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

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RUSSIAN novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was a gambling addict. He believed that if he could only maintain his composure, the various strategies and systems he dreamed up to beat the roulette wheel would one day pay off. He was kidding himself. No strategy can defeat pure chance. The Minister’s Cat is where the eponymous cat is repeatedly described using adjectives beginning with specific letters of the alphabet while Reverend Crawley’s Game saw players stand in a circle and join hands, except not with a direct neighbour. The result was a human knot that needed untangling – making it a rather risqué game. Sardines – cousin of Hide and Seek – was also much played during the Victorian period, as was Consequences – a written game where each player must contribute a line to a story without knowing what has gone before. British games: Blind Man’s Buff A game of Blindman’s Buff. Credit: Duncan P Walker There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’ 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 see this everywhere. The creativity, resourcefulness and incredible talent for improvisation in Egypt.’

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. 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 Passion In 1951, my father and mother, recently married, emigrated to the US, sponsored by his aunt Ruth, who was already in Brooklyn. In New York City, he believed, it didn’t matter how foreign you were: if you were smart and worked hard, you could get on in life. He continued to work in plastics factories. At some point, in the late 1950s or early 1960s, he got a job in a small manufacturing plant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, called Lened. Fiction and narrative non-fiction. Questions of freedom and identityand fortune and chance. TeachingOn 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. 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. 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.” 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.

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.

About

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.

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. Or I would sit in Lenny’s chair in the office the partners shared, with its heavy furnishings, the pair of identical mahogany desks. Lenny, who was now invariably referred to as ‘that horse’s ass’ by my father, was seldom there. Highlights of my visits were if Pepe, the factory foreman, had any spare time for me. Pepe could sometimes be persuaded to play ping-pong in the recreation room, which was a light blue linoleum room off the main factory floor, where the machines were built. The factory floor itself was a hot, hellish place that I tried to avoid. It made me ashamedly aware of my narrow boyishness to enter this loud dirty world where bare-chested oily men laboured over machines. 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. 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.”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. 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. 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 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. 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.

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.

Research interests

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 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.