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JTA
EST 1917

groucho marx

In 1961, Groucho Marx received an unlikely piece of fan mail. The poet T.S. Eliot had written to him, requesting a photograph. Marx responded, and the two began a correspondence that lasted for the next three years. It’s not just the mingling of so-called low-brow and high-brow culture that made this relationship so bizarre—it’s that […]

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Long considered perhaps the greatest violinist of his time, Jascha Heifetz was a virtuoso’s virtuoso. Born in Vilnius in 1901, Heifetz started young, receiving his first lessons from his father—a violin instructor—at three. By seven, he had made his debut. Five years later, Fritz Kreisler, an extraordinary violinist in his own right, declared, “We may as well break […]

A recent New Yorker profile of contemporary pickpocket Apollo Robbins briefly mentioned another theatrical thief who has since slipped into obscurity: Dr. Giovanni, a Hungarian Jew hailed as the most entertaining pickpocket of the 1930s and ’40s—and who tried to pass as Italian. Born Adolf Herczog in Budapest, Giovanni became legendary for stealing a stickpin from Prince Edward […]

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