Features
David Steinberg speaks fondly of his Winnipeg roots in autobiography
By MARTIN ZEILIG When asked why he decided to write this entertaining and insightful book comedian/director/writer/producer/actor David Steinberg provides a concise and reasonable response.
“Money,” Steinberg said in an email response to a series of questions sent to him by this reporter.
He seems to be following, at least in part, the wise words of Samuel Johnson (Dr. Johnson) the 18th century English writer, moralist, critic, editor and lexicographer who famously said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”
David as a youngster in Winnipeg
Left: David (right) with his older brother Fishy, in 1946
Top right: David in Israel while on a scholarship to the Hebrew University
Bottom right: David playing basketball at the YMHA on Hargrave, 1953
But, to be fair, there was more to Steinberg’s reply: “And I have a lot of memories and information about comedy and comedians I wanted to share.”Steinberg grew up in Winnipeg, where he studied theology at yeshiva at the age of fifteen, and went to the University of Chicago, leaving to become a member of Second City, notes his bio.
He appeared on Broadway with Elliot Gould in Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders and Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights, directed by Sidney Poitier. During Steinberg’s almost three decades as a stand-up comedian, beginning at the Bitter End, he released four comedy albums and received two Grammy nominations. Steinberg has directed many TV shows, among them Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Designing Women, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Golden Girls. He lives in Los Angeles and New York with his wife, Robyn.
This writer has known David “Duddi” Steinberg for decades. His sister, Tammy Lazer, and her (late) husband, Harry, and their two children, Hart and Shelley, lived next door to the Zeilig family in Garden City for a number of years.
I have vivid memories of Hart and me playing football catch on Primrose Crescent with “Uncle Duddi” whenever he used to come visit the family. David drove a blue 1959 Plymouth Valiant.
On at least one occasion, he even visited my parents, Lillian and Morrey, and played his guitar and sang a folk song while sitting on the orange shag carpeted living room floor of our five room blue bungalow.
While watching David on a television comedy special from Hollywood many years later, my mother reminisced about that special time when the young “still undiscovered” Duddi Steinberg had serenaded her.
I recall a standup comedy show Steinberg gave at the Centennial Concert Hall back in the late 1970s. Afterwards, he invited some friends, including my mother, and family members backstage to visit him in his dressing room for a while.
As someone said afterwards, “Fame and success hasn’t changed him. Duddi Steinberg is still a real down-to-earth mentsch.”
My late brother, Ken, worked as a radio arts correspondent for CBC in London, England for many years back in the 1960s and ‘70s. I recall him telling me that he and his first wife, Gillian, saw a play in the west end, which had first appeared on Broadway, starring Steinberg.
“The play wasn’t memorable,” Ken said. “But, David is an engaging actor. He’s very good.”
Steinberg writes that it took him a few years to write the book—all the stories, reminiscences, tales of directing, performing and related anecdotes and incidents—to get it “where I wanted it.”
The list of comedians in the book seems endless, from Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks, to Don Rickles, Lucille Ball, Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Lily Tomlin, Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Martin Short, Steve Martin and so many more.
“We didn’t have TV in Winnipeg while I was growing up,” the author writes.
“I watched every movie as a kid and listened to every radio show. Radio was so exciting. It was all about your imagination. You were creating pictures in your head from what you were hearing. I always applied that to my stand up. Second City (the Chicago comedy and improvisational troupe) was one of the best things that happened to me early on.
“I learned from seeing Lenny Bruce perform at the Gate of Horn that a comedian could be dapper and still be funny (rare for the time). Lenny was a genius. He was soft-spoken and never pandered to the audience. He was never afraid of being controversial. He was my comedic hero. He was everyone’s comedic hero.”
He also considers being on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for over 30 years as a major highlight of his career.
“Johnny asked me to host it when I was 26,” Steinberg says. “Looking back, being on that show with Johnny was everything to me. I love comedians and I love my life in comedy. I loved directing all the shows from Bob Newhart to Curb Your Enthusiasm. And I’m so proud of this book.”
Yet, in looking back at his long and illustrious career, Steinberg says that “Getting the Order of Canada (presented by former Governor General Her Excellency the Right Honourable Julie Payette) was one of the most important moments in my life. Remember, my father (a rabbi/grocer) and mother were Russian immigrants, with very little. My only regret is that they were not there to see me get one of the highest honors of my beloved country.”
Some notable excerpts: “Insecurity combined with arrogance is good DNA for a comedian. So is anger, aggression, and sadness. If you’ve had a great life and a wonderful bar mitzvah and you’ve been given a lot of money, you’d make a lousy comedian. You’re better off being the comedian’s lawyer.
“…I may be the only comedian to have made Elie Wiesel laugh; that I was admired by the great New Yorker writer S.J. (Sid) Perelman, and by Philip Roth, Kenneth Tynan, and Harold Pinter. And that I was virtually adopted by Groucho Marx and many of the legendary old-timers (such as Jack Benny and George Burns) at Hillcrest Country Club. I also directed Burt Reynolds at the height of his considerable fame, before he self-destructed.
“It’s a funny thing about comedy: when you give your life to it, it can become a serious business. I spent my life in and outside the comedy world, and it is a world, a universe unto itself.
“But this book is not just about my life in comedy—it’s about my life and comedy in the last half century. I lived through a time when stand-up comedy was a poor relation to other forms of entertainment, when being on a successful sitcom was nothing to write home about. But, I think I was one of a group of people—along with Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and a few others—who pushed stand-up forward as an art form and made comedy an important part of the culture.
“Comedians ‘steal’ from each other all the time—not material, but ideas. There’s no good comedian that hasn’t stolen ideas from someone. And you don’t really ‘steal’ material. You do your own version of it. And so that’s a bar code. So Shelley Berman on the phone—I guarantee you Nichols and May had their comedic ‘on the phone’ piece before him. Bob Newhart was on the phone in a way no one else was.”
Then, there was the time Steinberg was best man at the wedding of the notorious Mafia kingpin Joey “Crazy Joe” Gallo.
He writes: “Joey Gallo was about forty years old when we met and about as famous in his own high-visibility field as I was in mine.”
Caption under a photo— one of many photos— in the book: “I hadn’t known Joey Gallo that long, maybe a year or so, but I arrived at Jerry and Marta Orbach’s house for a party, and when I got there, I was told that Joey and Sina were getting married right then.When Joey insisted I be his best man, the priest was so excited I froze, surprised and shocked, as you can imagine. (I thought it should have been Jerry, who had known him for many, many years). And here I am right after the ‘I do’s’ with the happy couple. March 1, 1972.
“I remember, as a child, sitting in my neighborhood Winnipeg movie theatre all day, every weekend, watching the same Marx Brothers movies over and over again, and laughing and laughing and laughing, worshipping this great, odd, funny man with the funnier name, Groucho.
“Cut to eighteen years later, meeting my childhood hero, my new friend, Groucho. He could still make me laugh, but this time I could reciprocate the gift of laughter.”
David Steinberg’s life has, as he admits, been a dream built on laughter.
A legend in his field.
“Inside Comedy: The Soul, Wit, and Bite of Comedy and Comedians of the Last Five Decades”
By David Steinberg
(Knopf 335 pg. $40.00)
Captions for above photos, as supplied by David Steinberg:
Left: “On set with Jordan Peele (left) and Keegan-Michael Key (center). Many years ago, I directed Keegan in the pilot Frangela and subsequently became a big fan of Key & Peele. I was lucky to have Keegan and Jordan on Inside Comedy and to get to know these two amazingly talented people.”
Credit: Ty Watkins
Centre: “On the set of Inside Comedy. These are all people I love. They light up a room. Mel Brooks and Tim Conway are always buoyant, Jon Lovitz is so smart and just finished doing a perfect imitation of Woody Allen’s moose story, which he said inspired him into comedy. And my good friend Alan Zweibel, who is every comedy writer’s matzo brei. (Left to right: Brooks, Lovitz, Zweibel, me, Conway.) “
Credit: © Nicholas Rowan Adams
Right: One of my favorite birthdays with Don Rickles, Marty Short, Bob Newhart, and of course my wife, Robyn, who threw the party at E. Baldi restaurant in Beverly Hills, August 9, 2014.”
Credit: Courtesy of the Author
Captions for above photos:
Left: “Sharing a cigar with Groucho, as we always did. He was reluctant to come on as my co-host, but I’m so glad he did; it really meant everything to me, and the audience loved him.”
Credit: The Music Scene
Centre: “John Candy and his family lived in my guesthouse in Los Angeles for a year while we were writing and shooting the cult classic Going Berserk, circa 1982. John wrote most of the script on a napkin. That should tell you something. That was the whole script.”
Credit: Courtesy of the Author
Right: “This is Kong (short for “King Kong”). Kong was my monologue go-to. Sometimes I would talk about current events, and I also would do a Dietrich-like rendition of “Falling in Love Again.” One of the many places Kong and I went was on The David Steinberg Show, the CBS summer replacement for The Carol Burnett Show, 1972.”
Credit: Courtesy of the Author
Features
The Israeli dentist who got to know people like Yahya Simwar and thousands of other Palestinian prisoners better than anyone
By BERNIE BELLAN I wanted to depart from the usual post-event analysis of what happened on Saturday, April 13 in which so many pundits have been engaging. After all, by the time this is read, Israel may have struck back against Iran, so to engage in speculation as to how Israel should respond to what Iran did that day will probably be largely outdated.
Instead, I want to write about an article that appeared on the Haaretz website on Sunday, April 14. Now, if you’re not familiar with Haaretz, I’ve been referring to that news source many times over the past couple of years – not because of its political orientation – which is decidedly leftist, but because it often contains the kind of analysis you’re just not going to see anywhere else.
The particular article that snagged my attention had this headline: ‘I Asked Sinwar, Is It Worth 10,000 Innocent Gazans Dying? He Said, Even 100,000 Is Worth It’
The person who gave that quote is someone by the name of Yuval Bitton. I doubt you’ve heard his name before. Bitton was head of something called the “Intelligence Division of the Israel Prison Service.”
The article consists of an interview Bitton recently gave, in which he recounts his career working within the Israeli prison service, where he had the opportunity to interact with some of the most dangerous terrorists Israel had taken prisoner over the past 30 years.
What was Bitton’s backround? you might wonder. He was a dentist!
But it turns out that, as a dentist, he was able to enlist the trust of even the most embittered enemies of Israel – not to confide anything that would be considered any sort of information relevant to security, but to talk more openly about their feelings. The reason, as Bitton explains in the interview, is that when he was examining someone’s teeth, his patients would let their guards down – not out of fear of Israeli intelligence, but our of fear what their fellow Palestinian prisoners might hear what they said.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview in which Bitton offers a fascinating insight as to how he was immediately able to tell whether a prisoner was Fatah or Hamas. The interviewer explains that “While preparing for this interview, I found an item from 2005 in which you (Bitton) explained the differences between the teeth of prisoners who are affiliated with Fatah and those who are members of Hamas.”
Bitton: “The teeth of Fatah inmates are in poor condition, whereas Hamas prisoners maintain hygiene and purity. Theirs is a religious way of life. Ascetic. With rigid discipline. They pray five times a day, don’t touch sweets, don’t smoke. There’s no such thing as smoking in Hamas. You see a 50-year-old prisoner who is entirely free of any signs of illness. No tooth decay. I’d say, ‘You’re Hamas? They would say, ‘Yes, how did you know?’ ‘By the teeth,’ I replied. A very basic insight.
“Everything has meaning – it’s the same with regard to their way of life, for example. At 9 P.M., there is a total lights-out in the prison’s Hamas wings; in the Fatah wings they watch television all night.”
Interviewer: “At that time you were an inquisitive dentist, with good diagnostic skills. How did you end up as an intelligence officer?”
Bitton: “There was an intelligence officer I knew who hung out a lot in the clinic, which is a supposedly safe place for prisoners. They feel free to talk there, because their organizations aren’t monitoring or eavesdropping on them. He saw that I was talking to them all the time, and I also talked with him about all kinds of insight that I had about them. He realized that I could be a platform for recruiting sources and suggested that I join the prisons service intelligence division.”
In time, Bitton moved up the ranks to the point where he actually became head of Israel Prison Intelligence. It was in that capacity, he explains, that he realized what a terrible mistake it would be to release (Hamas leader in Gaza) Yahyha Sinwar in what became the swap of 1,026 Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Shalit.
Bitton offers some fascinating insights into the differences between the mindsets of Fatah and Hamas. At one point he notes, referring to differences between Fatah and Hamas: “Fatah talked about the 1967 borders, about the occupation, about the Palestinian people. To me, the Hamas inmates would say, ‘There’s neither 1967 nor 1948. There are no borders and there is nothing to talk about. You are on Waqf land, Muslim sacred ground, and you have no place here.’ “
He goes on to describe the realization by members of Fatah that Hamas members would have no hesitation in killing them the same as they would kill any Israeli. That happened in 2007 when Hamas – which had been cooperating with Fatah in governing Gaza to that point, suddenly turned on Fatah members.
Bitton says: “We [Israelis] were taken by surprise by the horrific disaster of October 7. I’m certain that in Fatah they weren’t surprised. They’d already seen it happening – they’d already seen how people were thrown off the roof, without a drop of mercy. How they [Hamas] tied Fatah activists, still alive, to cars and dragged them through the streets until they died. From Hamas’ point of view, members of Fatah are not their brothers. So what if they are Muslims too? They are an obstacle on the road to achieving the goal: a sharia state.”
He continues. Members of Fatah warned him: “Hamas will do to you what they did to us. You’re cultivating Hamas, injecting money into Gaza, humiliating Fatah, but in the end they will do to you what they did to us.”
And, in one particularly blood-curdling story, Bitton describes Sinwar’s absolute barbarism:
“There was a high-ranking Hamasnik in prison whom Sinwar suspected of collaboration. When he got out, they hanged that person in the city square and brought his 9-year-old son to watch. Is there anything crueler than that?”
I tell these stories here not to remind that Israelis live in a “very tough neighbourhood,” which is the phrase we’ve so often heard used to describe how very dangerous it is for a non-Muslim country to exist surrounded by Muslim countries – which we all learned many years ago, but to point out the importance of getting inside the minds of your enemies.
Has Israel miscalculated time and time again when it comes to misperceiving the intent of its enemies? Yes. We now know how badly Israeli intelligence misinterpreted clear signals that Egypt was going to launch an attack across the Suez Canal in 1973, and it didn’t take long to understand that, once again, Israeli intelligence and especially Netanyahu totally missed clear signals of what Hamas was planning on October 7.
And now, we’re hearing that, once again, Israeli strategists never thought Iran would react the way it did when Israel decided to bomb Iran’s consulate in Damascus.
I’ll end this particular article by referring to the incredible contribution that the U.S. – aided by other countries, including Britain, France, and especially Jordan, made in coming to Israel’s aid on April 13.
Reports are still filtering in about the weaponry that was used to prevent anything but the smallest number of Iranian missiles from reaching their targets in Israel. The Americans deployed new counter missile systems that had never been used in real-time situations previously – enabling them to launch counter weapons high into space to intercept Iranian missiles.
Without the aid of those other countries Israel would have suffered much worse on April 13. Yet, what I am afraid we will see is an even further insistence on the part of Netanyahu and the right wing fanatics who support him to thumb their noses at their American allies and entrench themselves even further in the ongoing series of mistakes they’ve made since October 7.
And our major Jewish organizations, including CIJA, B’nai Brith, and our Jewish Federation will say nary a word in criticism. As Yuval Bitton explains so well in that Haaretz interview, if it’s anything Ithe Israeli government and the Israeli security apparatus is very good at, it’s totally misinterpreting opportunities how to properly engage with your enemies.
Features
Brothers Arnie & Michael Usiskin’s Warkov-Safeer a throwback to days of long ago
By MYRON LOVE Step into Warkov-Safeer on Hargrave in the Exchange District and you’ll feel like you’ve walked back in time to an earlier era. The shelves are crammed full of shoe-related accessories – soles, heels, laces, polish, threads, needles, dyes – and other leather-related needs.
“There used to be a shoemaker on every corner,” says Michael Usiskin, whose family has operated the wholesaler for more than 50 years. “People used to keep their shoes for years. They might resole them ten times. Now you might have five pairs in your closet – different shoes for different occasions, and buy a new pair every year or two.”
Usiskin adds that “there is no place else like us between Toronto and Vancouver. When we moved here in the 1970s, this area was buzzing with garment workers and sewing machines. This was a hub of activity. It’s a lot quieter now.”
While the Usiskin Family has been connected with the company for 85 years, Michael Usiskin points out that the company – originally catering to the horse trade – was actually founded in 1930 in Winkler by the eponymous Warkov brothers – Jacob, Mendel and Morris – and their brother-in-law, Barney Safeer. Larry Usiskin, father of Michael and his brother and partner, Arnie, went to work for the company in 1939, four years after the partners moved the business to Winnipeg (to a location at Selkirk and Main).
The late Larry Usiskin and his late wife, Roz, were leaders in Winnipeg’s secular Yiddishist community. The Usiskin brothers received their elementary schooling at the secular Sholem Aleichem School at the corner of Pritchard and Salter in the old North End.
“Our dad was maybe 16 or 17 when he went to work for Warkov-Safeer in 1939,” Michael Usiskin notes. “He would do deliveries on his bike to shoe repair shops.”
He never left.
Michael Usiskin relates that, during the war years, the company relocated to larger premises at King and Bannatyne to accommodate a growing demand for its expanding product lines.
Larry Usiskin bought the business in 1969 – with a partner – in 1969. It was not a given that either Michael or Arnie would join the family endeavour. Michael was the first of the brothers to come on board. That was in 1984.
Michael had been working for Videon Public Access TV for the previous seven years. “I was a producer, editor and camera man,” he recalls.
Among the programs he worked on were Noach Witman’s Jewish television hour and such classics as “Math with Marty” and Natalie and Ronne Pollock’s show.
“Dad began talking about retirement,” Michael recounts. “With budget cuts and lay-offs coming to Videon, it was a good time for me to get out and join Dad in business.”
Michael became Warkov-Safeer’s managing partner in 1995 on the senior Usiskin’s retirement. Arnie joined his brother in partnership in 1998.
“I had been working for CBC for 17 years as a technician,” Arnie relates. “A confluence of events presented me with the opportunity to go into the family business.”
Although Arnie bought out Michael’s previous partner, he continued on at CBC for another four years before accepting a buyout.
“I went from show business into shoe business,” he jokes.
Today, Warkov-Safeer has customers from Ontario to the West Coast. “Things have changed considerably over the years for our business,” Michael notes. “Our shoe market is now solely more expensive brands. And we also supply a lot of leather and leather-related products for hobbyists.”
He reports that a lot of their marketing has long been done by word of mouth. “We used to go to a fair number of trade shows, but not so much anymore,” he adds. “We now have a number of sales representatives throughout Western Canada and Ontario.”
“We’re not high tech,” Arnie points out. “We have a niche market. What we sell is a form of recycling – allowing people to look after and fix their shoes. We see a trend developing in this area.”
While Arnie and Michael Usiskin have no plans to retire quite yet, they do acknowledge though they are not getting any younger and would welcome someone younger to come into the business who might be willing one day to lead Warkov-Safeer into the future.
Features
Winnipeg-based singer/songwriter Orit Shimoni spreading her wings again after being grounded by Covid lockdown
By MYRON LOVE In the spring of 2020, Canadian-Israeli singer/songwriter Orit Shimoni was in the midst of a cross Canada tour. She had started in Vancouver, had a show in Edmonton and stepped off the train in Winnipeg just as the Covid lockdowns were underway. Shimoni was essentially stuck In our city, knowing virtually on one.
Four years later, she is still here, having found a supportive community and, while she has resumed touring, she has decided for now to make Winnipeg her home base.
“I really appreciate the artistic scene here,” she says. “I plan on being away on tour a lot, but I have understanding and rent is affordable.”
Our community also benefits from having such a multi-talented individual such as Shimoni living among us. Over the past 15 years, the former teacher – with a Masters degree in Theology, has toured worldwide as well as producing 12 albums of original works to date – the most recent being “Winnipeg”, a series of commentaries on her life experiences, wishes and dreams over the past couple of years – which was released last fall.
She has also produced an album of songs for Chanukah.
According to her website, Shimoni expounds on her “truths, her feelings and tells her stories” in venues that include bars, clubs and cafes, coffee houses and folkfests, theatres, back yards, living rooms, and trains. Her music is described as a potpourri of “bold and raw, soft and tender, witty and humourous,” incorporating empathy and condemnation, spirituality and whimsy,” and crosses different genres such as blues, folk and country and “speaks to the human condition, the human heart and the times that we find ourselves in”.
She observes that the inspiration for her songs can come from anywhere, including conversations with others, nature, history, news and her own lived experiences.
In response to the ongoing situation in Israel today, she reports that she is trying to use her music to create positive energy in trying to foster a commonality between people.
In addition to adding to her musical corpus while in Winnipeg these past four years, Shimoni notes that she has used her enforced lockdown downtime to explore other ventures. One of those new areas that she has been focusing on is art.
“I have always had an interest in painting,” she says. While she hasn’t had an exhibition of her painting yet, she has prints for sale and is available for commissions.
“My last two albums have my paintings as the cover art,” she points out.
Another area that the singer/songwriter has been developing over the past four years is writing and performing personalized songs for special occasions. “I can bring to birthdays, weddings and memorials personalized songs to mark the occasion,” she notes. “It is another way that I have diversified what I can offer.”
One project she completed last year – with support from the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba – was “singing the songs of our elders” in which she interviewed several Jewish seniors – with the help of Gray Academy students – and told their stories in song.
Among other performances she has given locally over the past year was a special appearance before a group of Holocaust survivors at the Gwen Secter Creative Living Centre, a self-written, one woman show – called “The Wandering Jew” at Tarbut in November and, most recently, a concert last month at Gordie’s Coffee House on Sterling Lyon Parkway.
Another new area of exploration for Shimoni is animation. In an interview with Roots Music Canada last fall, she embarked on an ambitious animation project based on her song “One Voice,” which she wrote a few years ago, and which perfectly reflects the anxiety that many people are feeling in these troubled times.
Last October, she was back on tour – with renowned American songwriter Dan Bern – after three years away from the road. She did two weeks’ worth of concerts in American West Coast states and Colorado – and. in late January, she began a month-long journey that started with shows in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal and stops throughout the Midwest as far as Texas.
She recently returned to Montreal for a show and is currently doing a series of concerts in Germany – with further stops in Belgium, Holland and England.
“It will be good to be back in Europe,” she says. “I have developed a loyal following in Germany and elsewhere.”
A writer for one publication in Berlin described Shimoni as ‘one of the most interesting singer/songwriters I have met in a long time.”
Here at home, Winnipeg concert promoter Ian Mattey observes that “with each concert, her audience has grown – a testament to the wonderful balance of her lyrical genius, haunting voice and musical talent.”
The singer/songwriter feels grounded – in a good way – in our fair city – and we hope that she will be with us for some time to come.
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