You may have recently come across an unusual rising star in the Israeli Tiktok sky: an elderly woman, with a Russian accent and without what is known as a "bone in the tongue", who appears on the screen as an image and is recorded with only her voice in conversations with her twenty-plus year old daughter.
The daughter is Lial Kriserman, a 29-year-old copywriter from Tel Aviv (originally Beer Sheva), and her mother is Amelia, who became a web phenomenon without knowing what to click on even to read comments.
The Tiktok page that Lial opened for them bears the name of the colorful, demanding and uncompromising mother, and she is undoubtedly its main star.
All the videos published so far have garnered between twenty thousand and a quarter of a million views, an impressive streak even for the biggest of the Israeli TikTok stars.
The videos are only a few seconds long, and each one of them includes one or the other saying of the mother during a routine phone conversation with her daughter.
Among the outstanding successes you will find Amelia's reaction to the offer to go together in the race for a million ("I can run, Lial? You know when I run - if there is something to eat or buy"), or her comment on the strength of the Jewish people ("The times when it was possible are over To do to the Jews what could have been done before; we have a state, we have an army and we have Noa Kirel.
At other times you will find her urging her daughter to get married and have children, and always in her original way.
The impromptu punches that are thrown as if without meaning to, nonchalantly, in the middle of a small talk with her daughter, make her an icon in the making.
But what passes in the videos as purely comical, in life as in life, is a bit more complex.
"I may be generalizing, but it seems to me that Soviet women have a complex relationship with their mother," Kriserman says.
"In general, living in a Soviet home means high expectations. It is an education for excellence, and less than excellent is not considered. Today I say that there are good and bad things about it, and I haven't decided which is more. It brings quality products, on the other hand, it is accompanied by great pressures. My reaction to failure is difficult, but I'm working on it, and I know that with humor you can't make everyone laugh, and that there are things that people won't like and didn't like."
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Although she laughs at her, Lyall sees her mother's uncompromising honesty as a great advantage: "Today, after we kids have grown up and left the house, we can tell her we're coming on Friday and she says, 'No way, bye. I need to rest.' You can say Yoo, what, my mother doesn't want me to come on Friday, but you can also say - what a lady! She doesn't have the strength and tells me face to face, come on, next week."
Do you feel similar to her in this?
"No, and I don't know if I can be like that either, but I understand her in this regard. She is powerful, she is real. She is tremendous. I am direct and I am sure I got it from her, but there is a difference between telling the truth and saying everything that is going through your mind In my head without thinking twice. And now that I live alone, if someone comes in I immediately ask them to take off their shoes and take out tapchaki (slippers, in Russian), and I love flowers. That's for sure from her."
Over the years, Yael learned the ability to see the grace in her mother's behavior, but it wasn't always like that.
"When I got a little older, and stopped looking at my parents as people who owe me, I started to see that they are also someone's children and they are also human beings," she says.
"Then it became funny to me. I had to grow up to learn to take it in proportion."
She also develops her ability to cope with her mother's bulldozing power through the videos.
"My videos are also my way of making comedy out of it," she says.
"After all, I can say 'Ugh, she called me 30 times for a presentation, it sucks', and I can also say 'Come on, it's a devastating situation.'"
The presentation video that Kriserman talks about describes another one of the cases where Amelia Kriserman wanted something, and when Amelia wants something - she gets it.
The recording of that conversation made waves until he brought them both to an interview on Nev Raskin's show.
While Lial blushed under the spotlight, Amelia, as usual, gave a show that would not embarrass Hanna Laslow.
"I'm less of a star than her," says Lial, "and this is also evident in the interview with Raskin."
According to her, she had no doubt that this was how it was going to be.
"Before I started with all of this, I called my mom and told her, 'I'm going to make you an influencer.'
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It all started almost by accident, from a project for Lyall's visual communication studies at the HIT Institute of Technology.
There, as part of a documentary course, Kriserman was asked to submit a work on a character that particularly affects her.
"In the beginning, friends from the course told me that it was most banal on my part to choose a mother," says Lial, "but I told them, 'Listen, you don't understand. There is no one else like her.'"
The day of the screening arrived, and an entire class witnessed for the first time the phenomenon known as Amelia Kriserman.
"Then I realized that she makes everyone laugh, and not just me," says Lial proudly.
From that day on, she continued to document her mother more and more, and that's how the Tiktok idea was born.
"It took me a while to figure out how to convey her character in a light and up-to-date way, and it took a while for people to recognize her from TikTok and tell her, 'I love you.'"
How does your mother deal with celebrity?
"She didn't think it would interest anyone, ever since the school project. She still doesn't understand what the hype around her is about, but it makes her laugh out loud. Yesterday she called me laughing because she was in some bedding store and the saleswoman recognized her and didn't even take the the voucher'".
In their first video posted by Yael on social media, her mother details what is required of her daughter to live peacefully with her: a diploma, marriage and children.
Everything is presented to the audience in a comical guise, but it's hard not to wonder how much the real expectation that shines through the comedy weighs on the daughter, all the more so in a country that encourages childbirth.
The social pressure is already there, in the field, and plays a role for many in the race to start a family.
It seems that there is no need to add to it.
"I had a conversation with her about it," Liel shares, "and she told me, 'In the truth of life, I know that when you want it, you will have it.'"
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And do you want these things?
Marriage?
Children?
"Yes. I matured late in that sense. It was never urgent for me, and I never envisioned my wedding dress. This constellation of buffet-hall-marching-together-forever didn't work for me. I only wear black, And my dreams have always been related to my career. Only now, when I'm at the peak of working on my career, I've started asking myself questions. There's this phrase, 'What's the value of happiness if you don't share it,' and it's an insight that landed on me in the last year. I see ahead, and I I see that all the effort I put into my career I want to balance with my family. It's in my head, even if it's not as urgent for me as it is for my mother. It's brewing slowly."
In the meantime, she focuses on her great love - to laugh, and this is also the engine that pushes her to publish the videos.
"I also have a dream to do stand-up," she reveals, "but I'm afraid of dying of a heart attack."
In her job at the McCann advertising agency, she's the one who always comes up with the comedic ideas.
"Exciting commercials are less my thing," she laughs.
Between the lines it appears that she is comfortable there, making fun from behind the camera.
"Will I put myself more in the center in the future - that's an interesting question, for which I don't currently have an answer," she said.
"I like being applauded for my work, it's hard for me to be applauded."
So what are your ambitions going forward?
"I really like the career I've chosen. As a little girl, it sounds strange, but my dream was to make commercials. I know I'll continue to be funny, and I want to continue it and for as many people as possible to hear my jokes. I come to this with social responsibility, also as a copywriter. There is Power in advertising, and with power comes responsibility - responsibility to choose what the text is, and who the model or actress will say it. I would like to promote healthy ideologies with humor. I believe that the most delicious dish for people is comedy, that's how people like to eat their message the most."
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