Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [93]
So I decided to infiltrate the Jewish establishment, set on qualifying as a pillar or at least a cornice. For openers, I volunteered to work as a fund-raiser for United Jewish Appeal, which explains how late one afternoon I actually found myself sitting in the office of a suspicious but hot-to-trot clothing manufacturer. Certainly I had come to the right place. A Man-of-the-Year plaque hung on the wall behind tubby, good-natured Irv Nussbaum’s desk. So did a pair of bronzed baby shoes. There was an inscribed photograph of Golda Meir. In another photograph Irv was shown presenting a Doctor of Letters scroll to Mr. Bernard Gursky on behalf of the Friends of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. A model of an eighteen-foot yacht that Irv maintained in Florida was mounted on a pedestal: the good ship Queen Esther, after Irv’s wife, not the biblical Miss Persia. And photographs of Irv’s obnoxious children were here, there, and everywhere. “You’re kind of young for this,” said Irv. “Usually our fund-raisers are, well, you know, more mature men.”
“A guy can’t be too young to want to do his bit for Israel.”
“Care for a drink?”
“A Coke would be nice. Or a soda water.”
“How about a Scotch?”
“Darn it. It’s too early in the day for me, but you go right ahead, please.”
Irv grinned. Obviously, contrary to reports, I wasn’t a boozer. I had passed a test. So now I submitted to a crash course of dos and don’ts.
“I’m going to trust you with just a few cards to begin with,” said Irv. “But listen up. Rules of the game. You must never visit your target in his office, where he is king shit and you’re just another shmuck looking for a handout. If you run into him in the synagogue, you can butter him up with Israel’s needs, but it’s no good putting the touch on him there. Bad taste. Money-changers in the temple. Use the phone to schedule a meeting, but the time of day you get together is of the utmost importance. Breakfasts are out, because maybe his wife wouldn’t let him bang her last night, or he didn’t sleep because of heartburn. The ideal time is lunch. Pick a small restaurant. Tables far apart. Some place you don’t have to shout. Make it eyeball to eyeball. Shit. We’ve got a problem this year. There’s been a decline in the number of anti-Semitic outrages.”
“Yeah. Isn’t that a shame,” I said.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m against anti-Semitism. But every time some asshole daubs a swastika on a synagogue wall or knocks over a stone in one of our cemeteries, our guys get so nervous they phone me with pledges. So, things being how they are this year, what you’ve got to do is slam-dunk your target about the Holocaust. Shove Auschwitz at him. Buchenwald. War criminals thriving in Canada to this day. Tell him, ‘Can you be sure it won’t happen again, even here, and then where will you go?’ Israel is your insurance policy, you say.
“We will provide you with the inside info on your target’s annual income, and if he starts to cry, saying he’s had a bad year, you say bullshit and read him numbers. Not the numbers on his tax returns. The real numbers. You tell him now that we’ve got that fucker Nasser to contend with, his pledge has to be bigger this year. And if he turns out to be a hard nut, a kvetcher, you slip in that everybody at Elmridge, or whatever country club he belongs to, will know exactly how much he pledged, and that his order books could suffer if he turns out a piker. Hey, I understand you’ve gone into television production. You need help with casting, Irv’s your man.”
Help with casting? A babe in the show-biz woods that swarmed with ferrets, conmen, and poisonous snakes, I even needed help tying my shoelaces in those days. I was bleeding, no, haemorrhaging money. My first pilot, the idea sold to me by a hustler who claimed he had a co-credit on a Perry Mason episode, was for a projected series about a private eye “with his