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This was about the time when I declared that if my father thought I was going to join him in the business then he would have to think again. He didn’t seem especially disappointed by the news. He didn’t have a very high opinion of my likely capacities for engineering or business and he said if Lenny’s son was anything like his father then he wouldn’t wish a second-generation partnership on anyone. He had a higher opinion of Lenny’s daughter Nina, but neither my father nor Lenny would have envisaged passing on the company to their daughters – and anyway, Nina was reported to be going off the rails at this point, working as a hot-pants-wearing waitress in a go-go bar – which made her rank in the same glamorous company as Barbara in my eyes. I hadn’t prepared well. It was the day of the New York Marathon, and I kept being detoured around the route. After an hour of this I was still waiting at a junction to get onto the approach road to the George Washington Bridge. I had reached the data limit on my phone, which meant that Google Maps was unavailable and I was unlikely ever to find Henry Street in Elizabeth. So I parked the car and took the subway to meet my friend Christopher for lunch. Squeak Piggy Squeak is a faintly ridiculous game that involves a blindfolded ‘farmer’ who sits in the centre of a circle of ‘piggies’ and must place a pillow on the lap of any of the surrounding piggies and then sit themselves on top of it. The piggy must squeak and if the farmer identifies him or her correctly, the piggy becomes the farmer. Izio remained interned in Siberia until the summer of 1941, when he was released together with all other Poles held by the Soviets following the Nazi invasion of the USSR. He then joined what became a brigade of the British army, taking part in the Battle of Monte Cassino, from which he also lived to tell the tale.
The humble dice has been used across the world for thousands of years as the basis for uncountable games of chance – from children’s play to high-stakes betting. In medieval London, dice would typically have been made from bone – and ‘loaded’ dice were not uncommon. There were lots of different games, but one of the most popular was Hazard, where the outcome of each roll of two dice could be bet on, and the aim was to roll a double. Despite its prevalence, betting on dice was deeply frowned upon by the Catholic Church and certainly not a game for ladies to play. The company was named for its original partners, Lenny and Ed. Of Ed I know nothing other than his name, because he was the man my father replaced. Leonard Palmer was also a Polish Jew who had come to the United States via London. He had also been in Siberia, and had also joined up with General Anders’s Polish battalion that formed in the USSR and made its way through Iraq, Iran and Palestine to Italy as part of the British 8th Army. My father flourished at Lened. The story I grew up with is that in his spare time he tinkered around in a corner of the factory floor, coming up with innovations and the beginning of an invention that moved Lenny Palermo to offer him a partnership. Virtue may be an even better option, says Flusfeder. A life lived with honesty and integrity will at least be consistent, whether we are suffering adversity or enjoying good fortune. As the Renaissance poet Petrarch put it: “Many times whom fortune has made bond, virtue has made free.”
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She came out of the office to help me. We tramped around together for a while before I did come across a little scrub of a hedge and a stone to mark my father’s grave. loved, mourned and deeply missedit says, which doesn’t give much sense of who he was. More eloquent are the places and dates of his birth and death: warsaw jan. 7 1922 – new york city nov. 16 2008 and his name: joseph ( izio) flusfeder. Henry VIII loved a spot of football – and is said to have owned the first pair of football boots. However, he banned it for being uncivilised – a decision that coincided with his declining health and athleticism.
I liked Pepe. He had made a dangerous crossing to leave Castro’s Cuba and even though I disapproved of this, in a boy-Marxist kind of way, I forgave him. The last time I saw him was when I was sixteen and he took me drinking, the giddy rush of afternoon Heinekens, and everything he said, other than on political matters, seemed to me to be apt and wise.The fourth-ranking attraction on TripAdvisor for things to do in Elizabeth is to take the bus to Newark Airport. Elizabeth is a run-down post-industrial rust-belt town in northern New Jersey. It hasn’t recovered from the loss of its largest employer, the Singer sewing-machine factory, which closed down in 1982, the same year that Lened shut. I was already seeing plenty of post-industrial ruination on my drive out of Queens: the clumps of people idle on street corners, boarded-up buildings that had once been enterprises, the messed-up, potholed roads that the city hadn’t got around to repairing.
I think Joe Flusfeder and Lenny Palmer met in London. It might have been at the factory that made spectacle frames, because Lened was involved in the grinding of lenses in its early days. And Lenny Palmer wasn’t Lenny Palmer yet. He had originally been Mendel Oblengorski. At some point in the war he took on the identity of a Sicilian sailor called Leonardo Palermo in circumstances unknown, perhaps murky. Thrilling, intelligent and wilfully unique, with the bonus ball of being unexpectedly moving, David Flusfeder’s thirteen investigations are the result of a lifetime of original thinking. I loved it” - James Runcie, author of The Great PassionIt may be embodying it again, in a surprising post-postmodern reaching for authenticity. Thomas Edison’s phonograph, in which sound waves were etched onto the surface of a rotating cylinder, was invented in 1877. The first records made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) rather than shellac were manufactured in the late 1930s, but PVC only became standard in the post-war plastics surplus that also enabled the washing-up bowl and the hula hoop. The first LP was pressed in 1948. An entire classical symphony could now be contained on a single disc. ( The symphony is the unit of cultural value that the recording industry uses when it wants to boast about innovation: the compact disc’s seventy-nine-minute length was chosen as being sufficient for Beethoven’s Ninth.)
His brother, who I’m named for, was shot on a street in Warsaw by a German soldier. His father died in the death camp of Treblinka. His mother committed suicide in the Ghetto. His cousins all had similar fates and only two other members of his family survived. Searching displaced-persons camps in Italy at the end of the war, he was reunited with an aunt, his father’s sister, Ruth. In London he met up with his father’s brother Jerzy, who was now also called George. This George had converted to Christianity, managed to take out Dutch nationality and was on his way to live in South Africa, because he was sure that it would all happen again.On this, statistician David Spiegelhalter, who studies the public perception of risk, puts it bluntly. Probability doesn’t exist outside the mind, he says: “It is not an objective aspect of the world. It’s a way to operationalise a belief.” At best, he says, it provides us with a map to help us navigate outcomes that are immeasurable and ultimately unknowable.
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