Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
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. Instead, our brains make reasonable assumptions and update them if necessary. Along the way, we develop habits, and the impression that we live in a deterministic world in which what happened yesterday is a reliable guide for our actions today. 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. 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.” 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’ 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.
This is an extract, read the full feature in the Dec/Jan 2022 issue of Discover Britain, out on 4 November. 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.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. 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. Fiction and narrative non-fiction. Questions of freedom and identityand fortune and chance. Teaching
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. 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 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 WalkerMy 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. 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. 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.
Great Deal 
New Comment