Outwitting History (23 page)

True, I haven’t attended a Yiddish banquet in years—I’m not sure anyone has. But I’m glad many of the older Yiddish organizations are still here. They have knowledge and memory found nowhere else, and even if they won’t speak with one another—or with me—surely there is still work enough for us all.

Mr. Lansky?” boomed the resonant voice on the other end of the line. “Mr.
Aaron
Lansky? You don’t know me, but let me assure you, I know
you
! My name is Towers.
Bob
Towers. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, let me assure you, in my business Bob Towers is a name people don’t forget!”

“And what business is that, Mr. Towers?”

“What business?
Talent!
I book talent for the Catskills, the Borscht Belt, the Jewish resorts. A young fella like you, you’re too young to remember, but years ago there were dozens—did I say dozens?— there were
hundreds
of Jewish hotels in the Catskills. Today just eleven
giants
remain, and it just so happens that I represent four of them. It’s my job to be on the lookout for new talent. That’s why, when I read about you in the
Times,
I said,
‘He’s our boy!
’ Whatd’ya say—do you know how to make a speech? Even if you don’t it doesn’t matter, you can learn. I loved what I read. What a story! What color! What drama! What Yiddishkeit! What
youth
! I’m ready to sign you up right now,
sight unseen,
the Cotillion Room of the Concord, eleven
A.M
., fourth day of Pesakh. Do we have a deal or
do we have a deal
?!”

I had always thought of the Borscht Belt as the enemy camp: the place where they turned Yiddish into a punch line. So why even consider Mr. Towers’s offer? Well, partly out of curiosity—I had never actually seen the place. And partly because I had learned that the best way to garner support for the Yiddish Book Center was to speak to Jews, and in the late 1980s the Catskills was still a place where Jews could be found. So I persuaded my friend and occasional traveling companion Roger Mummert to join me, and late on a rainy night, we pulled up under the front portico of the Concord.

Even at that hour, the Concord was ablaze with light. Up and down the main driveway we passed double- and triple-parked Cadillacs, with New York and New Jersey plates, waiting for harried valets to return them to the multistory garage. Inside, whole families, three and sometimes four generations, were promenading back and forth along a broad, brightly lit concourse in their furs, jewelry, and Pesakh best. Although it was too late for the nightclub acts, other entertainment was still going strong. We passed up the disco (the average age of the writhing dancers seemed to be about sixteen) and headed instead to the Night Owl, the Concord’s late-night bar. A tired band, heavy on the wire brush work, played pop favorites of the forties and fifties—a muted version of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” sticks in my mind— while middle-aged couples sat on black leatherette chairs at round tables, each with its own sputtering citronella candle in a red glass bowl covered with white plastic lace. The kidney-shaped bar was made of translucent faux marble, softly illuminated from below. Since the Passover prohibition against
khumets,
leavened food, extends to beer, whiskey, vodka, and all other manner of grain alcohol, the bar list was limited to Carmel concord grape wine, extra sweet Malaga, apricot brandy, and an improbable assortment of mixed drinks all made with Slivovitz, a
kishke
-burning plum brandy from Yugoslavia: Slivovitz on the rocks, Sliv and soda, Slivovitz sour, and Sliv and Coke. I downed a Sliv straight up and, my eyes bleary, stumbled off to bed.

At 10:30 the next morning I headed downstairs to the Cotillion Room to set up for my eleven o’clock lecture. In my years as a public speaker I had lectured at many lavish—if not to say garish—synagogue social halls, but none could top this. The Cotillion Room was shaped like a half moon, with the audience seated in tiers looking down on an expansive, jet black stage. The décor was a cross between Louis XIV and classical Greek. Heavy draperies, crystal chandeliers, six-foot-tall plaster-cast urns at either side of the double doors, and standing in ornate, fluorescent-lit alcoves along the walls, a dozen larger-than-life alabaster Greek goddesses with bared breasts and missing limbs. As I set up the slide projector I was watched by two naked Venuses balancing water jugs on their heads.

At ten to eleven they let in the audience. They entered talking. Roger stood by a Grecian urn, handing out Yiddish Book Center brochures, while I, still fiddling with wires on the stage, was fending off a widening circle of well-wishers.

“Mr. Lansky? Mr. Lansky? I have books for you back in Canarsie. When can you come get them?”

“Excuse me, young man, maybe you have Jewish books in large print?”

“Yungerman, yoo-hoo yungerman, I come from Cleveland, I read about you in
Hadassah
.”

“Read, shmead, what does he care what you read? Mr. Lansky, do you know who I am? I’m Mrs. Simkin, I’m a member . . .”

The din had grown deafening when, out of the corner of my eye, I spied a tall, tanned, vigorous man in his seventies striding from the wings and heading straight for me.

“Which one of you is Lansky?” he demanded of the milling crowd— a foolish question, I thought, since I was the only one in the circle under seventy. “I’m Towers,” he announced, pumping my arm up and down, “Bob Towers. Welcome to the Concord. Now let’s go somewhere quiet where we can talk business before you go on.”

Wearing a brightly colored jogging suit, with a heavy gold chain around his neck, exuding health and good cheer, Mr. Towers led me past the throng to a small, curtained area at the side of the stage.

“Okay, first things first,” he said with no further introduction. “How much did it cost you to get here?”

I was scheduled to speak in five minutes and would have preferred to spend the time reviewing my notes, not discussing pecuniary details. “Actually, we drove here,” I said, “so it didn’t cost very much.”

“Never mind!” he boomed. “When Bob Towers invites a guest, Bob Towers pays for him to get here. You know the Exxon station at the top of the hill?”

“Uh, no, not exactly, it was pretty dark when we arrived.”

“Dark, shmark, you may not know the Exxon station, but one phone call from me and that Exxon station will know
you
! You pull in there and tell ‘em Bob Towers sent you. They’ll fill you right up to the top— premium, high test, the best—whatever you want.”

My car, a diminutive Honda Civic wagon, had a ten-gallon gas tank and was still half full, but I managed some small expression of gratitude as my fingers anxiously leafed through the folded notes in my pocket.

“No, no, don’t thank me,” said Mr. Towers. “After all, you’re the speaker. You’re the
star
. You call the shots around here. Now tell me, how much do want for this performance?”

“Performance?”

“That’s right, no need to be shy. I’ve been in this business more than thirty years, I’ve seen it all. Now, how much is it gonna be?”

I had received honoraria before, but the directness of the question, three minutes before I was scheduled to speak, caught me off guard. Before I could respond Mr. Towers had pulled a five-inch wad of cash from his pocket and was peeling off bills: “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty . . . “ He went on to $65. “That’ll do for now,” he said, folding the bills and
deftly stuffing them into my jacket pocket. “We’ll talk again after the show.”

The “show” was drawing nigh—two minutes to go—but Bob Towers wasn’t through yet.

“Okay, how long are you planning to speak for?” he asked.

“I don’t know, probably about an hour, then time for questions—”

“An hour?
An hour?
Kid, you’re new to this business; you don’t have the benefit of my thirty-plus years of experience. Take it from me,
no one
speaks for an hour. Let’s face it, we’ve got old people out there, their plumbing’s not what it used to be, it doesn’t matter what’s happening on stage, they can only sit so long before they’ve got to get up and scram—straight to the john. I’ve seen it happen to the best of them. They got up on Abba Eban. They got up on Bella Abzug. And let me assure you, young man, they’re gonna get up on you too if you try to speak for an hour. Remember what I’m telling you,
keep it short,
short is golden, short is beautiful. Okay, let’s go!”

And with that he pushed me out of the wings and onto the stage. Not counting the Greek goddesses, there were about three hundred people in the room, and they were definitely not young. While I squinted into the spotlights, Bob Towers was already at the stand-up microphone (there was no podium), launching into his introduction:

“Three weeks ago,” he thundered, enunciating every word like a boxing announcer at Madison Square Garden, “three weeks ago, I read an article in the
New York Times
. It was an article about a young man. A young man who knows Yiddish. The
mame loshn
!” At this first Yiddish utterance the audience was already laughing. Despite his admonition to me to be brief, his introduction went on for fifteen minutes. He covered the Old Country, Second Avenue, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Nobel Prize, and a rousing pronouncement that “Yiddish will not be consigned to oblivion!” before finally coming back around to me. “When I read the story in the
Times,
I decided to get in touch with this young
man and bring him here to you. He was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, known to the history books as a famous whaling town, and as we say in Yiddish,
Fun vanen kumt a yid?
How does it happen that a boy from New Bedford, still young, still wet behind the ears, should become so enthused about Yiddish? Let’s let him tell us himself. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, Aaron Lansky!”

As I walked toward the microphone, Bob Towers reached out with another bone-crushing handshake, pulled me close, and whispered into my ear, “Go ahead, kid, knock ‘em dead!”

Given the age of the audience, I was afraid to take his charge too literally. I lowered the microphone to my own height, looked out at the audience, and offered a tentative
“Sholem aleykhem.”

“Aleykhem sholem!”
thundered the crowd in the proper Yiddish response.

“Un ver redt a Yidish vort?”
I continued in Yiddish. (“Who here speaks Yiddish?”)

“Vu den?
(What else?)
”
came the response, and already I had my first round of applause. This was clearly a different audience—and a different pacing—than I was used to. I spoke for forty-five minutes, showing slides and telling about my adventures on the road. I told about saving books from basements and Dumpsters, I told a lot of funny stories, but I also spoke seriously about historical continuity and cultural preservation, about the need to transcend nostalgia and lachrymose fixations and develop a practical program to convey historical consciousness to the next generation. I ended, of course, with an appeal for the Yiddish Book Center.

The audience loved it. Before the applause could die down Bob Towers bounded onto the stage and grabbed the microphone from my hand. “Ladies and gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen!” he yelled, hugging me to his side like a bar mitzvah boy. “Ladies and gentlemen, Aaron Lansky!”

The crowd was going wild, Towers waving them on with his right hand while his left hand held me tight, my face pressed sideways against his nylon jogging suit. And then, when the applause finally subsided, he released me and stepped to the front of the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been in this game we call show business for more than thirty years.
Thirty years
. I’ve seen the best of them, I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go. And I want to tell you that never—
never
—in all that time have I seen a performance like this one. No, not since a young man named Cha-im Weiz-mann spoke from this very stage here in the Cotillion Room. This is the real thing. This is culture. This is an undiscovered talent.” He paused to catch his breath. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve known you for a long time now, and I don’t mind telling you—this young man just knocked me on my
arse
!”

Again the crowd was clapping, louder and louder, and then some of them were on their feet. I thought it was a standing ovation until, one by one, they turned around and began pushing one another in a mad dash for the door. Bob Towers was right. These were old people; they had to go to the bathroom.

The lunch that followed my lecture almost defied description. There were five full courses, each with a half dozen selections. When I hesitated in choosing my “cold fish” appetizer—I couldn’t decide between the pickled herring, smoked herring, matjes herring, herring in cream sauce, gefilte fish with horseradish, smoked sable, and pickled white-fish in aspic—the woman next to me jumped in and ordered for me. “He’ll have one of everything,” she instructed the waiter, “and while you’re at it you can bring two more plates of gefilte fish for the table.” I was just digging into my second dessert, stewed prune compote topped with six inches of whipped cream, when the voice of Bob Towers came bellowing over the PA.

“Today, three hundred people were in the Cotillion Room for a lecture by a certain young man,” he informed the assembled diners, “and
two thousand and three hundred others were cheated.
Cheated!
I don’t mind telling you: this young man was
squandered
here at the Concord this morning.”

As though to make amends, after lunch Mr. Towers packed me and Roger into his Cadillac Eldorado and took us to see Murray Posner, the owner of a nearby resort. I thought I was there to ask Mr. Posner for a contribution; he thought he was interviewing me for a new act.

“Where else have you performed?” Murray asked me from behind a copy of
Variety.

“Well, I don’t perform, exactly,” I answered, “but I have spoken at synagogues, and I lecture from time to time at colleges and universities—”