Yahrzeit For Leslie Epstein
A tribute to one of my mentors and a dear friend
We met at Café Figaro in L.A. in 2007, if I am remembering correctly, several months after I had interviewed Leslie Epstein and written a piece on him for the Jewish Journal in 2006.
My piece focused on The Eighth Wonder of the World, Leslie’s novel set in Italy at the time of Mussolini.
Like so many of Leslie’s books, it had a satirical edge.
Wonder also demonstrated a unique voice, one of the highest literary quality.
Leslie never evidenced other than a beautiful, writing style, as he showed notably in King of the Jews, perhaps his most famous novel, in which he explored the philosophy of Hannah Arendt in limning a character, who might have been prophetically named Trumpelman, a villainous capo in the concentration camps during the Holocaust.
Yes, Leslie was a daring and brilliant writer, as well as a visionary.
Not everyone understood or fully appreciated his gifts.
Some critics felt that his humor about a dark subject was inappropriate.
But Leslie was a man of great wit and courage, and he never stopped writing with his comic, literary flair.
He was a man with a rare pedigree, who might have been the most gifted of all the Epsteins, even if he was not as recognized.
As is well known, Leslie’s father, Philip, and his uncle, Julius, co-wrote, along with Howard Koch, the Oscar-winning screenplay for Casablanca, a Warner Brothers film from the early 1940s that is on anyone’s short list for one of the greatest scripts every written and one of the best movies ever made.
Coincidentally, Carol, my wife, and I recently went to Café Figaro, the French bistro, where Leslie Epstein, one of our era’s most brilliant and gifted writers, and I spoke for hours many years ago.
He was very generous with his time, a blessing to me, for I looked up to him as a mentor and a friend.
A moderately built man, with a gentle heart, Leslie was also very brave and could show a fierceness, which came through in his novels and essays.
Though he was not a boxer like Julius, his uncle, and Philip, his dad, Leslie Epstein was set to play a tennis match in the Pacific Palisades area, where he grew up, when I met him at Café Figaro in 2007.
Around that time, while playing tennis, Leslie tore his ACL, an injury known to many athletes.
But this did not stop him from hanging out with me and relaxing in the French café in Los Feliz, a neighborhood on the Eastside of Los Angeles, before heading back to the Westside for his tennis match.
Like his father and uncle, Leslie Epstein was a Francophile.
He was well aware that the French had a poor record during World War II, but, as he sipped his soup that afternoon at Café Figaro, Leslie pointed out with tenderness that the French had elected several Jews as leaders of their country, something our country has never done.
It goes without saying that Leslie Epstein was correct.
Leslie and I had become pen pals, e-mail pals, after I had interviewed him for the Jewish Journal in 2006.
For several years, we used to send each other e-mails about baseball, particularly about Jewish baseball players.
He knew how much I loved the game when I was a boy; and I, of course, was aware that Theo, one of Leslie’s children, was at the time the general manager of the Boston Red Sox.
Yes, Leslie was very kind to me. And he was one of the best writers around, though, as I say, he was not appreciated nearly as much as he should have been.
Leslie would chuckle at my use of an adverb there, because he told me back in 2007 when we met at Café Figaro that he could be dogmatic, even hilariously so, about some aspects of creative writing, such as when he told his students that they should limit the number of adverbs on a page.
Leslie Epstein headed up the creative writing department at Boston University for 36 years and continued to teach there, as I understand it, until about a year ago, when he passed away on May 18.
I did not learn of Leslie’s passing until recently when I did a Google search on his name.
I had not seen Leslie since 2021 when we met in Brookline, Mass., and walked over to his condo.
He asked me if I had gotten my COVID shots, which I had, and we strolled a few blocks to his home.
He was about to go to Maine, if memory serves, with his family, but he did have time to chat with me about writing and old Warner Brothers movies and the blacklist.
As it turned out, he had just published Hill of Beans, a novel which in some ways evokes The Eighth Wonder of the World, as well as King of the Jews in its hilarity and scathing takedown of villains during World War II and the Holocaust.
Hill of Beans also has a thematic link to San Remo Drive, Leslie’s lovely “novel from memory” about his childhood growing up in the Pacific Palisades area as the son and nephew of the writers of Casablanca.
When I saw Leslie in 2021 in Brookline, he showed me pictures of his father and uncle, as well as John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall, and Canada Lee, who starred with John Garfield in Body and Soul, all of whom flew in 1947 to Washington, D.C., to protest House hearings against the supposed Communist influence in Hollywood.
The 1947 hearings marked the beginning of the blacklist.
Like Philip and Julius Epstein, Leslie was an idealist, part of a family, whose creative fecundity across the generations can best be described as unique.
I can’t tell you what an honor it was to me that he praised my writing.
That was a true compliment coming from Leslie, one of the best writers on the planet.
Yes, Leslie and I had a delightful time when we got together at his Brookline home, just as we did in 2007 when we spoke for hours at Café Figaro in Los Angeles.
In 2021, when we were at Leslie’s home, we hung out in his kitchen, with the window open to an airshaft, before he told me that he needed to take a nap before a card game.
He was going to play poker with some of his friends, if I am remembering correctly.
One of the kindest things that a person can do is to be giving of their time, and Leslie, as I indicated before, was very giving.
We had fallen out of touch for some years, but we did reconnect in 2021.
Sometimes, you get the sense that you have known someone before, that they have always been a part of your life.
Only God knows the truth.
But I did feel and still feel a deep connection to Leslie.
I encourage readers to go to my website, www.robertdavidjaffee.com, should they wish to read my 2006 Jewish Journal piece on Leslie Epstein, “Farce, Fascism and Dash of Proust Create a ‘Wonder.’”
My website has the original print copy from the Jewish Journal of that article on Leslie Epstein, as well as some of my other pieces for that publication, grouped under a pull-down menu that is titled, Published Work.
On a side note, when I have tried to access many of my old Jewish Journal articles online from the Jewish Journal website, the articles appear to be truncated; whether that is due to a file management issue or some other technical problem, I don’t know, but many of my articles for that publication have been cut off, midway through the pieces.
I contacted the Jewish Journal in the past couple of years about this problem. It would be nice if all of my Jewish Journal articles could be restored online in their entirety, just as I wrote them.
Leslie Epstein would have understood this issue all too well, for some of his writing has been neglected, if not truncated.
As I say, I recently did a Google search on Leslie, and Hill of Beans was not listed among his works.
It is a novel that should be read, along with King of the Jews, The Eighth Wonder of the World, San Remo Drive and others, because it reminds us of the power of art and idealism, about how a movie, like Casablanca, or a novel, like one of Leslie’s, can transform our lives and help to defeat evil.
Leslie Epstein was a remarkable writer and intellect.
In the tradition of the Marx Brothers and Mel Brooks, Leslie Epstein sometimes wrote from a perspective akin to that of a standup comedian or even Bugs Bunny, a Warner Brothers character, when he lampooned the evil of Mussolini and others in The Eighth Wonder of the World, just as he lampooned Hitler, as well as Jack Warner, in Hill of Beans, a novel published in 2021.
I still have the inscribed copy of Hill of Beans that Leslie gave me in Brookline that year.
Though I never spoke to Leslie explicitly about politics, he might very well have invoked Bugs Bunny or one of the Warner Brothers characters in saying that the time is coming when it will be “curtains” for Trump, just as it was for Trumpelman, the capo, in King of the Jews.
While Leslie had many friends, I would also imagine that Leslie, like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine at the end of Casablanca, was looking forward to the continuation or beginning of many more “beautiful friendships” with so many of his admirers, including me.
He struck me as being an optimist in spite of the grief he endured, the passing of his dad when he was young, the deaths of his mother and Uncle Julie within three days of each other in 2000, and other losses.
Leslie inspired me with his strength as well as his generosity and literary gifts.
Like Bogey’s Rick Blaine, “a rank sentimentalist,” and Claude Rains’ Captain Renault, who tosses that bottle of Vichy wine into the trash at the end of Casablanca, Leslie Epstein had more than a streak of idealism in him, and he exhibited that with his humor and kindness, which were as rare as his imagination and courage.
When Rains’ Captain Renault famously says, “Round up the usual suspects,” at the end of Casablanca, he does so with a great deal of irony, for there is nothing usual about the friendship he shows to Bogey’s Rick.
And there was nothing usual about Leslie Epstein.
He was a prophet, a visionary and a dear friend.
Blessings to you, Leslie, and to your whole family.
CORRECTION:
In my last article, “Happy 80th Birthday, Reggie Jackson,” published yesterday, May 16, I incorrectly used the present tense when I wrote of Kenny Holtzman that he “is” Jewish. Holtzman, a star pitcher when I was a child, passed away two years ago. I regret the error.