(Quick piece of housekeeping. For the last two months, a technical glitch has prevented anyone leaving a comment. Being me, I naturally, assumed nobody was interested enough. Last week, the problem was rectified. I look forward to a flood of feedback this week.)
I don’t know about you, but I find true-life accounts of confidence tricksters fascinating. I thoroughly enjoyed Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can, the fairly accurate film account of the extraordinary exploits of Frank Abagnale, who, posing as, among others, an airline pilot and a hospital doctor, forged payroll and other cheques worth millions of dollars. Leonardo diCaprio is immensely attractive as the con man, and Tom Hanks, as the stolidly determined FBI agent who tracked Abagnale for years, turns in a convincing and wonderfully observed performance. (When does he ever not?)
If you want to see whether Abagnale would have fooled you, watch the episode of television game show To Tell the Truth from 1977 that featured the real Abagnale and two other contestants, both posing as Abagnale, in an attempt to fool the panel. The relevant section is from 1:58 to 13:40.
On my morning walks a couple of weeks ago, I listened to a podcast from the BBC: a radio docudrama chronicling, over six 30-minute episodes, the story of Anna Sorokin, Russian-born, whose middle-class family moved to Germany, from where, after finishing high school, she escaped to Paris, and then, in 2013, New York, where she reinvented herself as Anna Delvey, an heiress about to inherit a multi-million dollar trust fund and looking to launch an arts centre complex in Manhattan. Over the next few years (and, for most of the time, by the seat of her pants and the skin of her teeth), she managed both to fool enough of the people enough of the time, and to talk her way out of enough tough corners, to enable her to live a millionaire lifestyle ($100 tips to busboys, champagne dinners in boutique hotels, taking three friends on an all-in two-week holiday in Morocco, staying at a $7000 per person per night villa). It is a fascinating story, as much about those she fooled and used as about Anna herself, and the blend of documentary and dramatization is very well-handled. It was directed by the masterly Sasha Yevtushenko (probably the only BBC Radio drama producer whose father featured on the cover of Time magazine for his achievements as a poet). You can hear it here.
Listening to it, I was struck by what I suspect may be a dilemma that many con artists face. Both Abagnale and Anna seem to have been seduced not only by the prospect of wealth and a glamorous lifestyle, but also by the attention and admiration that they would attract as a result of that lifestyle. Particularly with Anna, I feel that she wanted to be admired more than anything. This, I suspect, is also part of the reason why Abagnale chose such ‘sexy’ professions as airline pilot and hospital doctor. Unfortunately, the con artist is the one person who knows that what he is being admired for is a sham. Even sadder is the fact that the con artist knows that there is one genuine achievement for which he might be worthy of admiration: the extraordinary combination of social and other skills, and the dedication and energy, that he displays in maintaining the charade. The irony, of course, is that the only way the con artist can achieve recognition for that is to be exposed as a fraud. In Anna’s case, I wonder whether the one blatantly foolhardy decision she made at the end of her ‘career’ was deliberate, because she wanted the world to know what she had managed to achieve.
It was only after listening to the serial that I realized that I, in a very modest way, was involved in my own little scam, or, at least, deception, in posing as an expert on a range of subjects, including Portuguese history. And then, last week, my scam collapsed.
When Netflix come to film the story of my rise and fall, the screenplay I write (I’ve never seen the point in fantasising modestly, have you?) will contain three key moments, scenes whose significance is not immediately obvious.
The first is an apparently casual comment I made in my blog post of 24 March. After discussing the nature of my narrative construct, I wrote: So, bottom line: don’t take every word here as an accurate account: this is a blog, not a witness statement. This looks, in retrospect, like the kind of throwaway line, toying with the audience, that Orson Welles used so deliciously in his dazzling 1973 film essay about, among other things, art forgery and literary hoax – F for Fake.
Now we move back to December, and a conversation I had with my friend Seth, an amateur historian who wondered if I might be interested in seeing the PowerPoint presentation that he had put together after a Jewish heritage trip to Portugal.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when my nephew Saul WhatsApped me with the news that he has discovered that a work colleague of his is originally from Lisbon, can trace his family back through several centuries of continuous residence in Portugal, knows about both Belmonte and Penamacor, and is something of a history buff, even editing Wikipedia entries on the Jews of Portugal.
And yet, ignoring all these warning bells, I calmly put my head in the lion’s mouth by choosing, the very next week, to write about 1497 and the Belmonte community. My post was published at 9AM on 9 June, and, at 9:48, I received another WhatAapp from Saul, drawing my attention to what he called ‘one (perhaps) corrigendum’. (‘Corrigendum’! There’s a 400 shekels an hour lawyer’s word, if ever I heard one.)
Saul pointed out that his work colleague stated that the Jews were not expelled from Portugal, but, rather, the practice of Judaism was prohibited.
When my phone rang 30 minutes later, and I saw that it was Seth, I knew what he was phoning to tell me, even though he would have me believe he was phoning to enquire about the general well-being of Bernice and myself.
So, I checked back on my sources and quickly realized that I had leapt to a mistaken conclusion. So (and here we come to this week’s real subject), I believe that some of you may have been under a misapprehension after reading last week’s blog.’ Some of you may have been under a misapprehension.’ So much more civilized than ‘I made a false statement’, don’t you think? I’m considering applying for a job as a Government spokesman.
Oh, the hell with it. I was wrong! Satisfied?
Let me at least try to put the record straight. The story of the Portuguese monarchy’s treatment of its Jewish subjects at the end of the 15th Century is a little more complicated that I suggested last week.
In the wake of the expulsion from Spain in 1492, tens of thousands of Spanish Jews fled to Portugal, where King John II granted them asylum in return for payment. However, only eight months later, the government decreed the enslavement of all Jews who had not yet left Portugal. In 1493, King John deported thousands of Jewish children to the recently established colony of São Tomé in Central Africa, where many of them soon died.
King Manuel I, who succeeded John after his death in 1494, was a pragmatic man, who well understood the contribution of Jews to the Portuguese economy, tax-collecting, and professions, and was loth to lose that contribution. However, in 1497, Manuel married the widow of John’s oldest son, Alfonso. Isabella, his bride, was the eldest daughter of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. (Do try to keep up at the back, there!) She had spent part of her childhood in Portugal, and subsequently had been very popular in Portugal during the years of her first marriage. When Alonso was killed in a riding accident, Isabella became convinced that his death was a punishment from God for Portugal sheltering Spain’s Jews rather than expelling their own. She became very religious, and followed an ascetic lifestyle of mourning. Although she had vowed never to marry, she was eventually persuaded to marry Manuel, on condition that he expel all Jews from Portugal who would not convert to Christianity. He agreed to her ultimatum, and they married.
However, Manuel still wanted to keep as many Jews as possible in Portugal, and so he devised a plan. He ordered that Lisbon was to be the only port of embarkation Jews could use. On March 19, 1497 (the first day of Pesach), Jewish parents were ordered to take their children, between the ages of four and fourteen, to Lisbon. Upon arrival, the parents were informed that their children were going to be taken away from them to be raised as good Catholics. Some children were literally torn from their parents, while other parents chose to kill themselves and their children rather than be separated. Eventually, many of the parents agreed to be baptized, along with their children, while others succumbed and handed over their babies.
Later that year, another 20,000 Jews came to Lisbon from all over Portugal, to prepare for departure to other lands. They were herded into the courtyard of the palace of Os estaos, and were approached by priests trying to convert them. Some capitulated, while the rest waited around until the time of departure had passed. Those who did not convert were told they would forfeit their freedom and would become slaves. More succumbed. Finally, the rest were sprinkled with baptismal waters and were declared New Christians.
This explains why there were so many anusim, or crypto-Jews, in Portugal in the following centuries, in contrast to Spain. Of course, the Portuguese Inquisition, which flared up intermittently until its eventual abolition in the first part of the 19th Century, ensured that those New Christians who were not prepared to give up their Jewish identity had to be very circumspect in their practices.
There! I feel much better for having confessed my sin. However, you should now be even more aware that what I write is not necessarily to be trusted. Sadly, the more we bend the truth, the more pliable it becomes.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s someone at the door. I suspect it may be Tom Hanks, wearing glasses with thick, black rims, so I’m just going to nip out the back to climb the garden wall and make my escape.
Before I go, here’s a young man who is still in the blissful state of being unaware that such a thing as human deceit even exists.
