Galerie Michael owner Michael Schwartz with clients

For 30 years, Michael Schwartz has owned and operated Galerie Michael, an art gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, building, in his own words, “museum-quality collections, one work at a time.” Works by Picasso, Dali, Goya and Miró adorn the walls for the current exhibition on Spanish masters.

With a staff of 24, many of whom hold fine-arts degrees and are called curators, Schwartz would be happy to sell you a work of art. But he would prefer to tell you a story first because what Schwartz really wants to do is enchant you.

I’ve known a few art dealers in my time, and much the way poker players have a tell, dealers have a “sell.” Some dealers sell status and exclusivity — as if you are joining a club; others make a more mercenary pitch, appealing to one’s sense of value, investment savvy and greed; for others, the sell is more aesthetic, with a focus on the artist’s technique, or on occasion how the painting matches the client’s home. Schwartz’s sell is different: He wants to educate you.

Which is funny because until he became an art dealer, Schwartz didn’t know all that much about art. He grew up in Chicago. His mother, who had been trained as a concert pianist but took on more commercial gigs once she had children, was always taking her children to museums and stressing the importance and beauty of art.

By his 30s, Schwartz was in charge of circulation for Look magazine in several Midwestern states, when his boss started taking him to Europe. At the same time, some friends approached him with the idea of opening a gallery in Chicago that would appeal to recent college graduates and other young people starting out in life who wanted to buy good art but could only afford prints. They asked Schwartz to buy them a Picasso the next time he was in Paris.

Schwartz wandered into a gallery and explained that he was in search of a Picasso for a gallery in Chicago. The owner asked what he knew about prints and paintings. “Not much,” Schwartz said. The gallery owner took an interest in Schwartz and started to teach him that every painting has a story that makes it come alive. The gallery owner told Schwartz that this time he would select the best work for him to buy, but that he needed to study the artists and their work; the next time, Schwartz would have to choose. Thus began his art education.

Back in Chicago, Schwartz’s wife was becoming impatient with his investment. Her ultimatum: Have them pay you back or take the painting. It was right around then that Schwartz had an epiphany: He loved art and would open his own gallery. Although he had four young children, his wife gave him a year to establish himself — which he did. However, during the winter of 1978, Chicago was beset by a blizzard so severe that Schwartz was barely able to see the road as he drove home. He pulled over at a diner and called his wife: “I’ve had it. I’m leaving.” His wife told him he was having a midlife crisis and that they should try to work out their problems. Schwartz explained that he didn’t want to leave her — he wanted to leave Chicago and move the family to California.

After a few months of due diligence, Schwartz found a gallery in South Coast Plaza that was foundering and made an offer to acquire its inventory and take it over. He bought a home for his family here and enrolled his kids in school for the coming year. A few days before closing, the gallery owner informed Schwartz that he had sold to a higher bidder. “But we had a deal!” Schwartz protested. “I moved my family to California!” The gallery owner said he was sorry but their deal was not finalized. Schwartz sued.

The following week, Schwartz found himself wandering in Beverly Hills, on Rodeo Drive. There he found a beautiful building next to the Hermès store that was a showroom for the Beverly Park development, then in its early stage. Schwartz loved the space. He called his wife and told her that he felt their future was in Beverly Hills, on Rodeo Drive. Even more, he felt as if that space was meant for them. “The energy there was fantastic,” he said. Schwartz, who describes himself as a BuJew (Jewish Buddhist), threw the I Ching as well — it, too, confirmed that his future was in Beverly Hills.

Nine months later, having spent a tidy sum on litigation to no result, Schwartz got a call from a real estate broker. There was a space available on Rodeo Drive, but the owner insisted on meeting directly with all prospective tenants. Schwartz soon found himself in the space he had coveted — the real estate development had sold out in record time. The owner had many demands; Schwartz had a few of his own. What Schwartz suggested was that they each write down on separate legal pads what they needed in order to make the sale — then they switched pads. In 10 minutes, they had a deal. “It was bashert,” Schwartz now says.

For the next 28 years, Schwartz operated his gallery there to great success. He continued to travel to Europe, establishing long-standing relationships with important dealers, including members of the Pissaro, Renoir and Cezanne families. In keeping with the European gallery tradition, Schwartz sought to distinguish himself by organizing exhibitions and publishing catalogs, making his gallery a place to learn about and buy affordable art. Although Schwartz estimates that 60 percent of his work sells for between $10,000 and $50,000, he still offers works by Picasso for as little as $3,000 (even though he knows that is, in itself, a lot of money).

Two years ago, when Schwartz could not come to terms with his landlord (Schwartz wanted a 10-year lease; his landlord wanted to give him four), he moved to the former José Eber hair salon space on Via Rodeo — a larger space for less money with a long lease. He feels that the space brings its own excitement.

On Rodeo Drive, over the decades, he has watched the ebb and flow of commerce, from the Drexel Burnham traders of the 1980s to the current wave of Internet entrepreneurs. He has seen waves of buyers come and go, from the Middle East, Japan, Russia and China. Schwartz estimates that 60 percent of his business is based on repeat customers.

“Being here [on Rodeo] is a multinational experience,” Schwartz said.

Schwartz has come to believe that although Los Angeles in general, and Beverly Hills in particular, are not art destinations like New York, many of its visitors are art collectors. And, he said, if they visit Rodeo Drive, as they inevitably do, they are often surprised to find a gallery like his there, with the quality works he exhibits.

Over the years, Schwartz’s areas of interest have been 19th century plein air painting (landscapes); old master drawings, with a particular interest in Rembrandt; and works by such 20th century masters as Picasso, Miró and Dali. Schwartz curated the Kaplan collection of Rembrandt artworks exhibited in England and Germany. He also has an expertise in the graphic works of Toulouse-Lautrec and was instrumental in bringing the Wagner collection of French poster art to LACMA’s permanent collection.

Schwartz’s fundamental belief is that knowledge surrounds a work, deepening the viewer’s connection to it. To demonstrate this, he showed me a small Renoir work, a scrap the painter had used to sketch a face — Schwartz told me about the girl it was based on, how Renoir used these scraps and how rare they are. As he did, I looked at the work anew, finding delight in details I might otherwise have missed. Yet, to be completely honest, I would say that Schwartz’s charm in telling those stories is as great a factor as the knowledge he imparts.

Schwartz also recounted how once, when he went to visit Dali at his home in Spain, he was ushered into a garden where the aged Surrealist was sitting on a throne, dressed like a pope, wearing a large ring that Dali’s assistant told Schwartz he should kiss. Schwartz refused, but instead opened a briefcase full of cash and asked if that might serve as his acknowledgement of Dali’s genius. Dali consented, and Schwartz proposed that Dali do an edition of works based on the many inventions that Dali had conceived, including a reclining massage chair that replicated the feeling of being a baby in the womb. Dali told Schwartz that the idea was not Schwartz’s but Dali’s, because he had inspired him to have this idea. The edition was very successful. Schwartz still has a set and promised to show them to me. I thanked him but said no. I had to go.

I was afraid this might turn out to be a very expensive column.

“Tooker Lips,” New York, 1965, by Melvin Sokolsky, © 2011.

On the afternoon I attended the Annenberg Space for Photography’s latest exhibition, “Beauty Culture,” I was standing in the dark watching a series of fashion images projected in the digital gallery, when I was distracted by a woman who entered the room. I did a double take, as I recognized her as one of the iconic women featured in the exhibition, a former fashion model.

My eyes darted between looking at her watching herself and looking at the images of her on the screen. In the pictures, she was an otherworldly creature, a two-dimensional slate on which to project beauty, an object lesson in perfection, created in the service of commerce. In person, she stood aloof from her image, disengaged, cool but somehow timid — as, if in the dark, the photo was real and she was the shadow.

Lauren Greenfield, a Los Angeles-born-and-based photographer and documentarian, had created a specially commissioned film for the exhibit, and it was about to start. The model withdrew, and I stayed.

Greenfield’s 30-minute film explores the cult of beauty from several viewpoints — of the photographers, such as Albert Watson, Melvin Sokolsky and Tyen; of models, among them Crystal Renn, Emme and Carmen Dell’Orefice; of modeling agents, such as Eileen Ford and Bethann Hardison; of young women (beauty pageant contestants, teenagers, body builders); of plastic surgeons; and of women who have had plastic surgery or cosmetic enhancements, including Cindy Margolis (the self-anointed most downloaded woman on the Internet). It also interviews New York Times reporter Alex Kuczynski, author of “Beauty Junkies,” as well as a French intellectual who had cheek implants inserted at eyebrow level, and actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who derides unreal cosmetic enhancements and who asks: “What is with the lip thing?”

“Beauty Culture” also displays 175 print images from 100 photographers, both commercial and fine artists. Among them are Vogue celebrity photographer Bert Stern, the Surrealist Man Ray, ad-campaign and portrait artist Herb Ritts, the French fashion photographer Guy Bourdin, Rolling Stone and Interview celebrity portraitist Matthew Rolston, the German eroticist Ellen von Unwerth, the feminist artist Leonard Nimoy (yes, that Leonard Nimoy) and the French commercial graphic/photographic illustrator Jean-Paul Goude. The show also explores a variety of topics, including Hollywood glamour, the continuing influence of Marilyn Monroe’s short career, the artifice integral to the billion-dollar cosmetics industry, the modeling industry, and a view of some iconic women who have come to embody a moment or era, including Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy, Cheryl Tiegs, Christy Turlington, Kate Moss and Gisele Bundchen.

“Twiggy” print,  New York, 1967, by Melvin Sokolsky, © 2011.

The exhibition also asks: What size is beautiful? What color is beautiful? And it investigates the phenomenon of the pin-up girl, from Betty Grable to Farrah Fawcett, as well as women who have used images of androgyny to advantage. There’s also a section called “Reaction and Revolution,” which explores how retouching creates ideals of beauty unattainable even by the subjects. And, on the other side, it shows ways in which photographers, models and individuals have revolted against such narrow definitions of beauty.

“As much as beauty can astonish and inspire,” Wallis Annenberg, of the Annenberg Foundation, is quoted as saying in a press release for the exhibition, “it can also corrupt and subvert, rendering all else — even itself — broken and obsolete. The great contemporary photographers … turn art’s mirror on ourselves as well. I can’t think of a more important conversation for the Annenberg Space to have.”

But is this exhibition really a conversation? The images are presented like a runway procession of our cultural fixations, a progression of beauties, actresses and models whom we’ve come to know by name and whose celebrity has increased in parallel with the success of the products and industries at whose service they made their fortunes. The images are beautiful, even when the subject is not (such as one picture of a needle being applied for a collagen injection).

The exhibition asks worthy questions about the sexualization of children; about a definition of beauty that more often than not depicts a white, skinny, youthful girl, while in the real world, standards of beauty have moved away from the blond, blue-eyed waiflike tomboy to more athletic, more curvy, more ethnic beauties. It asks about how our own self-image is impacted by a world where even the most beautiful women are digitally doctored — to lengthen their legs, or remove the wrinkles or blemishes from their faces.

These are certainly valid questions, but not surprises.

“Diaboliques,” by Tyen,  © 1986, Susie Bick, Dior Cosmetics.

And, sometimes just asking the questions is not enough. “Beauty Culture” left me feeling empty — it simply skims the surface of the issues by acknowledging them, while the very beauty of the images acts as a counterargument, one that says: That’s just the way it is. No matter the importance of Oprah or popularity of J.Lo or the successes of the Kardashians, modeling agents will continue to stand outside of high schools in Brazil or the Baltic countries looking for a 14-year-old beauty to sign to a modeling contract.

Cosmetic and jeans companies will not sign the winners of the Westinghouse science competition, or even the national spelling bee, to be their spokespersons. The cult of beauty is about the ideals and values attributed to a world of surfaces.

After staring at the model staring at herself in that dark room, I was hoping for an epiphany, an insight into the deeper nature of the transaction we enact in conferring the status of beauty upon an image or a person. I had none, and the exhibit provided nothing more.

On the subject of imbuing meaning, Sigmund Freud supposedly said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” And sometimes a model looking at a photo of herself is just a person looking at a picture.

“2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America” (St. Martin’s Press) is Albert Brooks’ novel (in all senses of the word) take on our not-so-distant future. Anyone familiar with Brooks’ films, such as “Defending Your Life” or “Modern Romance,” will not be surprised that his debut novel is clever and entertaining. But it is also thoughtful, insightful and inventive about issues as diverse as health care, transportation, aging and politics. And funny — let’s not forget funny.

“2030” is a mixture of the utopian and the dystopian — great advances and great consequences — a future that, even when beyond belief, remains possible.

In “2030,” Brooks takes liberties one imagines he never could have in film to opine on topics large and small (i.e. everyone is tracked everywhere and every birthday party now features an insufferable montage video; the novel ends with a presidential inaugural address).

Brooks also seems to relish the freedom to create a story with no true main character, but, rather, a wide array of figures. They include: Dr. Sam Mueller, who came up with the cure for cancer and reaped the financial benefits of doing so; Matthew Bernstein, the first U.S. president of Jewish descent (his mother is a Roman Catholic, but, as Brooks notes: “If you’re running for president, even living on the same street as a Jew makes you one”); Susanna Colbert, a former investment banker Bernstein recruits to be Treasury Secretary and whom he falls for; Brad Miller, an 80-year-old who ends up buying an apartment on a cruise ship to live out his final years; Max Leonard, a trust-fund-financed revolutionary who wants to harness the anger of young people against the “olds”; and Shen Li, a Chinese health care entrepreneur eager to import his vision of caring neighborhood clinics and surgery performed by robots to the American market.

To Brooks’ credit, as each of these characters travels to his or her own date with destiny, the narrative never feels disjointed. We feel we know these characters, and we wonder what’s going to happen to them.

Shortly after the novel begins, a 9.1 earthquake occurs on the Pacific Rim (which is scary prescient on Brooks’ part), but rather than devastating Asia, it levels Los Angeles. Miller is taken to a tent village in Pasadena to wait for the insurance money that is promised him, but never seems to appear. In the meantime, the country can’t afford the trillions of dollars it will take to rebuild Los Angeles. Bernstein sends Colbert to beg the Chinese for a loan. They refuse, but instead propose an equity stake — they will rebuild the city in return for 50 percent of the city’s revenues and the pledge that Chinese workers who participate in the rebuilding can become U.S. citizens within two years. In no time, Brooks tells us, Los Angeles smells “better.”

Brooks empathizes with his characters and does not judge their foibles too harshly, as if to say, “Nobody’s perfect.” The novel has no truly evil characters, and in “2030,” as Jean Renoir once famously remarked, “Everyone has their reasons.” Brooks’ characters remain entertaining even in their darkest moments — as when Leonard has lunch with Walter Master, a Jack Kevorkian-type euthanasia advocate, who tells him, “Go change the world. I’ll pay for the sandwich.”

On the other hand, Brooks is clear that there is always a price to pay for our actions. When the Nobel Prize-winning billionaire Mueller disses Leonard, the latter conceives a plot that will have tragic implications for others, including Miller; Bernstein’s re-election will hinge on whether Colbert pays back a favor to a large contributor, as well as on Bernstein’s wife’s reaction to his feelings for Colbert. In Brooks’ world of tomorrow, much like our present, human self-interest still clouds our judgment and chance meetings can still lead to outcomes we can never foresee.

That Brooks enjoyed writing this book is evident on every page, and that, too, is infectious. Although, as a filmmaker, his comedies have always taken a close look at relationships and at society, at times played out to surreal extremes, in this first novel, Brooks has found a medium particularly well suited to his polymath interests and prolific inventiveness.  Although living in 2030 may be more difficult than now in many respects, reading about it is very enjoyable. Or as Brooks recently tweeted: “Medical Breakthrough: ‘2030’ increases lifespan! (of author, but still).”

William Link

“Now, Tom, do I look Jewish?”

William Link, 77, was asking the question. Link is one of, if not the most successful producer and writer in television history, having put, with his late partner Richard Levinson, 16 series on the air, including creating “Columbo,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “The Cosby Mysteries” and “Mannix.” They also created any number of important TV movies, including “The Execution of Private Slovik,” which launched Martin Sheen’s career, “That Certain Summer,” which was the first sympathetic portrayal of gay men on television, and the 1988 “Terrorist on Trial: The United States vs. Salim Ajami,” which was hauntingly prescient.

When I met him, Link was wearing a yellow sweater adorned with dogs, sitting in his art-filled Beverly Hills home with his wife, Marjorie. The answer to his question was not obvious, but the question was being asked with some irony because of Link’s situation. His whole life had been spent as a non-Jew, while everyone in his life – his best friend and writing partner, his wife, most of his professional colleagues and associates – all were Jewish. Yet, a few weeks before we met, Link had discovered that he was, in fact, Jewish.

A man whose past was hidden from him has spent his life writing mysteries. Coincidence? And what of the fact that Link, having turned to writing Columbo short stories, may have solved the two most nagging mysteries in his life – his background, which we might call “The Case of the Blue Suitcase,” and another, a question that has dogged him his entire career: How did he and Levinson come up with the name “Columbo” for Peter Falk’s character? But more on that later.

There is an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” where, for a brief time, Larry believes he’s not Jewish and suddenly becomes un-neurotic, self-confident, a doer, saddled with loving parents and a happy family. This is sort of that story – in reverse.

Link’s grandfather walked out on his family when Link’s father was 13. As a result, Link’s father never knew much about his family background. His mother’s lineage traced back to the Huguenots, and she spoke German.  His father had grown up on the Lower West Side of New York (first tip-off) and was a self-made man, working as a textile broker (second tip-off), and because his father was in a primarily Jewish industry, he spoke some Yiddish (big alarm goes off). Regardless of these indicators, as far as Link is concerned, his father never knew he was Jewish, and Link was raised as a non-Jew. He had a happy childhood and loved his parents. “They were terrific people, and I miss them to this day,” he said.

Link was interested in storytelling even before he could write – he started drawing comic strips as a child. Later, he graduated to writing mystery short stories.

At 10, he was already reading Weekly Variety (another clue, perhaps?). On the first day of junior high school, he was told to look out for a tall boy who wrote mysteries and performed magic. Similarly, Levinson was told to look out for a short boy who loved magic and writing mysteries. So began a partnership that lasted 43 years, until Levinson’s death in 1987.

But first, Link played a small part in a Hollywood story. When “Dragnet” premiered as a radio program in 1949, Link recognized the famous opening notes as being the same as the theme from Miklos Rozsa’s 1946 “The Killers.” He wrote to the show’s composer, Walter Schumann, noting the similarities. Schumann wrote back saying, “Yes, Mr. Link. With Mr. Rozsa’s permission, I took the theme from ‘The Killers.’ Keep listening to ‘Dragnet.’ ”

A while later, when Link read in a front-page story in Variety that Rozsa’s music publishers were suing Schumann for plagiarism, he found the letter at the bottom of his closet and gave it to his father, who in turn passed it along to his attorney, who in turn gave it to Rozsa’s music publisher.  As a reward for Rozsa’s victory, Link was invited up to New York to stay at the Plaza hotel, and, as thanks, given tickets to every Broadway musical then playing.

Levinson and Link started writing mystery short stories, and selling them as teenagers to Ellery Queen mystery magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery magazine. They both attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, but business held no appeal for them. Before the notion of cinema studies was invented, Levinson and Link studied movies and teleplays. Their favorite writer-director was Billy Wilder – they were crazy for anything he did – and their favorite teleplay author was Paddy Chayefsky. For their college theses, they were allowed to submit “publications,” so they submitted three screenplays – all of which they eventually sold. After graduation, the school closed the “publications” loophole.

After serving in the Army and continuing to collaborate on stories via airmail, the two decided to head to Hollywood. Levinson flew ahead, and Link drove cross-country with his good friend Mike Rosenfeld, who would go on to become an agent at William Morris and be one of the founders of Creative Artists Agency (CAA).

Succeeding in television was no angst-filled journey for the duo – their first year, they made $50,000, a fortune in those days, which, according to Link, impressed his mother and made his brother jealous. For the next decade, they freelanced, writing episodes for mystery and drama series of all sorts, from “Johnny Ringo” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” to “Honey West,” “The Fugitive” and “Burke’s Law.” And then, in 1968, they adapted a play they had written, “Prescription: Murder,” as a TV movie. It featured a character named Lt. Columbo, played by New York actor Peter Falk. And the rest – well, the rest is not just TV history, but hours and hours of pleasure for families (including mine), generations of writers and shows inspired, and the mentoring and fostering of so many careers, including that of the 21-year-old director of the first on-air episode of the “Columbo” series. What was his name? Oh, yes – Steven Spielberg.

As Link tells it, Lew Wasserman, who ran Universal/MCA, and Sid Scheinberg, who ran Universal TV and would eventually run Universal, showed him and Levinson a short film, “Amblin,” which Spielberg had made, and then asked: “What should we do with this kid?”

“I said, ‘Put him under contract,’ ” Link recalled, “and they did.” Link said of Spielberg, “At 21, he was brilliant. He knew every lens. He knew how to move the actors within the frame without having to cut to a close-up. He would only use a close-up when it was important. Spielberg had it all at 21. The nicest guy you ever worked with … and he’s that way today.”

Levinson died of a heart attack. He had been a three-pack-a-day smoker (four when stressed), and Link, who was with Levinson the day he tried his first cigarette as a teenager, knew that it would one day kill his friend. Levinson knew it, too, “but he was hooked.” The loss devastated Link and sent him to a shrink, who helped him continue, and continue to write. But he still feels his partner’s presence.

“I think Dick sits on my shoulder, telling me, ‘Bill, you can do better with that line.’ ” TV series, movies and more “Columbo” followed. Link continues to write seven days a week. He no longer writes TV shows, but he still writes mysteries. Stories. And he sells every one.

Recently, Crippen & Landru published Link’s “The Columbo Collection,” 12 original short stories featuring Lt. Columbo. Once again, the most persistent detective in the world is hounding the arrogant murderers who think a detective wearing a raincoat in L.A. is someone they can outsmart. The fact they are – to a person – wrong does not diminish the pleasure of reading how Columbo unravels each crime, often by asking “one more question.”

As for how Columbo got his name – for years Link and Levinson were asked that question. For years, they gave an assortment of answers. They couldn’t remember. There was a nightclub in Philadelphia called Palumbo’s. There was a crime family in New York called Colombo. In the introduction to “The Columbo Collection,” Link offers a theory: Fighter Rocky Marciano’s trainer was named Allie Colombo. A.J. Liebling wrote about him, Link watched the fights. Could that be the genesis of the name? Link was not sure.

But when I met him, Link told me confidently that he had finally solved the puzzle. One of Wilder’s greatest movies is “Some Like It Hot.” Levinson and Link went to see the film on its opening day in 1959. They studied the screenplay. They watched the film often. But it was only recently that Link was struck by what was staring him in the face all along: The gangster that Curtis and Lemmon are on the run from, played by George Raft, is called, memorably, “Spats.” His full name? “Spats Colombo.” Link is now convinced that is the source of the detective’s iconic name.

As for that other mystery, the one about Link’s Jewish heritage, it turns out that Link’s father was troubled by his father’s running out on the family and by not knowing anything about him. When Link’s father went to serve in Europe in World War II, he hired a genealogist to research his family tree. The report remained in a manila envelope that was placed in a blue suitcase, to which Link’s mother added other family documents, such as birth and marriage and confirmation certificates. Upon his mother’s death, the blue suitcase passed to Link. He gave it all a cursory look but never examined it thoroughly.

Only recently, Link’s niece, Amy, decided to do her own family research and went through the blue suitcase. There, in the old manila envelope, was a family tree, listing Ezekiel, Jacob and Sarah – and, no, the family was not Amish. They were Jewish.

The reaction of most of his friends, thus far, has been, “We always knew.” Link says he couldn’t be happier. But then again, he’s always happy when he’s solved a mystery.

Who do we have to thank for Hitler’s eventual defeat? What was World War II’s turning point? Who, by his actions during the war, inspired Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s early leaders? The answer, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s stirring new documentary, “Walking With Destiny,” is Winston Churchill.

Churchill, who died in 1965, is hardly a forgotten figure. To the contrary, there is a large and healthy Churchill industry producing new books, one after another, season after season.

To some extent, “Winston Churchill: Walking With Destiny,” which opens Nov. 5 at select Laemmle and Edwards theaters, was born out of historian Martin Gilbert’s 2007 work, “Churchill and the Jews” (Gilbert served as a historical consultant to the film). Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the founder of its Academy Award-winning film division, Moriah Films, along with Richard Trank, the center’s media director and Moriah’s executive producer, were inspired by the book to make a film that would be, in one sense, larger than a parochial story about Churchill, but in another sense, narrower, focusing on the years 1940 and 1941 – as Hier called it, “the most dangerous moment.” What Hier wanted to tell was the story of “the man who saved Western civilization.”

As Trank explained, the more he got into the research, the more he was struck by how, even into the 1930s, Churchill stood virtually alone in seeing the danger Hitler posed and in speaking out about his revulsion for Hitler’s racial policies concerning the Jews. Trank, who also produced and directed “Walking With Destiny,” grew up in Downey, Calif., the son of one parent who fled the Holocaust just before the war, and the other whose family immigrated earlier to South Africa, where they were Yiddish actors. He earned his bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and did graduate work at USC. Trank has been the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s media director and the executive producer of Moriah Films, the center’s Jack and Pearl Resnick Film Division, since 1984. He was the producer of the Academy Award-winning documentary, “The Long Way Home.”

Moriah has often focused on Jewish figures, but “Walking With Destiny” instead profiles a person to whom the Jewish people, as Hier put it, “owe a great debt of gratitude.”

The film effectively shows the power of Churchill’s uncompromising stance against Hitler – from before the war and during the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz – and his efforts to gain the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the reluctant American people.

Still enormously stirring are Churchill’s words delivered in his deep, sonorous tones, calling on the British to fight on, casting the conflict in heroic terms, never minimizing the difficulties ahead or how great the stakes were, but assuring the British people that even in the face of death and destruction, they must “carry on.” It is hard not to be moved, even today, hearing Churchill’s words, and seeing the vintage images of bombed-out, burned and rubble-strewn London.

Here was Churchill, already in his late 60s, a patrician (or, as he might be cast today, “elitist”), ready to lead the people by example, always out in the streets soon after the German bombs fell, talking to people, helping to clear rubble, engaging in the fight, at one with his people – lifting their spirits, hardening their resolve and assuring victory by refusing, alongside them, to be defeated.

Perhaps it’s just coincidence that “Walking With Destiny” is being released around the time of the Kristallnacht anniversary. But the message is clear. As Hier put it, without Churchill, nothing that is sacred in Jewish life would have survived.

The relevance to today, although never stated explicitly in the film, is also clear – and this is why I recommend this film whole-heartedly and hope that it will be seen by as many students and schoolchildren as possible. It shows what it means to stand on principle, against all odds in the toughest of times – and that although there are many politicians, only a few are true leaders.

“I would hate to think what the world would be,” Hier said, “if there had not been a Winston Churchill.”

A work by Niso Maman

The Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon in Southern Israel, six miles from Gaza, is a 500-bed facility with an emergency room and a teaching hospital that treats Israelis and Palestinians. Qassam rockets launched from Gaza land so regularly on the building that the top two floors are kept unoccupied as a “safety buffer.”

Imagine that you are Lee Wallach, an American and CEO of Community Assets Consulting, a firm specializing in assisting Israeli, international and U.S. environmental technology companies with business in the United States and California. And that you visited Barzilai, some 18 months ago. Or Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who, together with his chief of staff, Matt Wollman, also visited Barzilai and, while there, came under rocket attack. Or Niso Maman, an Israeli sculptor of international renown who often works with recycled materials and operates a studio in West Palm Beach, Fla. Or even Daphna Ziman, political activist, philanthropist, founder and chair of Children Uniting Nations, who lives in a beautiful home in Beverly Hills and had heard about Barzilai and the sculptures Maman has created.

Each of these people wanted to do something to help Barzilai.

Here’s what happened: Wallach came up with the idea of having an artist create artworks from the missile fragments and debris that had hit the hospital, and he approached Maman, who accepted the challenge. Wallach also approached Baca to discuss how Qassam rocket debris might be allowed into the United States to be fashioned into sculpture and then exhibited. And Ziman offered her home to host a reception for Barzilai, Maman and the sculptures.

All of which is how, on a recent evening, I came to find myself at Ziman’s home viewing an exhibition of Maman’s sculptures called “The Qassams of Barzilai,” in the company of Maman, Ziman, Wollman and City Councilman Paul Koretz, as well as Dr. Shimon Scharf, Barzilai’s CEO and medical director.

Displayed throughout the home were more than a half dozen of Maman’s sculptures. They were striking, surprising and challenging. In some instances, the work was humbled by its medium’s provenance, at other times it transcended it, becoming a thing of perplexing beauty.

One piece used twisted, rusted strips to form a peace symbol; in another, small shards became a woman’s torso. Even more interesting were pieces in which the rocket canister was evident but was surrounded by metal to suggest a futurist-style work of strange energy, a flower of evil, if you will, moving back and forth between horror and beauty. Finally, there were a few sculptures where the metal seemed like mad brushstrokes speaking their own abstract language.

Maman explained that each metal fragment came from shrapnel collected by the Israeli bomb squad, and each had been marked as to when and where it fell, then stored in evidence boxes. “This was the most challenging scrap metal I ever worked with,” Maman said. “As an artist, I like challenges. With some pieces I tried to transform them completely,” he continued, “but some pieces, it was a struggle to work with the energy of the piece.” Maman said his connection to the materials was personal, as he had been in Ashkelon during a rocket attack, and one of the fragments he’d worked with had fallen the day he was there. He said he derived great satisfaction from the work and from the exhibition. “It’s a great feeling to do this for the hospital, because they are doing wonderful work,” he said.

Wallach said he hopes to send Maman’s current exhibit on a national tour and has already garnered support from the American Jewish Committee, StandWithUs and the Iranian American Jewish Group 30 Years After; the latter organization displayed the work during its recent conference at the Century Plaza Hotel. Wallach hopes to invite other artists to “tell the story of Barzilai.”

Wallach also has launched a fundraising campaign for the Friends of Barzilai to fund an underground emergency room, protected from attacks; to enhance the hospital’s oncology institute; and to renovate the gynecology wing, as well as the neonatal intensive care and pediatric intensive care units. Wallach would like to match the $44 million the Israeli government has pledged for improvements to the hospital.

At the event in her home, Ziman said she had long been frustrated by the situation in Southern Israel and wanted to speak out about the destruction wreaked by the missiles. However, when she first saw the sculptures, she said, “I was blown away.” What moved her was that, in “turning death and ugliness into beauty,” she saw a powerful metaphor for the best of Israel, that it has been “turning a desert into a garden … building rather than destroying … turning a negative into a positive.” She said she was grateful to be able to offer her home for the exhibition.

The event was neither political nor an evening to engender political debate. It was an exhibit of sculptures – interesting, unexpectedly beautiful and poetic. And yet, as Scharf, Barzilai’s director, pointed out, no one can look at the sculptures without thinking of the words of Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares.”

Or, as Maman said, “If shrapnel can be turned into fine art, maybe there’s a chance for peace.”

Tony Curtis was so famous, so iconic an American movie star that I don’t really need to tell you who he was. He was Tony Curtis, and he lived that role with childish delight, relishing where his life had taken him, and the pleasures and opportunities fame had afforded him. By the time he died last week at age 85 at his home in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, Nev., he was known the world over – for the movies he starred in, such as “Some Like It Hot” and “Sweet Smell of Success,” for the women he loved (Janet Leigh, Marilyn Monroe), for being the father of Jamie Lee Curtis and for being a movie star from a time when being one mattered.

Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx. His parents were Hungarian immigrants who came to the United States following World War I. His father, Emanuel Schwartz, was a tailor who could barely support the family. His mother, Helen, suffered from schizophrenia, as did his younger brother Robert. At one point, when his parents could not support the family, Curtis and his other brother, Julius, were sent to a state institution. After the brothers returned to the Bronx, Julius was killed by a truck and Curtis fought in a street gang and endured anti-Semitic attacks.

Curtis joined the Navy in 1944, serving during World War II. Upon his return, he took acting classes on the GI Bill and was discovered by a Universal Studios talent scout. What Hollywood had to offer – girls and money, in that order – was irresistible.

It was Curtis’ combination of toughness and vulnerability – his predatory sexual magnetism and the almost female quality to his beauty – that would make his career. Billy Wilder had the genius to lampoon and showcase all these contradictions in “Some Like It Hot,” casting Curtis as a jazz performer who was a womanizer and a con man who had to disguise himself both as a woman and as a Cary Grant-flavored fop. Burt Lancaster seized on Curtis’ charisma and his ambition by playing opposite him in “Trapeze” and “Sweet Smell of Success.”

Once Curtis achieved success, the roles were many, but his great performances were few and far between. Although he could surprise in such roles as “The Boston Strangler” (1968) and “Lepke” (1975), more often than not he was in such popcorn fare as “The Great Impostor” (1961) and “The Great Race” (1965). Curtis also starred in the TV series “The Persuaders!” with Roger Moore for two seasons (1971-72), and later played a recurring character in “Vega$” (1978-1981). Nevertheless, over the years the role he came to inhabit best was that of Tony Curtis.

Curtis was married six times: to Janet Leigh (daughters Jamie Lee and Kelly), Christine Kaufmann (daughters Alexandra and Allegra), Leslie Allen (sons Nick and Benjamin), Andrea Savio, Lisa Deutsch and Jill Vandenberg. He did two stints at the Betty Ford Center for drug and alcohol abuse. Yet, despite his ups and downs, personally and professionally, he had a keen sense of his rakish appeal to the general public and was willing to use his celebrity not only to support his lifestyle but also to support causes greater than himself.

I first met Curtis in 1988 in Budapest at ceremonies for the dedication of a memorial sculpture to the 600,000 Hungarian Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Imre Varga’s weeping-willow-like monument, “Memorial of the Martyrs,” stands to this day in the courtyard of the Dohány Synagogue. The Emanuel Foundation, which Curtis was instrumental in founding and which is named for his father, is a Brooklyn-based charity that sought to preserve and restore sites of Jewish interest in Hungary and had raised money for the memorial. Curtis was in Budapest to garner as much publicity and recognition as possible for the organization and the event and to serve as a draw for local politicians and potential donors.

I was there because my parents were involved in the Emanuel Foundation and because my father was being honored by the Dohány Synagogue for his rescue efforts in Budapest during World War II (a plaque honoring my father’s wartime actions is affixed to the base of the Holocaust memorial).

Curtis had traveled to Budapest with two of his children, Kelly and Nick (the latter of whom would later die of a drug overdose). Curtis was charming – the elegance, swagger and air of noblesse oblige that he had employed to pose as a wealthy gentleman in “Some Like It Hot” had by now been absorbed into his public persona. The event was a great success: In the following years, the Dohány Synagogue was completely restored to its pre-war glory with funds from the Hungarian government, and support was being given to other synagogues as well as to maintain Jewish cemeteries all over Hungary.

Several years later, after I moved to Los Angeles, my mother enlisted me to be the driver and general factotum to Andor Weiss, the Emanuel Foundation’s executive director. Weiss was a Brooklyn-based Orthodox rabbi and a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who may have been the most tenacious person I’d ever met.  Whenever he was in town, I would drive him around, imagining that I was co-starring in a remake of “The Mad Adventures of ‘Rabbi’ Jacob,” or what would surely one day be the basis for the oddest buddy comedy ever made.

One day, our travels had me turning off Sepulveda Boulevard and into Bel Air Crest. We were directed to a townhouse up the hill. The rabbi, not much more than 4 feet tall, reached to ring the bell. After a few minutes, the door opened, and there to greet the rabbi was Tony Curtis, wearing short-short white tennis shorts – and nothing else. No shirt, no shoes, his white hair teased high. He embraced the rabbi. Then he turned to me and hugged me, too, before leading us into his home.

We talked for several hours. The rabbi had big plans for Los Angeles: a gala, events, honorees, sponsors. Curtis listened amiably and offered to allow his name to be used on whatever letterhead, committee listing or invitation would help. The rest was up to the rabbi. After that, Curtis took us on a tour of his house. We met his wife, Jill, who bore what seemed an intentional resemblance to Marilyn Monroe but who revealed herself to be her own person – lovely, thoughtful and passionate about horses (in 2009, she and Curtis released a documentary about Shiloh, a horse rescue facility they founded). Everywhere we went, paintings leaned against the walls. Curtis proudly showed us several, talking about the influence of Matisse and Magritte upon his own work, and mentioning upcoming exhibitions of his artwork. Among the works leaning against the walls was one that stood out because of its resemblance to the work of the Swiss artist Balthus. When asked about it, Curtis confirmed that it was indeed a Balthus – a small work, mixed casually among the Curtis oeuvre.

When we got to the garage, he showed us a new Camaro he’d recently purchased. “When I was a teenager in the Bronx, I loved muscle cars,” he said, “and in my head I’m still a teenager who wants his muscle car.” You could take the boy out of the Bronx, but it appeared that the Bronx never left the boy. That was what made him a star, allowed him to survive Hollywood, and have a sense of himself that included befriending an Orthodox rabbi and lending his name and his celebrity to raise funds to commemorate his Hungarian Jewish heritage.

And that, for me, was the key to understanding Curtis’ lasting appeal: the bald-faced nature of his charm, his vanity, his egotism, all feeding a larger-than-life persona that was self-created and that he deployed with charm and generosity for his benefit and to help others, with his talent sitting there casually in the mix, like a lone Balthus.

It’s been 10 years since my mother Eva Teicholz died on Sept. 22 – nine since I stood by her graveside at the unveiling. Since then, I have visited her grave in New Jersey on many occasions and have diligently observed days of mourning and lit memorial candles.

I loved her dearly. But have I missed her? The answer is, of course, yes. But death does strange things: it restores our loved ones to their best selves – as we would most like to remember them – before the ravages of disease or age fully took their toll.

So I have spent the last 10 years forgetting the more than 20 years before that during which my mother suffered from severe recurring depression, her multiple suicide attempts, hospitalizations, outpatient ECT treatments, her cycle of dazed, better, fine, too good, bitter, worse, bad, crazy, immobilized and unwilling, and needing to go to the hospital. Even writing this paragraph causes tension to course through me in a way that I had almost forgotten.

Since her death, my mother’s smile is with me. Her wicked sense of humor, dark and cutting as it was, which in later years could turn just mean, is once again clever, witty, even insightful.

My mother had a love of culture, high and low. She had a better understanding of Shakespeare than any of my teachers ever did, but she also delighted in gossip, tabloid papers and, increasingly over the years, TV shows. How often we discussed what was on TV that night, what old movies there were to enjoy, what new sitcoms delighted, what shows in rerun she relished.

So I miss her when I watch a sitcom, or a particularly good mystery. Sometimes I’ll be watching something old-fashioned, say a Masterpiece Theatre Hercule Poirot, and I will savor each detail, knowing that no one would have found it more delicious than my mother. Sometimes on the weekend, I’ll turn on the classic movie channel and indulge in a communion we would have shared.

My mother was also quite glamorous. In Budapest, in her youth, my mother was what today we would call an M/A/W (model/actress/whatever) with the stage name Eva Somogyi. She cared little for her career, enjoying it as much for the social mobility it provided as the income. Since her death, with benefit of the Internet, I’ve been to able to accumulate, scan and retrieve images of her from those days. She was indeed beautiful. I have seen two of the three films that she appeared in, and I agree with her assessment that she “was not a great actress, but was cute on screen.”

As I came to know her, my mother was vain, narcissistic, critical and demanding. Looks: Hers, mine, other people’s – all mattered to her. The way a person was dressed, the way a table was set, manners, the paintings in a person’s home, the cups that the coffee were served in at a home or a restaurant (she was against coffee served in paper cups) – nothing went unnoticed.

I miss neither the scrutiny nor the weight of such constant judgments. But I do cherish my mother’s appreciation for the good, the worthy and the beautiful in all things. I often find my head filled with arcane knowledge she instilled in me about subjects – artists, dancers, long-forgotten European writers; or in thrall about movies, art exhibits or cultural events that few others seem interested in – and I miss being able to share or tell her about them. Less and less, there seem to be people I know who care as much about the things she cared about.

Just the other day, while my wife and daughter were away, I brought home dinner. I placed the takeout containers on the dining table – and stared at them. Although plastic utensils were provided and the containers were made so that I could eat right out of them, I couldn’t bring myself to do so. I set the table using the best of our dishwasher-safe plates, placed the silverware with the fork laid upon the cloth napkin, placed the glass in front and served myself dinner, placing the containers away on the counter. Did the food taste better that way? I can’t say. Did I appreciate it more? Perhaps. But did doing so make me think of my mother? Certainly.

Following last year’s cancellation of the original New York version of the series after a venerable 20-year run — a record matched in drama only by the classic Western “Gunsmoke” — a new spawn will appear this fall: “Law & Order: Los Angeles.”

While some may dismiss this latest iteration of Dick Wolf’s procedural formula as “more of the same, only different,” to me, the creation of a “Law & Order” in Los Angeles signals a cultural watershed, a moment to consider what living here means and to question how our concepts of justice and ethics, crime and punishment, play out in a city whose geography has often been its destiny and whose police force and city prosecutor’s office have their own specific histories and culture.

To get a sense of how the show might navigate our freeways and byways, I spoke with René Balcer, executive producer of the new show and, since 1996, a veteran of what he calls “the mother ship.” With Balcer having weathered so many homicides from week to week over the years, I wondered what he thought Los Angeles would have to offer in the way of murder.

“There’s no end to the crime story, starting with Cain and Abel,” Balcer told me. “People are always coming up with new ways of dispatching their fellow man. And for different reasons … I don’t think we’ve done it all.”

“Law & Order” has always relied on a uniquely compelling structure — in the first half of the program, police investigate a crime (usually a homicide); in the second half, lawyers from the District Attorney’s office prosecute. The L.A. version will be no different.

Like the original, the story will be told through two police officers and two deputy district attorneys — but, like identical twins might at first glance seem the same, the Los Angeles version, due to its own idiosyncrasies, inevitably will be different from its New York sibling.

In New York, Balcer believes, cultures clash more, and people get in one another’s faces, while Los Angeles is a “patchwork of different cultures,” a city where denizens of the Westside need never go to the Eastside, nor those from South L.A. to the Valley; where beaches are free, but in some places, public access is made difficult (particularly in the enclaves of Malibu). Such insularity will affect the storytelling in the new show. “Each episode can concentrate in a certain area of town and deal with the culture almost, but not quite, in isolation,” Balcer said.

Over the course of its storied run, “Law & Order” became known for not delving much into characters’ personal lives, for taking stories “ripped from the headlines” and for making interesting casting choices that often gave serious roles to stand-up comics and stage actors largely unknown to TV audiences. The L.A. version will uphold those traditions, for the most part — tweaking them to reflect the character of the city.

Given that in this city, private matters are just a prelude to publicity, Balcer admitted that there will be “five degrees” more focus on the characters’ private lives outside the office.

In creating the two detectives and the two D.A.s, who will alternate weekly, Balcer and the other writers hope to reflect the complicated ideologies, loyalties, lifestyles, career paths and ambitions that characterize Los Angeles.

In “Law & Order,” Jerry Orbach’s Lennie Briscoe captured a specific New York Jewish ethnicity that was pervasive in some of the episodes (after the show was canceled, Heeb magazine ran a feature highlighting the eight most Jewy episodes). But Balcer feels the show and its L.A. descendant are more universal, saying, “In the world of crime, every ethnic group and religious group is well represented.”

Balcer, who is concurrently writing a miniseries about the LAPD in the 1960s, wants “Law & Order: Los Angeles” to acknowledge the city’s police history, both good and bad, including its history of bias, from its many former John Birch Society members to the corruption of the Rampart scandal.

The main detectives are Rex Winters (Skeet Ulrich), who as a rookie went through the Rodney King riots, and his younger partner, Tomas “T.J.” Jaruszalski (Corey Stall), whose father is a Polish émigré cinematographer and who, in Balcer’s words, “thinks being a cop is the most fun anyone can have … [like being] front row at the circus everyday.” Their lieutenant is Arleen Gonzales (Wanda De Jesus), a 20-year veteran who was one of the office’s first women detectives. “She’s gay; she has a life partner who’s younger; they have an 11-year-old son together,” Balcer said.

On the prosecution side, the alternating deputy D.A.s are Ricardo Morales (Alfred Molina), a first-generation Latino whose father was a groundskeeper at Hillcrest Country Club, “a political animal” whose goal is to become District Attorney, which he sees not only as a stepping stone but “the place to do the most good.” He is assisted by attorney Evelyn Price (Regina Hall), an African American who grew up in Baldwin Hills, the daughter of a successful upper-middle-class businessman who, although aware of “all the foibles of the LAPD,” will choose law over anarchy.

By contrast, Deputy D.A. Jonah Dekker (Terrence Howard) is more of a free spirit and creative legal thinker. “This is not going to be his last job.” His assistant D.A. is Lauren Gardner — the character’s name may change — (Megan Boone), who comes from a well-off San Marino family with right-of-center politics (think Angie Harmon on the mother ship).

As for the stories, Balcer said celebrities will only be about “one-tenth of the cases, because there are a lot more crimes that happen in L.A. … but don’t get the publicity.” A mix of national stories will be told with an L.A. hook, along with stories unique to the region.

“For example, in Temecula,” Balcer said, “there’s a big controversy over the building of a mosque — well, that’s an L.A. story, even though that story’s being replicated in other places in the country. And there are some that are unique to L.A. — like the backdrop to the financing of something like Proposition 8. That would be fertile ground for a story.” Balcer also said he and his writers are working on a story about “second-generation Russian immigrants who get kidnapped in L.A. in order to shake down their rich relatives back in Moscow.”

When we spoke, Balcer was only a few days into filming the first episode. Scripts for half of the first 13-episode order had been written, and the rest were in process.

Will the show succeed? Will it ring true? Will it convey how morality and justice are two shades of gray in a city where everyone wears sunglasses?

From my conversation with Balcer, Los Angeles already seemed to be becoming a character in its own drama — a city set in a desert where strong hands grasp at sand.

Given that I haven’t been posting much lately, I thought perhaps I would fill the gap by publishing an interview I did for Andy Warhol’s Interview back in the early 1980s with Isaac Bashevis Singer, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

As I recall he was prickly but quite game — qualities evident in the interview below, with the man I came to think of as “The Yiddish Yoda.”

The Passions of a Nobel Laureate:

Isaac Bashevis Singer by Tom Teicholz

Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. The son and grandson of rabbis, Mr. Singer was born in Leonczyn, Poland in 1904. Al­though he attended rabbinical school in Warsaw, Isaac Singer chose not to enter his father’s profession. Rather, he chose to become a writer and follow the example of his older brother, the author Israel Joshua Singer (I. J. Singer, who wrote “The Broth­ers Ashkenazi” and “Yoshe Kalb,” passed away in 1945). After working as a journal­ist for the Yiddish press in Poland, and as a translator of German works into Yiddish (most notably Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain“), he published his first novel, “Satan in Goray” in 1935. The same year, he emigrated to the United States and be­gan to be published regularly in the Yid­dish language newspaper, “The Jewish Daily Forward,” to which he continues to be a weekly contributor. Almost all his works have been serialized in, or written in serial form for “The Jewish Daily For­ward.” Mr. Singer continues to write all his first drafts in Yiddish, a highly expres­sive language of the Diaspora that, al­though written in Hebrew characters, is quite distinct from either ancient or Mod­ern Hebrew.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work first came to the attention of the English reading pub­lic in 1953, when a short story of his, “Gimpel The Fool” appeared in “ThePartisan Review.” The short story was trans­lated by, coincidentally, our other living American Nobel laureate for Literature, Saul Bellow. Since then his works have been steadily translated. His stories fre­quently appear in “The New Yorker,” and his novels, collected stories, memoirs and children’s books include: “Gimpel The Fool” (1957), “The Magician of Lublin” (I960). “The Slave” (1962), “In My Fa­ther’s Court” (1966), “Sosha” (1978). “A Young Man in Search of Love” (1978), “Collected Stories” (1981). “The Golem” (1982). This fall, Farrar, Straws and Giroux will publish his latest work, a novel. “The Penitent.”

The world of Isaac Bashevis Singer is a world of small Polish villages and Amer­ican emigre communities, of believers and blasphemers, of religion and mysticism, of satanic and holy forces. It is also a world of passion and obsessions: of lust, greed, marriage and divorce; and of the most basic human forces: life and death, treachery and loyalty, love and hate. Though his tales are always replete with meaning, it is always the story that is paramount. For above all, he is a master storyteller, and to read his work is to be drawn into a world that although at times surreal, is never unreal.

The following conversation took place in the study of Mr. Singer’s large and cluttered apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Tom Teicholz: Your works are known for their lush sensuality, and the perversion in which your characters indulge. Why does this interest you so much?

Isaac Bashevis Singer: Why shouldn’t it be interesting to me? Isn’t it the thing about which people think and act on all their lives? Isn’t sex the way—don’t we all come from sex? You might as well ask why people are interested in food.

TT: But it’s not always the subject matter of literature.

IS: I wouldn’t say it always is, but then I don’t do things that are always done.

TT: One imagines, though, the world of the Hassidim and Polish Orthodox Jewry to be a world of many restrictions.

IS: It’s true. My father was a Hassid, but I am not exactly a Hassid at this stage in my life. I am a religious man. I believe in God, but I am not a Hassid. I do not believe that man’s love and passion is something against God. He created it.

TT: But do you think that a life in which there are restrictions imposed leads to greater or more unbridled passion?

IS: I think that if you restrict one energy, it will come out in another energy. If you restrain yourself from sexual achievements, you will get other things. Your desire for literature or photography or any other work will be greater. This energy is in us. Of course, it can also become religion—it can become anything. The truth is that, if people didn’t restrict themselves, they wouldn’t be able to exist together. Our whole civilization and culture is based on restriction.

TT: Do you think in modern life today there are the same restric­tions or are—

IS: There are not the same restrictions, but we restrict ourselves just the same.

TT: Do you think life today is more passionate?

IS: I think that in people who restrict themselves, there is more passion because the passion doesn’t want the restriction. It tries to get out of the restrictions, so there is more of a battle. But in the end, there is some bookkeeping in life, so that if energy is spent in one way, it will not be spent in another way and so on.

TT: In one of your books, you talk about how as a young man, you wrote many rules for yourself, one of which was that one should only be married for fifteen years. Do you still believe that?

IS: I would say I believe that: if marriage is a contract, it should not be a contract for life. It should be a contract for a number of years until the people bring up a family. Then, if they still love one another, it should be prolonged.

TT: But is fidelity possible?

IS: I think it is possible. If it weren’t possible, people wouldn’t talk about it as a matter of fact, every human being restrains himself one way or another.

TT: But your stories are all about people who don’t, or can’t, restrain themselves.

IS: Well, they do, but sometimes their passion is so great that they burst their restrictions. I would say that the whole civilization is built on restrictions. You would not be able to do anything if you would only let go.

TT: In terms of literature, do you think there are some writers who are memorable for their writings about these passions, about sex? IS: Many, like Henry Miller and also Chinese writers and other Asiatic writers and writers in African languages.

TT: Which, for you, are the most memorable writers about sex?

IS: Well, we still think that Boccaccio knew his profession quite well.

TT: Do you think the elements you write about between men and women are so basic—do you think that’s why your works are read all over the world?

IS: I have the illusion that I am read because people like what they are reading. Why they like and what they like, I don’t know.

TT: Or what they understand?

IS: I don’t write so that my writing is obscure, so that I need commentaries. I try to make it clear.

TT: Do you think that fiction should be moral; that writers have a moral responsibility?

IS: I don’t think that a writer should sit down and try to write a moral story or a novel. But if he is a moral man, and a man who thinks about ethics and culture—real culture—there will be some message and insight. But if a man sits down to write and says, “This novel is going to make people better and bring the glorious future they are hoping for,” he will never succeed.

TT: So you feel that your ethical training . . .

IS: Was not lost. Except for a real outcast, no writer features crime or something like this. There are such writers too. I am sorry to say, but I don’t belong to them.

TT: What does God think of all the passions?

IS: I know that after this interview, you are going to interview the Almighty so that He will tell you all about it. I don’t know what He thinks.

TT: Well, what do you think about Him?

IS: All I can say is that I can see very well His great and divine wisdom. I cannot see His mercy all the time, but He has to hide something. He’s not going to tell me all the secrets.

TT: When you create your stories, do you feel more in touch with your Creator?

IS: I think I feel in touch with Him every minute of my life. I feel that He is there, and His providence is there, and His computer is so great that it can take care of all the billions of people and all the planets that have people.

TT: But you believe in free will?

IS: Yes.

TT: So He doesn’t predetermine?

IS: According to Maimonides, both are true: determinism and free will.

TT: How so?

IS: Maybe you don’t understand how so—it looks like a contra­diction, but it’s only a contradiction to our way of thinking. Not to God’s way of thinking. In a way, it’s possible, even in this world. You can say that under such and such a circumstance a man is going to feel this way, and he really does. That doesn’t mean that he did not have free choice. He had free choice; only he decided not to use it.

TT: What about suicide? You once said, “For me. a person who does not think about suicide is almost not a person.”

IS: I think a person who does not think about suicide does not see the tragedy of humanity. So he is not a highly sensitive person. I think a highly sensitive person would, sooner or later, play with the idea that a man can put an end to it if he really wants to.

TT: Do you still think about suicide?

IS: Why not? We all do.

TT: You’ve been quoted as saying that you believe we’ve all been here more than once.

IS: I believe in it. but I have no evidence that it is so.

TT: No one has called you from the Beyond and said it’s so.

IS: No one has called me, but when I walk in the spring and I see the leaves and the roses, I recognize them from last year. They are the same. In a way, they have been here last year. The same is true about us. We have been here the last century or so. It’s not a ques­tion of evidence, only a question of feeling.

TT: Are you as curious today about the world as you were as a young man?

IS: Yes. I almost wanted to say more so, but if I am as curious as I was, I am very curious.

TT: Have you found any answers to your questions?

IS: No answers at all. We find parts of answers, answers in certain circumstances, some personal answers. But the great answer to why we were born, why we are here, why we have to die, why we have to witness, and why we suffer, can never be answered in a really satisfying way. I would say that man is going to ask these questions to the very end of his existence.

TT: Are there still some questions that you think you will find answers to?

IS: Small ones, I find all the time. I write a story, and I ask myself should I finish it so or differently, and I find an answer. But when it comes to the so-called “Eternal Questions,” I don’t think that any answer is waiting for us.

TT: But. do you still believe, as Gimpel does, that anything is possible?

IS: I wouldn’t say anything. If you would tell me that we could walk on the ceiling, I would have my doubts. But knowing what causality is and what human will and human freedom are and what the human passions are, many things have happened—many things which limited people think cannot happen. But these things can happen and do happen and have already happened.

TT: You’ve been writing since the 1930s and have only been published in English since the 1950s. There is a lot of material that continues to appear in English without any regard to its chronological order. How do you choose what to release?

IS: What I think is worth being translated, I translate. Where I think I did not succeed 100 percent. I would leave them [untranslated].

TT: Do you re-work them?

IS: If I find time, I do.

TT: So some of the old material is as good as the new material?

IS: I don’t think we have time to search and search and find them. I think there is a lot of my material which should be translated. There is a lot of material that I would like to re-work.

TT: Work that has been published in Yiddish?

IS: Yes, published in Yiddish. There are unpublished things also, but mostly things that have been published in The Jewish Daily Forward. TT: Stories or whole novels?

IS: Stories, even novels and novellas—all kinds of things. Essays— scores of essays that I wrote just because I had to deliver stuff every week to the editor.

TT: Do you feel that being a serial writer was good training?

IS: I think it was good for me. It was good in the Nineteenth cen­tury. Many writers wrote like this. It has its shortcomings too. One of the shortcomings is that the writer is bound to repeat himself. But this repetition does no damage if the writer later edits his stuff and takes out the repetition. It is a very wonderful discipline for a writer. It is a whip that drives you to write, and in writing he tries not to be obscure because what he writes today, 20,000 or 40,000 people will read tomorrow or next week. You know that you are really talking to people and not to yourself. You don’t try to be an obscure writer who needs commentators to explain his work all the time.

TT: What is lost in translation in your work?

IS: I would say a lot would be lost if I didn’t work on them, but I work on the translations. I have learned enough English to work on them, and I am a reader myself. If I see that something is not right and I don’t like it and would not publish it, I will rewrite it. I would say that I do a lot not to lose anything. Sometimes I even gain through the forces of translation because while I read it I get new ideas. I would say that people who read me in Yiddish and people who read me in English, if they know both languages, will see how many changes I’ve made in the process of translation.

TT: With your present knowledge of English, are there any works that were translated 20 years ago that you think deserve to be re­translated?

IS: No. I have no complaints about the translations because my nephew, the son of my brother, I. J. Singer, was quite a good trans­lator. I think I would find mostly faults in my writing, not in the translation.

TT: How did Saul Bellow come to translate “Gimpel”? Was that just a coincidence?

IS: He undertook to publish a kind of anthology of Yiddish stories, and his assistant, a Mr. Greenberg, knew that I wrote “Gimpel the Fool,” and he read it to him. Bellow knows Yiddish, but not too much. He knew enough for an American man. He liked it and he translated it. This was the only time that he translated a story.

TT: In many ways, it launched your career in English.

IS: In a way, yes. It was published in The Partisan Review. That was read by most of the writers, and I got some attention.

TT: Does wearing the cloak of being one of the last Yiddish writers carry a burden with it?

IS: If I wear that cloak I am not conscious of it. When I sit down to write, I don’t think about whether I am the last or the first or whether I will help Yiddish or do damage to Yiddish. I think about the story— is it going to be a good story or a bad story? So because of this, other things I leave to the critics. If they want me to be the last Yiddish writer—actually, no one knows. No man knows if he will be the last one. There will always be someone else.

TT: Do you see yourself primarily as a writer of short stories?

IS: No, I have written novels. Of course, I love the short story. The short story is a great challenge to a writer because you have to say, in a few pages, a lot of things. I think that the short story should really be short. I think that the short stories in The New Yorker are almost all longer than my stories. Mine are really short. But if you manage to really say a lot and to bring out character and personality in a story, or bring out suspense, you have achieved almost the impossible.

TT: And what about your career as a writer of film treatments and as a playwright?

IS: I would not say that I am a playwright, at this point, certainly not with film—I wrote one little treatment once. I think of myself seri­ously as a writer of novels and short stories. If I succeed in making a play, I consider it a miracle.

TT: Now Yentl is being made into a film.

IS: It is being made into a film. That’s true. What kind of a film, I don’t know.

TT: Have you seen any of it?

IS: I wrote a script, but they didn’t take it. Barbra Streisand wanted a musical with songs. There are no songs in my script. So they made a different script and there will be songs. It is not really my child.

TT: But more and more you’re writing children’s books?

IS: I have written ten or eleven books—small books. Each one contains a story or maybe two. but never 20 or something like that

TT: Does this come from being a grandfather?

IS: I think I began writing for children before I became a grand­father.

TT: But you like writing for children?

IS: I love it. They are a great audience. Children are really inde­pendent readers. You cannot hypnotize them with reviews or advertisements or by authorities. The child has to like it. If he doesn’t like it it’s rejected. So they are real independent readers.

TT: You’ve been called a curator of a lost world. Do you feel more able to write about this lost world because you did not witness its destruction?

IS: First of all, the lost world is the world of my childhood, of my younger days. This is the world between the time of my being born and the time of my leaving—I’d say I was about 30 years old when I left Poland. So a large part of my life, though not the largest part, I lived in Poland. We are bound to write about the things of our younger days and to remember them better than the things that hap­pened yesterday or the day before. Of course, I write also about people here in America, but mostly I write about people from Po­land—Yiddish-speaking Poles. Jews—I do this to be sure that I write about people that I know best. I know their language best and their way of thinking. I would almost never write about people born in this country. Once in a while I will bring in someone, but just for a while.

TT: What about assimilation and the loss of culture? Your work seems to emphasize being true to one’s ….

IS: I don’t believe in assimilation. I think assimilation is when a man, who is a member of a minority, tries to adjust himself to the culture of the majority. I think this is not right. You should stay what you are and stay with your roots and not adjust yourself to people because they are more in number or stronger and so on. For in­stance, I don’t mind if you know all about Shakespeare. But if you know all about Shakespeare, and you don’t want to know anything about the Jews or the Jewish writers, I would say that you are trying to adjust yourself to a strong majority. I consider that wrong from an ethical point of view, and from the point of view of human dignity.

TT: Why from the point of view of human dignity?

IS: Because it’s not dignified for a man to deny his home and to try to imitate and own what belongs to somebody else. In other words, if you have parents and a home and a language and you say, “My parents and home and language are nothing. But my neighbor—his parents are important. His home is important His language is important”—you have no dignity.

TT: You can’t imagine that the two together can become more than the individual?

IS: Yes, I can imagine it, and it is so. But it is not so when one party is completely weak or nonexistent. That really means that you have decided that you are nothing and the other one is great because he has more power, or more numbers, which is not as the thing should be.

TT: You studied to be a rabbi, and your works are full of scholarly religious references. Do you keep up with this? Do you still read the Talmud and the commentaries?

IS: If I open it, I read it. Sometimes I am curious and I read it, but I have no discipline where I have to study every day so much of the Talmud or so much of the Bible. Sometimes I take out the Bible and I will read it for two or three hours wondering, since I have read it scores of times, why do I read it? But I always find something new in it. This would be true about the Talmud or all of these old books.

TT: You’ve called vegetarianism the greatest achievement of your life.

IS: I don’t mean a financial achievement. I mean an achievement in the sense that I had the courage to do what I wanted to do for many, many years and I didn’t.

TT: When did you decide this?

IS: I would say I made my last decision about 20 years ago.

TT(teasingly): But when one writes a great deal, one is killing many trees.

IS: Well, I don’t worry about the trees. I have not yet heard any tree crying. Let the Almighty worry about the trees. We will worry about creatures of flesh and blood, like ourselves.

TT: When did you feel comfortable as a writer and a journalist?

IS: I never felt comfortable. I always felt like I haven’t done enough and haven’t polished enough. I should polish more and improve more. So going around feeling comfortable is not in my nature.

TT: And today?

IS: Today I don’t feel comfortable at all because I am thinking about my next story and what I should do about it. Who wants comfort?

TT: Is there any recognition that you haven’t… I mean, you’ve received practically every prize there is to get

IS: I would say that I’m getting recognition, but I did not really work for recognition. This was not my sole condition [for becoming a writer]: either recognition or nothing. I would have done the same thing if I had not gotten any recognition. I would still do my work. Of course, I was glad that some of it I got, but recognition and money are not everything.

TT: Although your father wrote commentaries, he didn’t believe in secular writing.

IS: No. He was very much against it. He considered secular writing, as a matter of fact, sinful writing. He had no respect for secular writing and always warned me not to go in this direction because my brother I. J. Singer did it. He believed that a Jew, especially his son, should have one thing in his life and that was religion.

TT: Was it difficult to make the choice to go against him?

IS: It wasn’t difficult for me because he was against it—I didn’t want to bring him grief or spite him. I loved him too much to enjoy opposing him. But I had no choice. I didn’t have his belief that every restriction and all the laws, which rabbis have handed down gener­ation after generation, were really given by Moses on Mt. Sinai. Without this belief, I couldn’t have become a rabbi. I couldn’t have become a man who studied the Talmud all the time and does nothing else. It was a conflict between my beliefs and my love for him and my mother, which never diminished for a moment because I knew they wanted the best for me. But what they considered the best, I did not consider the best. Their intention was certainly very good.

TT: Did they ever read anything you wrote?

IS: Very little of it. My father, almost nothing. They read once in a while and what they read, they criticized. They never went around boasting about their son the writer.

TT: Do you think they would have been shocked by some of the material you now write about?

IS: I’m sure that if my father were alive now, he would still not read anything of my writing. He would say 1 had made the mistake of my life. My mother would be a little more tolerant, but not too much so.

TT: Is there a point at which you limit yourself, at which you censor yourself?

IS: Yes, I would say that if I hadn’t censored myself, my stories would have been even more sexy. I would have written more about sex than 1 do today. But I don’t believe in four-letter words—this I really dislike. I think it adds nothing to literature—it diminishes literature. I would have been more outspoken, but I think literature can do very well without it because my readers know as well about sex as I do; they know what it is all about I don’t have to explain it to them.

TT: What’s the difference between erotic literature and pornography?

IS: Pornography to me is a man who sits down to write just to excite people and has no other goal. It’s very boring. I tried to write, once in a while, a pornographic book. It’s boring, it’s repetitious, it adds nothing to literature. If you read Boccaccio you can enjoy both the story and what he writes about

TT: I’m sure you’re asked the same questions over and over.

IS: I don’t mind.

TT: Is there any question that you would ask of I. B. Singer that hasn’t been asked?

IS: No. I would leave him in peace.

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Originally published in Interview Magazine, August 1983.