“Will exchange $6,000,000 legacy for one pair shoes in good condition.”
That is the classified ad Abraham Starr might have put in the papers Friday as he saw visions of a fabulous fortune fading. Capetown lawyers, dispatches said, couldn’t find a trace of Harry Koslack who was supposed to have bequeathed a $17,000,000 legacy to the Starr family.
All Starr knew about the rumor of the bequest was that a Montreal lawyer had written him saying he had learned about the fortune from an old Capetown newspaper. He also knew (and this seemed more important to him) that what with reporters, photographers and salesmen clutte### up his iron shop, he couldn’t g###y work done.
“For a pair of shoes you can have my millions,” he told a reporter.
Not so skeptical were his son, Maxie, and his son-in-law, Harry Cohen, who stood outside on the sidewalk giving oral press bulletins to all and sundry.
The facts of the case—if, indeed, there is a case—still aren’t straight. But it seems that Harry Koslack, a grand-uncle, was supposed to have died in Capetown six years ago, leaving a $17,000,000 fortune of which $6,000,000 was bequeathed to Mrs. Fannie Starr, Abraham’s mother.
The reason for the delay was that the Starrs were Staraletskys when they arrived in Montreal from Bialystok many years ago. But the immigration official couldn’t
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
