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“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You must have made an old man very happy.”
I evidently looked puzzled as he went on to explain “I think it’s a Jewish thing... Every nation has a need for nostalgia, to feel a part of history, a part of the culture in which they live; but for us, for Jews, it sometimes comes out differently. For generations, you see, we were deprived of all participation. We didn’t touch history; we were merely allowed to continue. And so now, when we finally arrive where we are free, we aim straight for the trunk of the tree, the professions, doctors, dentists, politicians: it isn’t about the money, or the power; it’s about belonging, becoming a part of the backbone of society, the establishment, doing something that may count. But Walter, he was a storyteller; he never set his sights on anything concrete. Yet still he wanted to belong to history. And you gave him that chance. You believed his tale; you made him, or rather his creation, Willie, a character in the life of England. And you made others believe it too. You must have made him very happy.” He said this as if he didn’t realise that I was Jewish, and hence I could not possibly understand. And in truth I am not sure I do. My experience has been entirely different. But then again I am a professional, a member of the establishment, so who knows.
And that would have been the end of it, bar a little tidying up, but Willie Bergman was to surprise me once again.
On making this deiscovery my first and most anxious thoughts were for my career. I realised I had broken the first rule of scholarship and biography: I had been entirely seduced by my subject, worse, I’d been hood-winked, and published articles that demonstrated the crime. I did, for a moment, consider keeping it to myself, continuing with the concert promotions and writing the biography, but I knew I would get found out in the end. Unlike Walter, I was never any good at lying. I had always lacked that particular form of imaginative thought: my skills lay in putting puzzles together. And so I turned once again to studying Walter’s collection, this time with more of a detective’s eye.
Detaching Walter and Willie from the collection of objects and papers before me wasn’t easy; they had become so embedded with meaning, and memories of Walter’s tales. But once I began to see them for what they really were, the true scale of the achievement became apparent. Walter had taken a large and random collection of music memorabilia, each with something slightly Jewish about the names or venues, and, through an extensive addition of forged printed and handwritten papers (no doubt his own hand though in a contrivedly old fashioned style) intricately woven them all together into an elaborate and detailed hoax. It was fantastic. I had never come upon anything like it. And then it occurred to me that by making Walter the hero of the story, by telling the story of the hoax, using my own gullibility to demonstrate Walter’s credibility: that might just redeem me.
When, a few weeks later, my article The Myth of Willie Bergman was published in The Guardian Weekend Supplement, the response was unprecedented, for me at least. Articles by others followed in all the major newspapers, admittedly more interested in the news aspect of the story: Expert Hoaxed by Elderly Fantasist!; followed by radio interviews, even the occasional TV comment, and then the focus began to change from me towards Willie himself, and of course Walter. My concern for the planned concerts which had afterall been publicly funded by the Arts Council proved entirely unfounded as this publicity, far from putting off the concert promoters as I had feared, caused all the nights to sell out and so a national tour was hastily put together.
And so it seems that Willie Bergman is to have his day in the sun after all.
The last few months have seen a host of blog-sites and music forums discussing Willie Bergman, with an increasing number of commentators choosing to take the stance that he was real. I have even started receiving emails from people across the Diaspora claiming that Willie was their father, or uncle, or cousin. There have even been those who suggest that maybe Walter was in fact the hoax, carefully calculated to generate publicity, and that Willie Bergman was indeed a real unknown and underappreciated bandleader. It is as if he has become a kind of Jewish Everyman, although admittedly on something of a small scale. Clearly there are a great number of people out there who want to believe in him. The Willie Bergman Yiddish Twist Orchestras (there are currently two) are both on successful tours, one in Europe and one in Argentina, and the fad shows no sign of waning.
And the record Bubbe used to play? I have not been able to discover anything about the real Solomon Schwartz, despite my many efforts. Whoever recorded it, and under whatever circumstances, it has now, due to all this hoo-hah, been rereleased by a Russian Label and is doing well in the Itunes World Music charts. Where they got it from I do not know, and they seem unwilling or unable to tell me. At yet Bubbe did always call it Willie’s record; perhaps a bizarre coincidence, perhaps something more. I guess it will forever remain one of those many things I wish I had had the interest to ask her about when she was still here.
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