He never saw it coming.
Fyvush Finkel, who died Sunday at age 93, had big plans for the future, including an upcoming 94th birthday show at the Metropolitan Room, hopes of seeing “Hamilton” once the ticket prices dropped, having dinner with a President Hillary Clinton, and continuing to promote the traditions of Yiddish theater and vaudeville.
I know, because I conducted the last full interview Finkel ever gave.
This summer, in hopes of documenting the Jewish accent for an unrealized Daily News project, videographer George Goss and I visited Finkel in his Midtown apartment, turned the camera on, and basically spent the next hour in stitches as Finkel recounted high and lowlights of his 75-year career (though, truth be told, I had to explain some of the jokes to the young Goss).
It wasn’t that Finkel said anything that funny. It was that Finkel WAS funny. He couldn’t open his mouth without making you smile. Even just listening to him talk about Donald Trump was funny — albeit aided by Finkel’s dead-on impression of Bill Clinton calling him “Fiavish.” (That excerpt from Goss’s video is below.)
Though an Emmy Award winner from his days on “Picket Fences,” Finkel was happy to participate. “Set your cameras up whatever you like,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere!”
Unfortunately, that wasn’t true. But if it helps future biographers, here’s what we touched on in Finkel’s last interview:
The Jewish accent
“I don’t think it was real Jewish accent. It was a Brooklyn accent,” Finkel said. “The Jewish accent was done by the people (who) came from Europe. I remember my father spoke with a Jewish accent: ‘Nu, vatsamatter wit chew?’ I was born the same way, and all the Jewish comedians back then did that same accent. Willie Howard, a great vaudeville comedian, spoke in beautiful English, but certain parts of his act, he did with the Jewish accent. He would say, ‘I’ll teach you a French lesson! The landlord comes for the rent, you tell him ‘Avec!””
The joke being that “avec,” which means “with” in French, means “go away” in Yiddish. And that prompted Finkel to break into his Yiddish-accent version of “Dixieland”: “Way down South in the land of cotton, food is bad, hotels are rotten. Keep away, keep away, keep away, from Dixieland.”
His career
“Three-quarters of my life I spent in the Yiddish theater!” Finkel told me. “I’m the only one alive. I’m the last of the Mohicans.” Well, since there are now no more Mohicans, it’s worth looking back on the career of that final one.
“At the beginning of my career, even in Yiddish theater, I was a big flop,” he said. “I was 18 years old. Maybe I wasn’t ready! My father sat on one side and my brother sat on the other side and if the audience wasn’t laughing, they’d laugh it up for me. So all you heard was two people laughing! I died the death of a dog. The owner of the theater said, ‘Learn a trade. You’ll be better off!’ But finally, they allowed me in the vaudeville theater.”
Eventually, he became “a star of the Yiddish theater on the RKO circuit, which was every Tuesday in New York,” he said. “But I needed to make a living. Two sons to send to college. I don’t have to tell you what expenses are.”
So Finkel got an agent. “I spent a fortune of money trying to do an English act, but it didn’t work. They wrote the act for me. Cost me a fortune. And P.S., I died! They didn’t know how to write for me.”
And he couldn’t get work in New York City anyway because, believe it or not, the Hebrew Actors Union controlled all the jobs.
“But they finally said, ‘We have an opening in Pittsburgh.’ So I went. That was my school. I learned everything. And some bad habits, like upstaging. We would do anything to sell a gag. We would yell, ‘Register! Register,’ which means talk louder so they hear the gag. But they wouldn’t let me be a comedian. They said, ‘A tall man can’t be a comedian — you have to play the villain.’ When they shot me, you never heard such laughter in your life! I didn’t play it for laughs, but they were laughing. So they said, ‘All right. You’re the comedian from here on in.’
“All of a sudden, I played Boston for one night. The audience was laughing before I opened my mouth. They laughed because I was very thin and I was a funny shuffle dancer. With a Jewish audience, if you wore white socks, they screamed with laughter! So the owner says, ‘I took a theater in Brooklyn and you’re in!’ I said the union won’t let me in. He said, ‘Is that so?’ His name was Pesach Yebulstein. He was so enthusiastic about my talent. The union said, ‘No. Absolutely not. We have actors here who would be delighted to be in your show.'”
Fortunately, Yebulstein was persistent. “He goes to the big meeting and said, ‘I need an actor who can play 20 years old without a wig.’ No one raised his hand. So Yebulstein said, ‘Well then, Mr. Finkel has to play in my theater!’ One year. That was my life. The audience carried on. You’d be surprised. Then I did the same vaudeville house where I died and they paid me four times more and I killed.”
On Jackie Mason
“I used to pal around with Jackie Mason, who is one of the funniest guys ever. When I did ‘Picket Fences,’ we used to meet every day for breakfast. Eventually, I said, ‘Jake, I can’t have breakfast with you anymore.’ He asks why. I said, ‘It took me years to get rid of my Jewish accent. If I pal around with you, it’ll come back again.'”
He shared another Jackie Mason story. “Jackie says, ‘I know the difference between a Gentile audience and a Jewish audience. After the first act, the Gentile audience goes to the bar. And the Jewish audience is in the lobby saying, ‘How much does this show cost? There’s no scenery. What is Jackie Mason getting every week?'”
On the future
Finkel was excited that the Metropolitan Room had booked him for his 94th birthday on Oct. 9. He said he planned to do his act, “I start with ‘I’m 93 now. Half of my life is over.'”
The venue’s managing partner Bernie Furshpan emailed me this morning to explain Finkel’s allure as a headliner.
“Fyvush kept alive the culture I and many grew up with,” Furshpan said. “Not only did he celebrate the Jewish culture we’re familiar with from the past, but we wanted to celebrate him. He was the definition of ‘Mensch’ and it was my objective to give to him what he gave us all. I’m so heartbroken that he didn’t make it to his next birthday show and he will be missed so very much…No one can ever replace our dear Fyvush.”
Finkel had told me he would talk politics at his gig, specifically how much he disliked Trump. He explained that if Hillary Clinton was elected, Bill promised that Finkel could come to dinner in the East Room. He also offered his views on almost every American president since FDR.
“Truman was the greatest,” he said. “Eisenhower I enjoyed. There was no war. He knew what war is. He lived war. He saw the war. He knew.
“Kennedy was a good president as long as he lasted. His father was anti-Semitic. But it was too bad that they killed him. They killed his brother, too.
“Johnson I hated,” Finkel continued. “I don’t know why! I just didn’t like him. It was one of those things.
“Nixon? I did the picture ‘Nixon’ for Oliver Stone. I played his campaign manager. He had a Jewish campaign manager even though he was anti-Semitic. I guess when Nixon needed you, he didn’t care who you were.
“Jimmy Carter was the first president I ever met in person. He had a hard time. His sister was anti-Semitic. His mother was anti-Semitic. And his brother. Don’t even ask what an idiot that was. But he personally and his wife were lovely people. He lasted only one term.
“The Bush family, forget about it,” he said. “That’s what they are, bushes.”
And in closing
Finally, after 45 minutes of pretty much nonstop talking, Finkel concluded: “I don’t think the Jewish accent is gone. People want to hear it! After all, why do they keep hiring me?”
We thanked him and packed up our cameras.
“God bless you,” he said. “What, are you going to print all this?”
Yeah, Fyvush, why not?
