Let's write about the history of performing magic

Echo essay by Richard Segal* published in The New York Times:

Richard Hatch was searching the card catalog of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, hunting for intriguing titles under the subject heading “Magic.”

It was 1979, and Hatch was a young graduate student in physics, but he’d long nurtured an amateur’s passion for the conjuring arts and, on this day at least, he preferred to read about sleight of hand than quantum mechanics.

His rummaging stopped when he spotted a title called “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.” Hatch had spent four years of his youth in Germany so he translated it instantly: “Jews in Magic.” The card said the book was written by someone named Guenther Dammannand published in Berlin in 1933.

He paused. A book about Jews in magic, from Germany, in the very year that the Nazis assumed power and started burning “un-German” books in bonfires across the country. It seemed obvious. This was an antisemitic tract, identifying Jews to make it easier for the government to persecute them and the public to shun them.

Awful, Hatch thought. He then looked for a magic book he actually wanted to read.

Hatch would go on to earn two graduate degrees in physics but left the field in 1983, after realizing that his ardor for magic had completely overwhelmed his interest in science. 

He became a full-time “deceptionist,” as he calls it. While he honed his craft and looked for gigs, he translated a 1942 German book about the famed Austrian magician J.N. Hofzinser. That brought him to the attention of a collector of Judaica and magic books who urged him to translate a fascinating rarity he’d acquired: “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.”

“That’s when I realized that the book was about the great contributions that Jews have made to magic,” Hatch said in an interview.

Dammann, it turns out, was a 23-year-old Jew and amateur magician, the son of a well-off banker, who lived with his parents and brothers in Berlin when he self-published his book. It was 100 pages long and, historians say, the first attempt to inventory the great Jewish magicians, both living and dead.

Most of “Jews in Magic” is devoted to brief biographical essays inunadorned prose of more than 50 renowned professionals. One entry told the story of the Frenchman Alexander Herrmann, who, in decades of touring, dazzled Abraham Lincoln, Czar Alexander, and the prisoners of Sing Sing and who pioneered the suave devil look — goatee, tuxedo — that became the industry standard. Another profiled Harry Houdini, the Hungarian-born son of a rabbi, who escaped from handcuffs, jails and straitjackets and became one of the most famous showmen of his age.

The book was an oddly timed exercise in ethnic pride and a singular artifact of a life cut short. In 1942, Dammann and nearly 800 others were transported on rail cars to Riga, Latvia, where, Nazi records show, they were shot upon arrival.

Hatch, who lives in semiretirement in a small town in northern Utah, finished his translation of “Jews in Magic” four years ago and is strategizing about how to get it published, with annotations and photographs. At 68, he is a kind of one-man historical preservation society dedicated to Dammann.

Everyone Has a Theory

Since Dammann’s death, the ranks of Jewish conjurers has only grown. Among the notable: David Copperfield, David Blaine, Ricky Jay, Teller — who is the silent half of Penn & Teller — and Uri Geller, who, for the record, has long denied that his spoon bending is a trick. Gloria Dea, born Gloria Metzner, was the first magician to play Las Vegas. Max Maven, born Philip Goldstein, was one of the world’s most admired mentalists.

Why have Jews been so prominent in magic? In his book, Dammann does not speculate. So in January, I visited MagiFest, one of the country’s largest conventions of magicians, held annually in Columbus, Ohio. I went to hear Hatch give a lecture about Dammann, but the convention proved the ideal setting for an informal survey on the question.

MagiFest was three days of lectures and performance
“There’s a saying that we all die three times,” Hatch said. “The first death is the physical one, when your heart stops beating. 

Moreover, the second is when your body is consigned to fire or the grave. And the third is the last time someone utters your name. Life was so cruel and unfair to him, I just thought, it’s a worthy cause to keep Dammann’s name alive for as long as I can.”

One of the attendees was Joshua Jay, who co-founded Vanishing Inc., the company that owns MagiFest, and who had just finished a three-week run at the Midnight Theater in Manhattan. He sat near the round tables one evening and shared a theory.

“In the U.S., part of it is that the explosion of Jews in magic happens at the same time that Jews are flooding into this country as immigrants at the turn of the century and many of the jobs with the government, with corporations were not open to Jews,” he said. “Being a magician was like being a tailor. You were self-employed, so it was safe.”

Others believe that magic, with its emphasis on books and learning, holds an inherent appeal to Jews. Asi Wind, an Israeli-born New Yorker whose Off Broadway show of card magic ran for 16 months, sees a link between his encounters with religion while growing up and his fascination with magic.

“I remember going to classes to hear rabbis talk and you’d hear a lot about mystery,” he said. “They would say, ‘Look, the Bible predicted this or that before science, before anybody else knew.’ It almost felt like I was reading a magic book. The Bible is a book about supernatural powers and a specific kind of knowledge — secret knowledge, the kind that reveals things we don’t yet know.”

On a more pedestrian level, there is the Supportive Jewish Parents school of thought. Many Jewish performers say their moms and dads encouraged them at a young age and today are their most devoted fans.

One of the attendees was Joshua Jay, who co-founded Vanishing Inc., the company that owns MagiFest, and who had just finished a three-week run at the Midnight Theater in Manhattan. He sat near the round tables one evening and shared a theory.

“In the U.S., part of it is that the explosion of Jews in magic happens at the same time that Jews are flooding into this country as immigrants at the turn of the century and many of the jobs with the government, with corporations were not open to Jews,” he said. “Being a magician was like being a tailor. You were self-employed, so it was safe.”

Others believe that magic, with its emphasis on books and learning, holds an inherent appeal to Jews. Asi Wind, an Israeli-born New Yorker whose Off Broadway show of card magic ran for 16 months, sees a link between his encounters with religion while growing up and his fascination with magic.

“I remember going to classes to hear rabbis talk and you’d hear a lot about mystery,” he said. “They would say, ‘Look, the Bible predicted this or that before science, before anybody else knew.’ It almost felt like I was reading a magic book. The Bible is a book about supernatural powers and a specific kind of knowledge — secret knowledge, the kind that reveals things we don’t yet know.”

On a more pedestrian level, there is the Supportive Jewish Parents school of thought. Many Jewish performers say their moms and dads encouraged them at a young age and today are their most devoted fans.

“I played a week at Mystique Dining which is about a mile from my parents’ house in San Diego and they basically sold out the whole run,” said Michael Feldman, who at MagiFest demonstrated tricks from his book “The Pages Are Blank.” (Note: The pages are not blank.) “They called all of their friends and they were like, ‘You have to come see our son perform, he’s doing this run.’ And it was great.”

Egg Bag Redux

Richard Hatch spent part of his adolescence in Frankfurt because his father, a nuclear physicist, served as a civilian working for Naval intelligence in the late 1950s, debriefing scientists who had defected from East Germany. The younger Hatch initially gravitated to physics because he found his father’s work intriguing, but after four years of graduate studies at Yale, he ditched it all for magic. He loved nothing more, he explained, and by the late ’70s, breakout stars like Doug Henning and David Copperfield had proven that careers in the field were financially viable.

“I thought I’d married a theoretical particle physicist,” said his wife, Rosemary Kimura Hatch, a professional musician. “But one day he came up to me and said, ‘I really want to try magic.’ And I said, ‘Well, if that’s your passion, give it a try.’ I was the bread winner the following year.”

Richard Hatch was raised as a Mormon but left the church years ago. Asked why he’s spent so much time studying a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, he first offered a go-to quip.

“My grandfather was a polygamist (Morman❓😯) and his first wife was Jewish,” he said. “But my grandmother was the second wife. So I like to say I was nearly Jewish.”

More seriously, he said he was fascinated by the reaction to Nazism in Germany’s magic community, which quickly divided into Nazi sympathizers and Jews. And he found the story of Dammann’s life an irresistible mystery: Who was this guy? And why did he write a book about Jews and magic at one of the darkest moments in history?

Hatch answered those and other questions during a Friday afternoon at his presentation about Dammann at MagiFest. He was dressed in a blue suit and sported a gray beard, looking like a chief executive who’d come to rev up the sales team.

He explained that Dammann’s interest in magic started when he was 12 or 13 and that a retired illusionist and family friend named Ernest Thorn, who would later turn up as an entry in “Jews in Magic,” became a mentor. At 21, Dammann joined the Magic Circle of Germany, a hybrid of professional society and fraternal organization, though there were women members, too. Inspired by the Who’s Who’s books he read, Dammann decided to assemble “Jews in Magic.”

He clearly understood the dangers of the project. As Hatch told the crowd of about 700, Dammann asked living professionals for permission to include them in the book, usually through the mail. 

Apparently, some said "no". Among the names omitted from the work is Arnold de Biere, dubbed the “Prince of Entertainers, entertainer of Princes,” who frequently toured Germany.

Among his best known pieces was the egg bag trick, a parlor magic staple in which an egg keeps appearing and disappearing in a black bag that has been turned inside out, slapped against a hand and inspected by the audience. Versions of the trick have been performed for centuries. David Leendert Bamberg, born in the late 18th century and part of the six-generation Bamberg dynasty from the Netherlands — Page 25 of Dammann’s book — had a version that ended with a live hen.

Hatch estimates that Dammann printed 500 copies of his book and that it sold poorly. The few contemporaneous magic publications that mentioned “Jews in Magic” — the copies were sent by Dammann, who handled publicity, too — were startled by its very existence. In 1933, Germany was becoming a dictatorship. By September, Jews were not allowed to perform onstage for non-Jewish audiences and the number of Jews in German universities had already been sharply curtailed. The notorious Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of civil rights and citizenship, were two years away.

Dammann’s parents were both dead by 1937 — the causes are not known — and the family’s house had been emptied and seized by the following year. Gunther and his two brothers attempted to flee to Palestine.

“They tried to convert their assets, which were obviously less considerable than they had been,” Hatch told the audience at the MagiFest lecture, which he gave with a series of slides projected on a huge screen. “They were caught doing so. This is his younger brother’s mug shot.”

Gunther became a slave laborer at a Siemens factory in Berlin, where he put rubber coating on cables. None of the Dammann brothers survived the war.

More than a few of those featured in “Jews in Magic” were murdered by the Nazis. One was Hermann Kurtz, who performed under the name Mahatma, and who gained fame with the “inexhaustible hat,” an illusion in which a menagerie of items — plates, flowers, flags, livestock — pour out of a borrowed top hat.

Others fled Europe and continued their careers in the United States. Fred Roner, born Alfred Rosner in Vienna, lived in Manhattan and toured with a pickpocket act, which he performed as after-dinner entertainment in the ’50s in what were called Knife and Fork Clubs. Most memorably, he snagged the wristwatch of the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover. (He gave it back.)

Roner is the only performer from “Jews in Magic” whom Hatch actually met. The two had lunch in Roner’s apartment in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in 1986, and Roner talked with pride about his version of card to wallet — an effect in which a card chosen by a spectator vanishes from the deck and appears in the magician’s wallet.

“He was really proud that in his version, the wallet belonged to the spectator,” Hatch said. “He told me that getting the wallet wasn’t difficult. The real challenge was putting it back in the spectator’s pocket.”

Today, Hatch sustains the memory of those memorialized by Dammann with more than just historical research and lectures. About once a month, he performs at private homes, country club banquets or night clubs, typically near his home or in Salt Lake City.

When scheduling allows, he appears with his wife and adult son, a violinist and pianist. Wearing white tie and tails, Hatch performs tricks that were sensations a century or two ago in an hourlong act that would have worked in any Victorian-age parlor.

One highlight is a version of the egg bag popularized by Max Malini, who billed himself as “The Conjurer of the Century” — see page 78 of “Jews in Magic.”

“The classics are classics,” Hatch said. “They’re a good place to start, and not a bad place to get stuck.”

David Segal is a business reporter for The New York Times, based in New York, a reporter in the Business section, who has written several stories about magic, including a feature about the world’s most baffling card trick.

Let's write about "who writes the songs!"

Echo essay by by Sarah Larson published in the The New Yorker Magazine:

Lyrics and music by Bruce Johnston

I've been alive forever
And I wrote the very first song
I put the words and the melodies together
I am music and I write the songs

[Chorus]🎵🎵
I write the songs that make the whole world sing
I write the songs of love and special things
I write the songs that make the young girls cry
I write the songs, I write the songs

Barry Manilow Digs New York

To mark the opening of “Harmony,” his musical about the Weimar-era* sextet the Comedian Harmonists, the singer went back home to Williamsburg and poked around.

In his youth, Barry Manilow lived on a street called Broadway in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and though he’s lived in Palm Springs for decades, he’s always considered himself a New Yorker. (“The city rhythms all undo me / So sue me!” he sings in “I Dig New York,” on his 2017 album, “This Is My Town.”) This month, his musical “Harmony,” co-written with Bruce Sussman, opens at the Barrymore—on the other Broadway. On a recent rainy Tuesday, Manilow took a spin around the old neighborhood, peering at the strange and the familiar from the back of an S.U.V.

“We didn’t know we were poor,” Manilow, a youthful-looking eighty, said. He wore a black coat, spoke in a quiet, raspy voice, and took occasional drags from a vape pen. He waved it toward a young Orthodox woman who was opening the front door of a bustling prewar building where his family had lived. “The Mayflower—that’s where I hung out most of the time.” (He released “Here at the Mayflower,” an album imagining the lives of the building’s residents, in 2001.) He lived in an apartment with his grandparents and his divorced mother. As his 1983, memoir, “Sweet Life,” begins, he’s a shy eleven-year-old glumly returning from the orthodontist, passing Sal’s Shoe Repair and Kleiner’s Grocery and despairing about his braces. At home, his grandmother comforts him, saying, “Hello tatteleh, have some milk and cookies and then you’ll practice your accordion.” He didn’t mind the accordion: “I wasn’t bad at it, and I learned to read music.” 

Then his mother remarried, to a music enthusiast. “He changed my life,” Manilow said. “We moved to the Keap Street apartment, and he threw out the accordion and got me a spinet piano. Everything changed.” He addressed the chauffeur: “Mark, take us to Keap Street.”

Mark drove to Keap Street and stopped in front of a small tenement. “The family that owned the building—to get to the top floor, you would go through their living room,” Manilow said. “See that air-conditioner on the very top window? There’s my old room. It was an old closet. So I was in the closet for all those years.” (Manilow married his longtime partner and business manager, Garry Kief, in 2014; they have been together since 1978.) Manilow mastered the spinet, then taught himself arranging: “Arranging is the thing that I love—taking the song, slipping out a facet, finding a different facet.” Mark drove by a Satmar girls’ school, the former Eastern District High School. “This is my old high school,” Manilow said. Any memories? “Horror,” he said. “Nothing but terror. I did have good friends. And I was part of the band—first clarinet. Can you imagine the second clarinet? I wasn’t very good. But I kept getting better and better at the piano.” He went on to the New York College of Music, jingle writing (“Like a Good Neighbor,” “Stuck on Band-Aid”), and pop megastardom (“Mandy,” “Copacabana”), which has endured.

“This has been the biggest year of my career, I think,” he said. “They did a tribute to me at Carnegie Hall—wonderful Broadway singers, the New York Pops.” That was in May. “Then five nights at Radio City, sold out.” In September, in Las Vegas, he was given the key to the Strip after breaking Elvis Presley’s record for most performances at the International Theatre (six hundred and thirty-seven). “Now ‘Harmony.’ ”

“Harmony” tells the story of the Comedian Harmonists, a real-life Weimar-era vocal sextet in Berlin, whose fizzy performances of close-harmonizing comedic songs (“Der Onkel Bumba aus Kalumba Tanzt Nur Rumba,” “Mein Kleiner Grüner Kaktus”) made them an international sensation. “They were the Manhattan Transfer of their day,” Manilow said. “But they were the Marx Brothers, too—slapstick comics who did complicated harmonies. The Nazis destroyed everything they had done, because three of them were Jews.” (The group dispersed before the war; all six survived.) Harry Frommermann, the founder, “was the arranger. He came up with some of the most inventive part-writing and ideas. So Harry’s the guy that I connect with the most.” Composing the score, “I was in heaven.”

In the Comedian Harmonists’ repertoire, “every song was a different style of music, and I love that. All of my albums have different styles of music—there’s either a big-band cut or a novelty cut or big ballads or little jazz songs—and the same thing with this musical.”

Sussman and Manilow wrote an early version of “Harmony” in 1997. Regional productions followed; a big one fell through; time passed. Last year, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Manhattan, mounted this new production, directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle. “I mean, can you think of a more perfect place?” Manilow said. It has transferred intact. “Bruce and I never gave up on this show. We just wanted people to remember these people. We didn’t want them to disappear. These six geniuses.”

He’d thought about popping over to Carnegie Hall, where his grandfather started Manilow’s first standing ovation in 1971, and where a key scene in “Harmony” takes place, but pivoted toward lunch: “Mark, take us to Peter Luger Steak House (Brooklyn).” Any final local observations? “No,” he said, laughing. “Get me out of here!” ♦

*German Reich, was a historical period of Germany from 9 November 1918 to 23 March 1933.

Let's write about the failed Italian World War Two history

Echo essay published in History Defined:

(Although not being a historian, the take away lesson after reading this interesting essay is that Germany's alliance with Italy likely contributed to the reason why the Nazis and Hitler lost the campaign to invade Russia and therefore stopped Germany's 

Blitzkrieg method to take over of Europe.)

Why was the Italian Army so Ineffective During WW2?
By Carl Seaver

Military historians who observe the Second World War have long observed that the turning point in the conflict in Europe was the decision by Nazi Germany to invade Soviet Russia in 1941.

Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel (1891-1944) was a German field marshal during World War II. Popularly known as the Desert Fox, Rommel meets Italian General Italo Gariboldi in Tripoli, February 1941. 

Before this, the Nazis had conquered all before them. But, when their armies stalled outside Moscow and Leningrad in the winter of 1941, the war turned inexorably against them.

After the last push to seize the city of Stalingrad in 1942, the Red Army began driving the Wehrmacht back westwards towards Berlin.

In assessments of this, it is often noted how close the invasion of Russia, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, came to victory before the Russian winter set in. Perhaps, many have suggested, if Hitler had begun the invasion in the middle of May 1941, as originally intended, rather than in late June, as eventually occurred, the course of the whole war would have been different.

The reasons for that delay in the summer of 1941, the necessity of diverting German resources to the Balkans to aid Benito Mussolini’s Italy in its floundering efforts to conquer Greece and Yugoslavia, have been afforded great importance in the course of the overall war.

And this was not the only time the Germans had to step in to help the Italians. The same was already occurring in North Africa in 1941, and would transpire in 1943 once the Allies invaded southern Italy. 

So the question is, why was the Italian Royal Army so utterly ineffective during the Second World War?

Italian Military Production and Equipment

A basic answer to this question can be found in the economic bases of the major powers. Italy, simply put, was a poor country by comparison with, for instance, Germany, Britain, and the Soviet Union.

These had huge resources available to them. Nazi Germany could rely on companies like Volkswagen, Mercedes, IG Farben, and Siemens to drive large parts of its industrial war machine.

In Britain, companies like Rolls Royce and Jaguar were repurposed to produce fighter plane engines and battleships for the RAF and Royal Navy. At the same time, the Soviet Union could bend its command economy entirely towards the war effort when the regime’s very existence was threatened.

Italy did not have this economic base to rely on. Fiat, the only company that stands out for its status as a domestic economic heavyweight in Italy, played a massive role in producing Italian tanks. Still, even these were inferior to the German Panzer tanks and others produced by the other Axis and Allied powers.

All of this meant that the allies outmatched the Italians regarding armored divisions, the core of any army during the Second World War. For instance, some elements of the Italian Royal Army in the Balkans in 1941, and Italy in 1943, used the Fiat 3000 Tank.

This monstrosity of an armored vehicle had inadequate guns and very poor maneuverability. The Italian army began using it in 1921, so it was hopelessly outdated.

Why was the Italian army so unprepared?

Another critical issue was the lack of military preparedness on Italy’s part. It is a popular misconception that Italy joined the war on Germany’s side in the autumn of 1939. This was not the case. Mussolini was wary of jumping into the war too soon, and the Italian military was utterly unprepared to do so in the late 1930s.

Indeed some of the senior commanders of the Italian military at the time said it would take until 1943, or 1944, before the Italian military would be fully ready for war.

As such, Benito Mussolini employed a cautious approach in 1939. What changed was the swift manner with which Germany conquered Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940, and then France and the Low Countries in a lightning-quick campaign in the summer of that year.

With all of Central and Western Europe effectively under Nazi control and only Britain challenging Germany in Europe, Mussolini determined much to be gained by joining the war. 

So, regardless of the Italian military’s lack of preparedness, Italy entered the Second World War on Germany’s side in June 1940.

After Italy entered the war, it faced further problems. Mussolini had two geostrategic objectives. One was to build up a latter-day version of the Mediterranean empire of the Romans by conquering the Balkans regions.

The Italian Royal Army faced stiff opposition from committed Greek and Yugoslav partisans. As a result, Italy’s 1940, invasion turned into a disaster that necessitated German aid diverting to the Balkans early in 1941.

Poor planning played a significant role here and highlighted another problem of the Italian Royal Army, its poor standard of leadership amongst generals like Sebastiano Visconti Prasco, Ubaldo Soddu, and Ugo Cavallero.

Each of them successfully led the Italian forces in the Balkans from the commencement of the war but were dismissed after just weeks in command, due to their incompetence. As the war effort in the Balkans went poorly, morale amongst the Italian rank and file declined dramatically.

Italy in North Africa

Finally, the Italians ran into problems in North Africa for several reasons. First, the front here had a strategic significance within the broader war, unlike the Balkans, effectively a sideshow. The Italians wished to drive east from Tunisia and Libya into Egypt and secure the Suez Canal, a strategically important target for Italy and Germany.

Soon after, the British won their first major tactical victory in early 1941, when Operation Compass drove the Italians back into Libya and destroyed the numerically superior Italian 10th Army.

Consequently, the Italians were also forced to call on German aid, which arrived in the shape of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, some weeks later. Thus, the Italian armed forces in North Africa proved ineffective as the Allies prioritized that front early in the war, particularly following the US’s entry into the war in December 1941.

Maintaining control over the Suez Canal became a major tactical priority for the British in 1940, and 1941. As a result, even as Britain was suffering from the Blitz by Germany as the German Luftwaffe tried to bomb Churchill’s government into submission, London dispatched extensive resources to Cairo.

In conclusion, there was a wide range of factors involved in the ineffectiveness of the Italian armed forces during the Second World War. These included the relative weakness of the Italian war economy and the incompetence of many of Mussolini’s generals.

Moreover, the Italians faced unexpected opposition in the Balkans and North Africa. But ultimately, the key issue was that the Royal Italian Army was not adequately prepared for war in 1940. Italy should never have entered the war and attempted what it did.
Sources

John Gooch, Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy from Triumph to Collapse, 1935–1943 (London, 2020); Philip Jowett, The Italian Army, 1940–45 (Westminster, 2001).

James J. Sadkovich, ‘Italian Morale during the Italo-Greek War of 1940–1941’, in War and Society, Vol. 12, No. 1 (May, 1994), pp. 97–123.

James J. Sadkovich, ‘Of Myths and Men: Rommel and the Italians in North Africa’, in The International History Review, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1991), pp. 284–313; Vincent P. O’Hara, Struggle for the Middle Sea: The Great Navies at War in the Mediterranean, 1940–1945 (London, 2009).

Let's remember Solomon Perel- learn a lot in a well written obituary

Obituary echo published in The New York Times by Richard Sandomir:

ISREAL- Solomon Perel, a German Jew who saved himself from death by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and later felt gratitude for the Nazi he pretended to be in order to live, died on February 2 at his home in Givatayim, Israel, near Tel Aviv. He was 97.

Solomon Perel (1925 in Germany-2023 in Israel)

His great-nephew Amit Brakin confirmed the death.

Mr. Perel, who was also known as Shlomo and Solly, recounted his survival story in a 1990 autobiography. It was adapted into a German movie, “Europa Europa,” released in the United States in 1991, which won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film.

Like many other Holocaust survival stories, Mr. Perel’s began with Nazi oppression, which led his family to move in 1936 from Peine, Germany, to Lodz, Poland. After the German invasion on Sept. 1, 1939, they were forced into a ghetto that would house as many as 164,000 Jews. He fled later that year with an older brother, Isaac, in the hope of finding relative safety in Soviet-controlled eastern Poland.

In Bialystok, where he parted with Isaac, Solomon was placed by a Jewish assistance organization in a Soviet orphanage in Grodno (now part of Belarus). He stayed for two years, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941; he recalled that the Jewish children at the orphanage were roused from their sleep and told to flee the German attack.

Solomon became one of many refugees captured by the German Wehrmacht in an open field near Minsk.

Fearful that his captors would learn he was Jewish and shoot him in a nearby forest, he dug a small pit in the soft ground with the heel of a shoe and buried his identification papers.

After waiting on a long line, Solomon was asked by a German soldier, “Are you a Jew?” Heeding his mother’s last words to him, “You must live,” but not his father’s, “Always remain a Jew,” he lied: “I’m not a Jew. I’m an ethnic German.”

Not only did the Germans believe him; they welcomed him into their unit under the name Josef Perjell, and made him an interpreter. One interrogation in which he participated was of Joseph Stalin’s son Yakov Dzhugashvili.

“I became a split personality — a Nazi by day and a Jew by night,” Mr. Perel told The Week, an Indian magazine, in 2019. He remained there until his commanding officer sent him to the Hitler Youth boarding school in Braunschweig, Germany, during the winter of 1941-42.

If anyone discovered he was Jewish, “they’d deal with me like cannibals,” he said in “Because You Must Live: The Story of Shlomo (Solly) Perel,” a part of the Survivors Testimony Films Series produced by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.

He was relieved that the school’s showers had separate stalls, which prevented anyone from seeing that he had been circumcised.

But, he said, “nobody suspected me because it was impossible to think that some Jewish boy would sneak into the center of that protected country.”

He became, to the young Nazis surrounding him, a true believer, absorbing the lessons of National Socialism, wearing a uniform with a swastika and a Nazi eagle on his chest and preparing for military service.

“I was a Hitler Youth completely,” he said in the Yad Vashem film. “I began telling myself, ‘Wow, I’m part of a force that’s conquering the world.’”

But he could not switch off his real self entirely. In 1943, during the Christmas holiday, he received a holiday pass and took a train back to Lodz. For 12 days, wearing the black winter uniform of the Hitler Youth, he searched for his parents in the ghetto.

He rode a streetcar, which Jews could not board, back and forth. He walked the city’s streets. He saw men rolling carts piled with Jewish corpses.

But he did not find his mother, his father or his sister, Bertha, none of whom he would ever see again. His brothers, Isaac and David, survived.

Solomon Perel was born in Peine on April 21, 1925. His father, Azriel, owned a shoe store. His mother, Rebecca Perel, was a homemaker.

Solomon was nearly 8 years old when Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, but his life did not change appreciably until two years later, when antisemitic laws stripped Jews of their rights and citizenship. He was expelled from school.

“It was my most traumatic childhood experience,” he said in “Because You Must Live,” “that barbaric expulsion from school because somebody considered me different.”

The family moved to Lodz after his father was forced by the Nazis to sell his store for nearly nothing. Solomon attended a Polish state school for Jews. It was after the Germans invaded Poland and Jewish families were ordered into the Lodz ghetto that he started on the path that led to his lifesaving masquerade as a Nazi.

Simmy Allen, a spokesman for Yad Vashem, said that Mr. Perel’s life as a Jew among the Hitler Youth was more than unusual.

“We know of Jews using false papers and presenting themselves as non-Jews, even Aryans, during the Holocaust in different places throughout Europe, even in Berlin,” Mr. Allen said in an email. “But to be in the heart of the lion’s den, under that level of scrutiny all the time and, in a sense, part of the ideology of the ‘enemy,’ as Shlomo was, is a very unique and rare position.”

Mr. Perel recalled how invested he had become in the Nazi philosophy even as the war turned against Germany.

“I was deeply involved in a world that had been forced upon me, my reasoning powers had finally been completely anesthetized,” he wrote in his memoir, published in English and French as “Europa, Europa,” “and my mental faculties were so befogged that no ray of reality could penetrate. I continued to feel just like one of them.”

As the war neared its end, Mr. Perel was sent to the Western Front, assigned to a unit guarding bridges. When American soldiers arrested him, and his squad and briefly held him in a prisoner-of-war camp, his war was over. He was no longer Josef Perjell. He was once again Shlomo Perel.

Mr. Perel moved to Munich, where he was a translator for the Soviet Army during interrogations of Nazi war criminals. He emigrated to the British mandate of Palestine, fought in the Israeli war of independence and managed a zipper factory.

In 1959, he married Dvora Morezky. She died in 2021. He is survived by a son, Uziel, and three grandchildren. Another son, Ronen, died in 2019.

For many years Mr. Perel put his memories of the Holocaust aside. But in the late 1980s, after a near-fatal heart attack, he began to discuss his past and to write his memoir.

The film adaptation, written and directed by Agnieszka Holland, starred Marco Hofschneider as Mr. Perel. It earned Ms. Holland an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.

In addition to winning the Golden Globe for best foreign film, the movie was named best foreign film by the New York Film Critics

Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. But the German Export Film Union declined to select it as its entry for an Academy Award for best foreign film — a decision that prompted many of Germany’s leading filmmakers, including Wolfgang Petersen and Werner Herzog, to sign a letter of protest that was published in Daily Variety.

Mr. Perel attended the film’s premiere in Lodz.

Wehrmacht, (German: “defense power”) the armed forces of the Third Reich. The three primary branches of the Wehrmacht were the Heer (army), Luftwaffe (air force), and Kriegsmarine (navy).

In 1992, he reunited with some of his former Hitler Youth comrades and revealed to them that he was Jewish. Some years earlier, he had gotten together with surviving members of the Wehrmacht unit that had accepted him as a German.

He lectured about his experiences in Israel and around the world. “He insisted on including, with every lecture or talk he gave, a message for accepting the other,” Mr. Brakin, his great-nephew, said in a text message, “including the one that is different, and a message against racism in any form it might take.”

But Mr. Perel never fully purged himself of the Nazi identity he had adopted.

“To this day, I have a tangle of two souls in one body,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “By this I mean to say that the road to Josef, the Hitler Youth that I was for four years, was very short and easy. But the way back to the Jew in me, Shlomo, or Solly, was much harder.”

“I love him,” he said, referring to Josef, “because he saved my life.”

Richard Sandomir is an obituaries writer.

Let's write about Lion Feuchwtanger

 The Road To Hell: Berlin, 1933

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

This echo excerpt was published in Persuasion: 

An excerpt from Lion Feuchtwanger’s “The Oppermanns.”

Excerpting from The Oppermanns, a novel written by the Bavarian-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger in 1933. A reissue of the English translation with a new introduction by Joshua Cohen, the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is published by McNally Editions.

An outspoken early critic of the Nazi movement, and one of Germany's most famous writers, Feuchtwanger fled into exile months before he wrote The Oppermanns. The book is based on his own experience and that of his family and friends, as well as secret reports smuggled out of Germany by anti-Nazi activists. Following its publication, Feuchtwanger and his wife were both imprisoned by the Vichy regime in France. They eventually fled to the United States, where they lived until his death in 1958.

According to the historian Richard J. Evans, The Oppermanns was “the first great masterpiece of anti-fascist literature.” 

Set in the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power, the novel revolves around the Oppermann brothers: Gustav, a literary critic and the book’s central character; Edgar, a prominent surgeon; and Martin, the manager of the family’s furniture company. With painstaking realism, Feuchtwanger charts the institutionalization of anti-Semitism and the decay of German democracy through the brothers’ desperate attempts to come to terms with a country overrun by “barbarism.”

This scene takes place the night after Martin Oppermann is confronted by Herr Hinkel, an employee of the Oppermann family’s furniture company and a member of the Nazi party, who demands that Martin fire four Jewish workers and replace them with “Aryans.”

— The Editors.

During the night, toward dawn, they arrived at Martin Oppermann’s house in Corneliusstrasse. Thrusting the bewildered maid to one side, one of them entered Martin and Liselotte’s bedroom armed with a revolver and truncheon; he was followed by four or five more, all very young men.

“Herr Oppermann?” inquired the leader in a courteous tone.

“Yes,” said Martin. It was neither fright nor a desire to be disagreeable that made his voice sound gruff, it was merely that he was still half asleep. Liselotte had started up. She stared with wide, terrified eyes at the lads. It was said all over the country that those who fell into the hands of the state police were lucky, but woe to those who fell into the hands of the Nationalists. And these fellows were Nationalists.

“What do you want from us?” asked Liselotte anxiously.

“We want nothing from you, madam,” said the young man. “You are to dress and come with us,” he said to Martin.

“Very well,” returned Martin. He tried to work out the young man’s rank in the stormtrooper army. It was indicated by the metal ornament on the collar, the “mirror” as it was called. The man had two stars, but Martin did not know what the title of his rank was. He would have liked to inquire, but the young man might take the question as a sign of contempt. Martin was very calm. It was common knowledge that many were done to death in the cellars of the stormtroopers’ barracks, their names were known. There were only very few who came out of these cellars entirely without injuries. But, strangely enough, he was not afraid. “Don’t worry, Liselotte,” he said. “I shall soon be back again.”

“That won’t be altogether left to your decision, sir,” said he of the two stars. They put him into a taxi. He sat limply, his eyes half closed.

Lion Feuchtwanger (b. 1884 in Germany- d. 1958 Los Angeles Calif.) author of The Oppermanns, published in 1933.

His guards were carrying on a conversation in low tones. “Will we be allowed to stick him against the wall right away? I hope they let us and not the Thirty-Eighth examine him.” Martin rocked his head back and forth. What a childish way of carrying on. They wanted him to dismiss his Jewish employees. Perhaps they would attempt to bully him into it by ill treatment. Merchants of high standing and directors of industries had been dragged off to Nationalist barracks and concentration camps in order to extort voluntary resignations from them or the renunciation of some legal right. The Nationalists wanted to get possession of the industries that had been built up by the five hundred thousand Jews. They coveted their businesses, their positions, their money. They considered all means toward this end justified. In spite of all that, Martin instinctively felt that he, personally, was safe. He did not believe that he would be detained long. Liselotte would get busy on the telephone, so would Mühlheim1.

He was taken into a dreary room on an upper floor. A man was sitting there with four stars on the collar of his uniform, and there was another seated at a typewriter. The two-starred man reported: “Troop Leader Kersing with a prisoner.” That was it, the two-starred men were called troop leaders. Martin was questioned as to his identity. Then someone appeared in a more ornate brown uniform. He had no stars on his collar but a simple leaf. He sat down at the table. It was a fairly large table, a candelabra with lighted candles on it, as well as a bottle of beer and some books that seemed to be treatises on jurisprudence. The man thrust the books aside. Martin gazed at the candelabra. What a silly setting, he thought, and in the age of Reinhardt too. The chap had a leaf on his collar, had he? As a matter of fact, it wasn’t a leaf but an oak twig. They were very exact in such details.

“Your name is Martin Oppermann?” asked the man with the oak twig. It’s about time they knew that, thought Martin. It occurred to him that the thing was called a standard. Those with twigs on their collars were called standard bearers. That man was quite a big shot, a robber chieftain.

“Yes,” he said.

“You have resisted official regulations?” came the question from behind the candelabra.

“Not that I know of,” said Martin.

“In these times,” the man with the oak twig said sternly, “resistance to the regulations of the Leader is a treasonable act.”

Martin shrugged his shoulders. “I resisted the regulations of my packer Hinkel,” he said. “I am not aware that he has been appointed to discharge any official function.”

“Write that down,” said the man with the oak twig. “The accused denies his guilt and makes evasive answers. Take the man away,” he commanded the guard.

The two-starred man and three others took Martin down the stairs again and then lower still, down badly lit steps. This is the cellar then, thought Martin. They were now in complete darkness. The way led through a long passage. Martin was seized firmly by the arms. “Walk in step, man,” said a voice. The corridor was a long one. They turned a corner, then another. Someone flashed an electric torch into his face. Then they ascended a few steps. “Keep in step, you,” one of them said to him and gave him a push in the back. What a childish way of carrying on, thought Martin.

After he had been marched in different directions for about ten minutes, he was thrust into a fairly large, dimly lit room. Here things looked a bit more serious. Men were lying on boards and on heaps of rags. There were between twenty and thirty of them, half naked, bleeding, groaning, hideous to look at. “Say Heil Hitler when you enter anywhere,” commanded one of his guards, giving him a blow in the ribs.

“Heil Hitler,” said Martin obediently. They pushed through the rows of hideous looking, groaning people. There was a smell of sweat, excrement, and blood in the room. “There’s no more room in waiting room Number Four,” said the man with the two stars.

Martin was taken into another room, which was smaller and crudely lit. A few people were standing in it, their faces to the wall. “Stand over there, Jew-pig,” said someone to Martin. He stood beside the others; a gramophone was playing the “Horst Wessel Song”:

Make way for the boys of the Brown Battalions,

Make way for the boys of the Shock Brigades,

The swastika blazons the hope of millions,

The era of Freedom and Plenty begins.

“Join in the song,” came the order. The truncheons began to swing and the people with their faces to the wall sang. Then a record of one of the Leader’s speeches was played and after that the “Horst Wessel Song” again. “Salute,” came the order. Those who did not hold their arms or fingers stiffly enough in the ancient Roman salute were struck on the offending arms or fingers. Then “Join in the song,” came the order again. Then the gramophone was turned off and perfect silence reigned in the room.

That lasted, perhaps, half an hour. Martin grew very weary. He turned his head cautiously. “Stand still, will you, man,” said someone and struck him across the shoulders. The blow hurt him but not severely. Then the gramophone started again. The needle’s worn out, thought Martin. And I’m dog-tired. Even they will eventually get bored looking at my back.

“We’re going to say Our Father now,” commanded the voice. They recited the Our Father obediently. Martin had not heard it for a long time; he had only a vague idea of it. He took careful note of the words, they were really splendid words. The gramophone proclaimed the twenty-five points of the Party’s program. I’m getting training exercises of a sort now, thought Martin. Liselotte is surely telephoning by now. So is Mühlheim. Liselotte—she is the one I am worrying about most.

To stand for two hours sounds a mere nothing. But it is not easy for a man verging on fifty and unused to any form of bodily exertion. The glaring light and its refection on the wall tortured Martin’s eyes, the squeaking of the gramophone tortured his ears. But finally, after what seemed to him an eternity, though it was actually only two hours, the thing really did get too boring for them. They released him from the wall, drove him once more up and down steps and through dark passages and finally into a small room, which was rather dark.

The young men again took charge of him. Martin would have liked to talk to them, but he was too tired. The next man who spoke to him was Hinkel the packer. He was not in uniform. “I have interceded for you, Herr Oppermann,” he said, scrutinizing him with his mean eyes. “After all, we have been associated for a number of years. I think you would be wiser to give in. Sign a paper to the effect that you will comply with the regulations of the business committee, dismiss those four people and you are free.”

“I have no doubt that you mean well, Herr Hinkel,” said Martin peacefully. “But I cannot discuss the matter with you here. I can only deal with business matters in Gertraudtenstrasse2.” Hinkel the packer shrugged his shoulders.

Martin had a rough pallet in a small room allotted to him. His head ached. Also the place on his back, where he had been struck, was beginning to hurt. He tried to remember the words of the Our Father. But the Hebrew words of the prayer for the dead, which he had so recently spoken, substituted themselves. He was glad to be alone. He was exhausted. But the light had not been switched off and that prevented him from going to sleep.

Before the night was over, he was again taken to the room to which he had first been brought. Behind the table with the candelabra on it there now sat a man who had no twig on his collar, but only two stars. “You can go now, Herr Oppermann,” he said. “There are only a few formalities for you to comply with. Kindly sign this paper.” It was a statement that he had been well treated. Martin read it through, nodding his head. “If, for instance, I treated my employees in such a way,” he said, “I doubt whether they would make such an affidavit for me.”

“You don’t mean to tell me, sir, do you,” snarled the man, “that you have been badly treated here?”

“Don’t I mean to tell you?” Martin asked in turn. “Very well,” he added, “I won’t tell you.” He signed the paper.

“Then there’s this, too,” said the man. It was an order to pay two marks, one mark for lodging and one mark for board and services rendered.

The music was free, thought Martin. He paid and got a receipt. “Good morning,” he said.

“Heil Hitler,” said the two-starred man.

Taken from The Oppermanns (1933) by Lion Feuchtwanger. Translated by James Cleugh and Joshua Cohen. McNally Editions (2022).

The Producers - Serious Mel Brooks Filtered by Vaudville

By now, most everyone knows the story of The Producers, the creative theater masterpiece written by Mel Brooks. It's a funny show with a serious message.

Reviews about The Producers began in 1968 when the original comedy movie was released. Mel Brooks won the Oscar in 1969 for best writing and screenplay for The Producers. Zero Mostel starred in the 1968 movie as the comic, albeit unscrupulous, Broadway producer, Max Bialystock, the role Nathan Hale perfected in the stage musical. Gene Wilder was nominated for a supporting role Oscar in the 1968 film for his portrayal of Leo Bloom, the forlorn accountant who Bialystock turns into a producer. Mathew Broderick plays this part in the Broadway musical and movie.

In 2001, The Producers won 12 Tony Awards including Best Book, Score and Musical, 2 Drama Desks as Outstanding Book and New Musical, and the New York Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical

For reasons unexplainable, I didn't actually appreciate the extraordinary genius of this vaudevillian story until my husband and I saw the musical performed live at the Maine State Music Theater at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, this summer. Two veteran actors star in the Maine State blockbuster show: Ed Romanoff plays Bialystock and Chuck Ragsdale plays Bloom. Ulla, the deliciously hot blond who captures Bloom's heart, is played by Amy Bodnar.

We enjoyed the musical. So, we immediately rented the DVD movie, which is a re-creation of the Broadway musical, with Nathan Hale and Mathew Broderick. It's a rare musical movie which, for once, follows the story line of the Mel Brooks screen play and musical, line for line.

Bialystock is a man trained in the P.T. Barnum school where a sucker is born every minute. He latches on to Bloom because the star struck accountant's financial expertise will help him to fraudulently create wealth out of a sure fire Broadway flop. Bialystock convinces Bloom to go against his accounting scruples and the two men begin searching for a play doomed to failure.

Along comes a horrid script called "Springtime for Hitler". The two men sense a Broadway bomb. Bialystock and Bloom start counting their chickens when they find the play's author is a lunatic Nazi sympathizer who raises carrier pigeons on the roof top of a New York City apartment building. Bialystock embarks on a scheme to extort money from dozens of little old lady investors. He hires a terrible director, under the pretext the show is destined to win a Tony Award. Together, Bialystock and Bloom dream about a blissful lifetime of luxury in Rio de Janeiro, with sex kitten Ulla, who walks into their lives looking for a part in
the "Springtime for Hitler", musical revue.

All of which is absolutely side splitting funny. Without realizing it, the audience buys into the premise of "Springtime for Hitler", being seduced by superb acting, comical debauchery and double-entendre sexual innuendos of the bi-sexual variety. Insidiously, Mel Brooks rips open the envelope of political correctness in The Producers by tossing socially polite dialogue into the proverbial trash.

In fact, the show is an upscale vaudeville production with a drop deadly serious theme. For those who, God Forbid, buy into historic revisionism by sinking into the underworld of Holocaust Denial, the vaudeville tone in The Producers shoves their best intentions into eternal folly.

Although Nazism's inherent evil leaves no room for burlesque, Mel Brooks, nonetheless, creates an eternal joke out of the Third Reich, using vaudevillian genius to immortalize the stupidity of the Hitler era.

By an extraordinary twist of fate, "Springtime for Hitler" becomes a big hit, when the director of the show, who is supposed to seal its failed fate, is thrust into playing Adolf Hitler. It turns out, the duped director unsuspectingly creates a gay caricature of the Nazi terrorist, a portrayal which captivates the audience. Instead of the bomb they hoped for, Bialystock and Bloom find they have hit show on their hands. Now, they must repay their unsuspecting investors with the money they intended to steal.

Everything vaudevillian is magnified in The Producers, except for the theme. There's nothing at all funny about Nazism, except, of course, if the life and times of Germany's notoriously failed Fuhrer will be remembered as utterly brainless. Likewise, those who followed the Nazi dictator, who perpetrated World War II in Europe resulting in the murders of millions of innocent people, are portrayed as stage hungry manikins, decorating the set for the entrance of a tyrant turned buffoon.

"Springtime for Hitler and Germany" is the juxtaposed musical revue and showstopper in The Producer's second act, belying the reality bubbling beneath the musical's farce. Just like Hitler's suicide at the end of World War II, the failure of Bialystock and Bloom to carry off their ruse is analogous to the reality faced by the German people when the ugly truth about Nazism could no longer be couched in the ultra
patriotic spirit of nationalism.

Mel Brooks is a world renowned film director, writer, actor and the widower of the wonderful actress Ann Bancroft. He is also a World War II army veteran of The Battle of the Bulge, in Belgium. Many aspects of his comedic life as a Jewish American are a far cry from being funny. Regardless of a lifetime of other achievements, The Producers is a theatrical legacy for Brooks, the writer. Like a magician, Brooks uses vaudeville to hide a historical slight of hand, whereby the laugh lines are rooted in exposing the brutal truth about one of the most heinous of
mankind's modern times.