Award-winning actor, writer, director, producer, and comedian
(1922– )
My father wasn’t a joiner, so we were never synagogue members. When I turned thirteen, he persuaded a rabbi to rent him a synagogue in a poor neighborhood for a Thursday morning bar mitzvah for me. My only training for the event had been with another rabbi who, for a few months, was willing to teach me what I needed to know. My father, my mother, my older brother Charlie, and a group of strangers, old Jews with beards and prayer shawls, were the only ones who attended when the time arrived.
And it wasn’t like today, where kids write their own speeches. My father wrote the speech for me, in both flowery language and beautiful handwriting. “Worthy Assembly. You’ve afforded me a great honor this day, when you have come to this temple of God to take part in and celebrate on the day I have become a bar mitzvah.” It went on in the same manner, ending with “May God be with you in my endeavor to be a good member of society and a good Jew. Amen.” This speech was actually the same one my father had written for my brother Charlie, who had said it at his bar mitzvah a few years earlier.
Over seventy years go by when a granddaughter of our old neighbors the Fishmans contacts me out of the blue with something she thinks I’ll be interested in. It turns out to be her family’s copy of that same speech in my father’s own handwriting. My father had written it out for the bar mitzvah of Murray Fishman, her father, who was a year younger than I was. So that speech was delivered at three different bar mitzvahs at three different times.
I was thirteen and officially a Jewish man in the eyes of the elders, but my friends, who were older and maybe more religious than I, had already taken part in a minyan, a group of ten adult male Jews who get together for prayers. There have to be a minimum of ten or the prayers won’t be valid. If I saw men in our neighborhood with prayer shawls, I quickly crossed the street. I always dodged being part of a minyan, especially since I had learned only what I needed to learn for my bar mitzvah by rote. I knew no Hebrew. I couldn’t read the prayers.
But one day I was with my friends walking down our street when we were all called in for a minyan. Since I was part of the group I couldn’t escape. I had no choice. When everyone else started praying, I didn’t know what to do, so I prayed too—but in Hebrew double-talk. My guilt lasted many years, because at the time I thought that I was preventing the prayers of nine faithful Jews from reaching God because of my gibberish.
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MY INTEREST IN performing was sparked early on by my mother’s family. Her brother had been in Irving Berlin’s show Yip Yip Yaphank. He played the spoons and he sang. And my mother’s sister, Adele, was just a funny woman who made us laugh. We also went to movies and listened to comedy shows on the radio. I guess that people are born with a talent for comedy, but if you’re in a household that accepts humor as a potent force then you also develop it.
I could make kids laugh when I was very young and I liked doing it. When I was in first grade at P.S. 57 I was the teacher’s pet. At Christmas they asked, “Can anyone do anything entertaining?” One kid got up and tap danced, and I could stand, put one leg behind my head, and hop around on the other. It was one of those things I found out I could do, because I had a short torso and long legs. I did that in our classroom, and then the teacher took me to two other classrooms to do it. That was my first touring in show business right there.
In third grade, I played the Headsman in the play Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil. I was the guy who chopped people’s heads off. We performed the play for an audience and all I remember is that my mother sat next to the principal, who said to her, “That boy is the best one.” He said that because I was loud. I was the loudest one and he could hear me.
At Evander Childs High School, Mr. Raskin, who was the music teacher there, needed singers. So my friend Milton points to me and says, “He sings.” I could sing loud and I had a big operatic voice but no ear and no timing. However, I could sing like Caruso if somebody conducted me. Raskin says, “Let me hear you sing.” And he gives me a few notes to sing. I hit one note. “You’re in!” “In what?” “In the chorus.”
Then I was paired with a wonderful girl coloratura, Ruth, and we rehearsed a duet, “Yo Soy el Pato,” which is “I Am the Duck” in English. In rehearsals I sang it really well. This was for our big outing—to be onstage at Julia Richman High School in Manhattan for a Spanish festival.
So we’re there and Ruth starts to sing, and I’m supposed to walk behind her onstage. While I’m doing that, I can’t help myself. I’m doing it duck style. I’m flopping after her and the audience is roaring with laughter. The more they roared, the more I’d both walk like a duck and jump like a duck. That was my first and only theatrical performance in high school, but by then I was bitten.
A few years ago The New Yorker magazine was going to do a piece on my old neighborhood, and I wanted to show them where I lived. Our apartment building was on Belmont Avenue, with a second building backed up to it, on the corner of 179th Street. But when we arrived, I was shocked to see that there was nothing there. Both buildings had been razed. So I went to the open lot, picked out two bricks, and sent one to my brother in Atlanta with a note that said, “Memories of our old homestead.” Across the way were two short apartment buildings, two stories, like for three families each. They hadn’t been torn down because they were historic, even though they were older and much more decrepit. One of those buildings was where I prayed in Hebrew double-talk for the minyan.