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

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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. 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.) 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. 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 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.

They were able to do this because they could afford to light their rooms after dark, which was the start of a domestic leisure economy.” Professor Richardson also points out that there were many attempts to quash entertainment by those in power. “James I tried to legislate on some of these issues around entertainment, as did others before him,” she explains. “There’s an extensive outraged moral literature about people who play games and gamble in alehouses, but doing it at home was much more respectable!” It is fair to say that parlour games reached their zenith during the Victorian period. 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: 1888 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. 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. 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.’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. 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 is an extract, read the full feature in the Dec/Jan 2022 issue of Discover Britain, out on 4 November. 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.

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. 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 I’ve written about my father before and each time I’ve thought I was done with it. He was the idol and enemy of my youth, the smartest and toughest man I’ve ever known, and I fought against him harder than I’ve fought anybody. 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. 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.

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. 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.’ 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. Like many of my father’s decisions, his decision to get out of the recording business in 1982 was a shrewd one. In 1975, record sales in the USA had totalled approximately 460 million dollars. By 1978, that had gone up to around 500 million dollars, of which about two-thirds was made up of album sales and the other third of singles. But by 1982, vinyl was on the way out. Cassettes became more popular than records in 1985. CDs took over in 1989. By the 1990s vinyl records had become twentieth-century curios, a niche market kept alive by ageing audiophiles and a few purists’ genres like Detroit techno. 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.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. 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. 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.