Jewish actor Nehemia Persoff looks back at his first 102 years

• Author: TOM TUGEND/JTA
• Published date: 06 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

"I pretended that I was hurt," Persoff writes in his just-published autobiography, "The Many Faces of Nehemia." "So the teacher ran over and hugged me. I was in heaven."

Nearly a century later, the now-102-year old reminisced, "I learned then that I could make people believe my exaggerations and make fiction accepted as truth. I guess I was born an actor."

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Now, with some 200 stage, film and television credits on his resume, including roles in screen classics "Some Like It Hot," "Yentl," "The Wrong Man" and "An American Tail," Persoff sits in an easy chair propping up his legs at his home in the California coastal community of Cambria, recalling the high and low points of a very full life.

Listening to him, via Zoom, was a JTA reporter, himself 96 years old. Adding up the ages of questioner and responder yielded a total of almost two centuries, matching the longevity of some of their Biblical ancestors.

When Persoff was 10, his family left Israel and moved to New York, all but shattering the boy. He left behind the only friends he knew. Long "bombarded" with Zionism, he felt that his true mission in life was to help create a Jewish state.

Arriving in New York in 1929, at the start of the Great Depression, Persoff and his parents soon discovered that, contrary to mythology, the streets of America were not paved with gold.

His initial job at a motor repair shop earned him just a handful of dollars, but he upped this to a princely $35 a week when he landed a job as a New York subway electrician.

Persoff spent most of his fortune visiting the neighborhood movie theatre. The rest of his family was not so fortunate, so when he came home for dinner, he acted out all the parts for an audience consisting of his parents and siblings.

Having caught the acting bug, Persoff — through the intervention of a girlfriend — landed a scholarship at the New Theatre acting school. His first role was as a walk-on as Karl Marx, for a show attended mainly by Communist party members.

After an extensive make-up job, but not a single line of dialogue, Persoff walked on the stage. The audience, recognizing the actor as Marx, burst into a 10-minute long ovation.

His acting career was beginning to take off when, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he was drafted by the U.S. Army for a three-year engagement. However, he...