My name is Benguin. Not Benjamin. Not Benny. Benguin. My parents chose it during a power outage at the maternity ward, by candlelight, while eating leftover sufganiyot from someone else’s Hanukkah party. The nurse misheard “Benjamin” over a crackling radio playing a nature documentary about emperor penguins. By the time anyone noticed, the paperwork had already been laminated.
Kfar Ha’Matzil
I grew up in Kfar Ha’Matzil, a small community tucked behind three hills, a misplaced bus stop, and a rumor that there used to be a falafel stand “somewhere near the second cactus.” People called our area “sheltered,” which I thought meant we were protected. Later I learned it mostly meant we were hard to explain on a map.
Our house was number 14½, because the municipality ran out of integers in the 1990s and issued fractions instead of admitting a planning error. We had a garden, a lemon tree that only produced suspiciously square fruit, and a clothesline that doubled as the neighborhood Wi‑Fi antenna whenever Uncle Yoram visited with his “experimental router” and a roll of aluminum foil.
Beit Sefer Al Ha’Kir
School was Beit Sefer Al Ha’Kir—literally “The School on the Wall,” because one side of the building was technically built against a retaining wall that predated the founding of the state, the school, and possibly gravity. The classrooms smelled like chalk, wet wool, and the ghost of someone’s sandwich from 1987. Our science lab had three microscopes and seventeen mismatched chairs, which taught us early that observation is 90% squinting.
My best friend was Nitzan, who claimed he could identify clouds by taste. Our principal, Mrs. Levkowitz, enforced silence in the hallways using a bell that had once belonged to a ship. The PE teacher made us run laps around the parking lot while shouting motivational slogans he translated badly from English, such as “Pain is just bread forgetting it is toast.”
Indoor geography and other triumphs
Academically, I excelled at “Indoor Geography,” a subject invented when the roof leaked and we had to memorize the locations of buckets. I struggled with math until I realized the teacher was grading us on confidence rather than correctness. My crowning achievement was the Purim costume incident, where I went as “A Penguin Who Made Aliyah,” which everyone misinterpreted as political commentary. It wasn’t. I just liked vests.
After the wall
After graduation, I left Kfar Ha’Matzil with a backpack, a laminated student ID that still smelled like the wall, and a firm belief that if you squint hard enough, any dingy place looks like destiny. I did not become famous. I did not become rich. I became Benguin, which—depending who you ask—is either worse or exactly right.
Today I tell this story so that future children in fraction-numbered houses may know: you can come from nowhere obvious and still arrive somewhere unmistakably yourself. Also, if your lemon is a cube, do not ask why. Some mysteries are simply… shelved.