like I owed him. I managed to convince him to bring him to the sea and then he came, gave Amir a kiss.” Amdorski says: “Then I look straight ahead and I see Shahar (his niece) with Amir hand in hand, walking towards the water. And I look straight ahead and Amir and Shahar are suddenly at ‘Pizda Loch’ and I see Amir doing this, I say hello to him and it’s all in seconds. What, is he drowning?”
“Amir held Shahar on his shoulders, above the waves” | Photo: Courtesy of Yes Doku
Eyal Perry, his brother, recalls: “I see Amir in the water, and I see Shahar, my daughter next to him. I hear Shahar shouting. Suddenly a surfer passes by, he says to me: ‘Get out before I have to get you out too.’ , I see the surfer on the surfboard and Dawn on him, on his back, advancing and returning a little, and advancing and returning, I see her panic.”
Vinay explains: “Amir held Shahar on his shoulders, above the waves. His head was under the water and she was above the water as if he said, ‘If I don’t save this girl, I die myself’.” And Eyal the brother adds: “Afterwards, Shahar said that Amir told her, ‘Tell everyone that I love them’ and handed her over.”
“A moment I will never forget”
A day later, the family was asked to give permission to disconnect from the resuscitation equipment. “I asked him to take care of us,” recalls mother Sara through tears. At the funeral Yanai said: “You are everything to me. I will make all your dreams come true and Roy will never be alone.” And now he says: “I returned home, picked up Roy and told him that the doctors couldn’t save dad and he cried like crazy. It’s a moment I’ll never forget.”
Eyal Dessau says: “I received a message, it doesn’t matter who because it’s irrelevant, that I’m not allowed to come to the funeral. He didn’t want Michael, Shahar and I to come. But at night Shahar, my wife and I went to the cemetery, Michael was abroad, we uploaded him on Face Time “.
“I promised him ‘I will make all your dreams come true and Roy will never be alone'” | Photo: Courtesy of Yes Doku
And again at Bim, Yanai says: “When you experience a tragedy of this magnitude, I think everyone has to find the strength to continue. He (Roy) was my strength to continue. He also pushed me into a new relationship, right? You really wanted it. The fact that I’m in a different relationship , it doesn’t mean that I forgot the relationship that was with us every day. His songs are with us. It’s a part of our existence.” And Roy agrees and adds: “I miss my father and I will never forget him. My life is amazing and you always have to get up and keep going, even if it’s a little difficult.”
Investigation: A kind of Neveh.
The documentary series “Amir Prischer Gutman: The Life and Death of a Pop Star” is broadcast on Yes and Besting Plus.
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