Luck: A Personal Account of Fortune, Chance and Risk in Thirteen Investigations

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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. He survived being a Jew in the German occupation of Warsaw in 1939; survived being a prisoner in a Siberian forced labour camp for sixteen months from 1940 to 1941; survived being a Polish soldier at the battle of Monte Cassino in 1944. Originally called Izio, which is a Polish version of Israel, he adopted the name George in his attempt to carve out a life as an immigrant in London after the war. He had hardly any English and his accent was heavy and when he met my mother at an East End dance organised by the Polish Ex-Servicemen’s Association, she misheard his ‘George’ as ‘Joe’ and he didn’t have the facility to correct her, so Joe Flusfeder he became. And now I had a plan. I would drive from the old Lened factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey, then on to Detroit, where I would visit Archer’s to see my father’s machines in operation. And then fly to LA, to meet Steve and Nina, and broker a deal to help out Archer’s.

Games and activities often denote class – that was the case hundreds of years ago and it is the case now –while others are universally inviting, whether played in a workhouse or at Court. Some were cruel and violent, others endearingly silly. But all, from gambling to jigsaw puzzles, give us fascinating insight into how the leisure time of yesteryear was spent. British games: Bladder football A game of football being played in the streets of London during the 14th century. Credit: Chroma Collection / Alamy However, football remained widespread and continued to be a rough and violent game until the mid-1800s when rules were standardised by English public schools. This paved the way for a comprehensive set of rules to be established across the UK. British games: cat’s cradle Two small girls playing cat’s cradle Date: 1888Thrilling, 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 Passion I have been a tv critic for The Times,and a poker columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. I have also written for the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, Mail on Sunday, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung amongst others . My short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines, including Granta, Esquire, Arena, He Played for his Wife, The Seven Deadly Sins, New Writing 8, Fatherhood and the Jewish Quarterly. Dostoevsky’s experience is perhaps the most compelling. Even after he managed to rid himself of his addiction, the novelist retained the conviction “that in games of chance, if one has perfect control of one’s will, so that the subtlety of one’s intelligence and one’s power of calculation are preserved, one cannot fail to overcome the brutality of blind chance and to win.”

This works well enough in day-to-day life, but, writes Flusfeder, the extension of this very human way of thinking to economics often fails when it turns out that past results are an imperfect guide to future performance. This is how the world works: your rust belt is his travertine wall. Nietzsche wrote, ‘Mankind is not a whole; it is an inextricable multiplicity of ascending and descending life-processes . . . the strata are twisted and entwined together . . . Decadence . . . belongs to all epochs of mankind: refuse and decaying matter are found everywhere.’

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.

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. 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. I got over my guilt that I hadn’t made it to Elizabeth, that I’d allowed poor planning and the New York Marathon and telephone data usage and James Turrell to deflect me from it. Joe Flusfeder wouldn’t have minded. He was not a sentimental man. He never declared any feelings or curiosity or interest in Elizabeth, or Berkeley Heights, where he had, as they used to say, begun to ‘raise a family’. He had been in Elizabeth solely because of work, because Lenny Palermo and the unknown Ed had happened to set up a factory there. He chose, when he could afford to, to live in Manhattan. Elizabeth and Fort Lee and Berkeley Heights and Fresh Meadows, like London, like Monte Cassino or Siberia or Warsaw, were unavoidable steps on his way. 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.”

My father, Joe,was born in Warsaw, reaching the USA by way of England, Iraq, Palestine, Monte Cassino, and a forced-labour camp in Siberia; and my mother, Trudy, was from the East End of London. 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. 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.

It 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.) The pianist Glenn Gould gave up performing live that year, preferring the technology of the recording studio. In 1966 he wrote: ‘Whether we recognize it or not, the long-player record has come to embody the very reality of music.’ In 2006, 900,000 records were sold in the USA. There was a slight rise to a million the following year; and then something happened. Every couple of years or so, the figure would double, so that by 2015, nearly twelve million records were sold, a rise of just under three million over 2014. 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.This is an extract, read the full feature in the Dec/Jan 2022 issue of Discover Britain, out on 4 November. Joe Flusfeder didn’t like life in London. He was poor and he was made to feel ‘like a dirty foreigner’. He had a flair for working with machines and was offered a place at the University of Nottingham to study engineering, but couldn’t afford to take it up. Claiming experience with plastics moulding equipment, he was given a job in a spectacle-frames factory where he learned the job by doing it. Then he worked in a factory that manufactured plastic clasps for handbags. Sometimes he slept on the factory floor. Generally, he lived in rooms in east and north-east London, often sharing them with other Jewish Poles displaced by the war. 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. Flusfeder admits this of himself in the book’s concluding chapter. During a trip to Las Vegas to play poker during its annual World Series, he folded on what he subsequently judged a likely winning hand. He admits: “I am not a high roller. I’m more timid than I would have ever chosen to be.”