What’s in a name? | 10 November 2007

New York

My good friend George Szamuely, who is very big in the Jewish community of the Bagel, swears this is a true story. (George’s father, incidentally, was Tibor Szamuely, a great man who managed to leave the Gulag with 5,000 books and was writing leaders for The Spectator when he died suddenly at the age of 47. He and his wife are buried near Karl Marx.) Anyway, during the first week of the Yom Kippur war back in 1973, Israel had been taken by surprise and was barely holding the line on two fronts. I was on the Golan front and later switched to the Sinai one, filing twice a day for Acropolis, the leading Greek daily at the time. Those were great days for me. I had met a very pretty corporal by the name of Daphna and was running around with my friend Jean-Claude Sauer and Peter Townsend, of Battle of Britain fame, both of whom were working for Paris Match.

Not everyone was out for glory, however. While the three armies slugged it out like punch-drunk pugs, a certain Israel Dwek — not his real surname — had a brilliant idea back in the Big Bagel. Israel went down to the Register office of the city of New York, and applied for a change of name. He changed his surname to Fund and then went to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and took out a full-page ad in both papers. It went as follows: ‘Israel is on the brink. Money is desperately needed. Please send to Israel Fund…’ and included his newly opened bank account number. This is where Szamuely again comes in. He swears that the man had accumulated $30 million in no time.