O pinion
Rosenbaum Continued from Page 14
in hotels along Collins Avenue,
recapturing the easy camara-
derie of their younger days at
Toots Shor’s saloon near the
Theater District in Manhattan.

The cavalcade of stars did
not stop there. Muhammad Ali
sparred at Angelo Dundee’s 5th
Street Gym and did speed work
on the quicksand of the beach
— in heavy sweat clothes. He
was trying to reclaim the heavy-
weight championship forfeited
when he conscientiously objected
to fighting the Vietcong.

Meyer Lansky, the notorious
Jewish gangster, who two years
later would be fictionalized in
“The Godfather Part II,” had in
1972 just been extradited from
Israel back to Miami Beach to
stand trial for tax fraud. He
would spend his days at Wolfie’s
Restaurant on 21st Street
surrounded by an aging crew of
Jewish wise guys still smarting
over Fidel Castro’s takeover of
their Havana casinos in 1959.

All of them appear in “How
Sweet It Is!” (yes, Gleason’s
signature signoff), reimagined,
of course — along with one
more special guest. The Yiddish
novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer,
not long thereafter a recipient of
the Nobel Prize for Literature,
was spending the winters in
Surfside. While there he unspar-
ingly fictionalized the Jews of
Poland before the Holocaust,
and those who survived and
lived in New York thereafter,
capturing their comical lives of
heartbreak, betrayal and loss.

Ensconced just over the
Miami Beach city line, situated
right in between two Jewish
enclaves populated with those
who had fled or escaped one
hardship or another, Singer
made a canny choice for a writer
with a gravitational pull for the
shortcomings and desperate
moral choices of humankind.

One wonders what he might
have written about the Champlain
Towers today, a short distance
from his own apartment.

All the avenues of Surfside
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM were named for American and
British authors. (Just west of the
Champlain are Carlyle, Dickens,
Irving and Emerson avenues.)
Eventually a street would be
named for him. He must have
enjoyed the irony that some of the
hotels of Surfside once restricted
Jews. One shamelessly boasted
“Always a view, never a Jew.”
Singer strolled the sunbaked
landscape in a white suit and
impish teardrop fedora. Always
taking notes, he fiercely studied
and measured the patterns of
these transplanted Jews: melting
snowbirds and Holocaust survi-
vors looking to the sun to cure
memories of more ashen, cloudier
days; widows and divorcees
looking for a male ticket back
to the Northeast or out of loneli-
ness; young families tired of the
transit strikes and crime waves of
New York; Hasidim who dressed
in the sweltering Sunshine State
as if still in Lublin; and vaude-
villians wearing makeup suitable
to the burlesque surroundings of
Miami Beach.

All of them immortalized in
Kodak color, or in the pages of
“My Love Affair with Miami
Beach,” a book of photos by
Richard Nagler, for which Singer
wrote the introduction in 1990.

Imagine them as Singer once
did: plotting affairs, swatting
tennis balls, staring at stock
tickers, clacking mah jongg tiles,
gliding discs along shuffleboard
courts and gesturing wildly
about socialism.

“For me, a vacation in Miami
Beach was a chance to be among
my own people,” Singer wrote.

He found them sitting on the
Broadway medians and inside
the cafeterias on the Upper West
Side, too, of course. But the
Jews from Miami Beach were
somehow of a different species
— and not only because they
were more prone to skin cancer.

It was a Shangri-La of Jewish
misadventure, a shtetl still
trembling but without Cossacks,
the Chosen People out of choices,
the detour of a once wandering
tribe — finally at rest in and
around sleepy Surfside.

And now it is home to
new waves of Jews, reflecting
the area’s diversity: retirees, of
course, but also younger and
wealthier Jewish families, many
drawn to a booming Chabad;
a large cohort of Hispanic Jews
with feet in North and Latin
America; a smattering of Israelis;
and more Sephardic Jews than
the national average.

The residents of the
Champlain Towers were asleep
until a nightmare roused them.

Will any survive to tell this tragic
tale? In time, this beachside plot
will become another reminder
of senseless Jewish death in
America — acts of hate, or
negligence or of God: the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
in Manhattan and the massacre
at Marjory Stoneman Douglas
High School in Parkland,
Florida; the Leo Frank lynching,
The Temple bombing in Atlanta,
the Crown Heights riots; and
the antisemitic shootings at
the Jewish Community Center
of Los Angeles and Jewish
Federation of Seattle, and then
at the Tree of Life Synagogue
in Pittsburgh and Chabad
synagogue in Poway, California.

At times like these, disasters,
whether unnatural or manmade,
leave the same feelings of loss.

Miami Beach has served
as a refuge for some, and as
a playground for others. An
infinite coastline of condos
always seemed to be rising from
the sand. Today, unimaginably,
we know that one can come
crashing down. l
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, the
author of “The Golems of Gotham,”
“Second Hand Smoke,” “How
Sweet It Is!” and “Elijah Vislble,”
among other works of fiction and
nonfiction. Montefi ore Cemetery Company
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JEWISH EXPONENT
JULY 8, 2021
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