Pollack’s latest gig is as CEO of Epic Poker, which he founded along with well-known professional poker player Annie Duke. What makes Epic Poker different from other poker leagues is that players can participate only if they meet a set of statistical criteria reflecting consistent excellence in the game over the past few years. Virtually every other poker tournament in existence is open either to anyone who wishes to buy in or to select invitees whose fame alone is the most important criterion.

“You have to see this to understand what I’ve done here,” Pollack said as he approached a ballroom at the Palms in Las Vegas. Pollack is a thin, diminutive man, 46 years old, with a half-inch beard, and he stood gazing in expectant admiration at the room, the way a child giddily shows his dad a sand castle. “I got chills when I walked in to see it for the first time.”

The object of Pollack’s affection is a tricked-out television studio set on which, a few days later, the first of what he expects to be many very important poker games would take place. Bathed in red, white, and blue decorations and endowed with some nifty movable parts, the crux of the scenery is a round tan circle in the center of the set where would-be champions can duke it out for millions of dollars. “I wanted to make the entire venue in hardwood, but that didn’t make sense,” he said with evident glee. “So, I said, ‘At least put the feature table on the hardwood.’ And that’s how we’re going to talk about this, as ‘The Hardwood,’ ” a reference to the flooring of basketball courts.

There’s already the World Series of Poker, a handful of other major tournaments around the world, and, of course, the incessant drill of televised poker shows that flood the cable TV schedule. But Pollack insisted the Epic Poker League—a new tournament series he launched in early August that will start its second event September 2—will transform the game and make it as prominent and respected as tennis or golf.

As ambitious and vainglorious as all that sounds, it’s impossible to dismiss Pollack’s plans out of hand—the man has already repeatedly had a role in transforming unusual corners of the American sports scene. Betting against him—as many inevitably do each time he takes on a venture and as some prominent poker pros are doing this go-around—has always been a loser. Epic’s first season comprises No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em tournaments in August, September, January, and February, followed by a world championship in February for those with the best results throughout the earlier events. The jackpots vary depending on the number of players willing to ante up for $20,000, but the first event in August drew 137 of the roughly 220 qualifiers and ended in a $1 million payday for pro David “Chino” Rheem.

***

It was Pollack’s half-brother, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, who was the sports visionary in the family back when Pollack left the family home in Fort Lee, N.J., to major in journalism at Northwestern. Pollack appeared to be headed for a career in politics after a summer internship with the American Jewish Congress in Washington, D.C. That led to a one-year post-graduate gig at the AJC as a lobbyist working primarily on legislation allowing active-duty military personnel to wear religious head garb in noncombat situations. Then he moved to Los Angeles to work for the political public-relations firm Winner & Associates, where Charles Winner assigned him to do PR consulting for Major League Baseball as it faced early-1990s labor strife. The experience made Pollack realize that no journal was doing for the sports industry what Variety does for Hollywood or The Hotline did for politics, so in 1994 he left Winner to create the SportsBusiness Daily. (In fact, Hotline founder Doug Bailey helped bankroll the project with a $500,000 start-up investment.)

The professional hockey, baseball, and basketball leagues are all helmed by Jews, who have all brought to the promotion of sports a legacy of entertainment management. Growing up watching sports from the stands may have given executives like Pollack a broader view of the product—and what the viewer wants—than the athlete-focused marketing of the past.

“As with all the things he’s done, he likes to have a relatively clean slate to apply his creativity to,” said Bettman, the NHL commissioner and Pollack’s half-brother. “In his case, he has enjoyed a series of opportunities where he has been able to fully immerse himself at a time when wherever he was going, they needed something special he could bring.”

Sports, Pollack decided, “was really just a subset of the entertainment industry.” In 1998, he sold the trade publication to go to work for the National Basketball Association as a public-relations consultant during that year’s player lockout and work stoppage. He stayed with the NBA until 2000, when he bolted for a short-lived sports website that he calls his “reverse MBA”—“I learned what not to do when you’re starting a new venture,” he explained. Then NASCAR came knocking, hiring Pollack to build up the burgeoning race-car league’s new-media efforts. “It was a totally new experience to me,” Pollack said. “I grew up in New York and knew very little about NASCAR. When I joined the sport and started paying attention in a meaningful way, I realized what a unique industry and community it is. But it is also a national phenomenon.”

In the 2000s, thanks in part to Pollack’s efforts, NASCAR exploded across the media landscape. Beyond creating an immersive, you-are-in-the-car, on-demand cable-TV program called NASCAR iN Car, which won two Emmys, Pollack helped turn NASCAR.com into a model for sports websites. During Pollack’s tenure, NASCAR became the second-most-watched sports franchise on cable TV, behind football.

At NASCAR, Pollack worked for Dick Glover, the future founder of the comedy website Funny or Die. Glover came to NASCAR from ESPN, where he’d tried unsuccessfully to buy Pollack’s SportsBusiness Daily, so he already had an admiration for Pollack’s ingenuity.

“He’s very, very well-suited for emerging kinds of things that need the strategic vision,” Glover said. “What makes Jeffrey successful is he thinks strategically but he can act tactically. He assesses the situation, finds the growth opportunity, comes up with a plan, and then goes on the street tactically to implement it.” Those talents would come in handy when casino company Harrah’s Entertainment asked Pollack to helm the World Series of Poker, a recently acquired, then-35-year-old tournament. A dubious Pollack came to Vegas to observe that year’s WSOP and signed on because he sensed it could be a much bigger thing. He didn’t—then or now—know much about playing poker.

“He didn’t need to,” said Epic Poker exec Duke, one of the many players who regarded Pollack’s poker ignorance with great suspicion at first. “When it came to the WSOP, he had the players to listen to. We told him what we wanted. Whether he understands the nuances of an Omaha game is irrelevant. He understands how to listen to people.”

Within three years of Pollack’s arrival, the WSOP entered the annual top-10 list of “most admired sports league brands” assembled by Turnkey Sports. He left the WSOP in 2009 and in 2010 became interim commissioner of the Professional Bull Riding Association, another sport he knew little if anything about.

Yet he and Duke had long discussed a central quandary of poker: the fact that the top pros in the world never make it to the final table of the game’s most prestigious competition, the WSOP Main Event. The sheer numbers of entrants—there have been more than 5,600 each year since 2005—diminishes the odds that anyone the public actively follows can survive to the end. At the time, Pollack had routinely insisted this was what made poker so attractive, that anyone can enter, play against the world’s most famous and best players, and win—an open and democratic idea that also prevented the WSOP from generating an equivalent to Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, players who transcend their game into the broader popular culture.

Now Pollack and Duke believe Epic will change that. “While obviously it’s spectacular to watch people compete for a $10 million first prize, and I personally hope that that kind of spectacle never goes away, the idea of professionalizing the sport and giving it an objective measure to see who the best players are in the world is something that’s very much needed for poker to evolve to the next level,” Duke said.

Pollack is tight-lipped about how Epic is paying for its start-up and what the path to profitability will be. One well-known pro, Daniel Negreanu, isn’t participating because he doubts the business model can survive. In a scathing piece titled “Why I Didn’t Play the EPL,” posted on the poker website Card Player, Negreanu noted that Epic Poker games will only appear on CBS television because Pollack’s company is buying the time and that the league has no significant corporate sponsors. “I’m always careful about what I attach my name and likeness to, and after doing my due diligence on the ‘business plan,’ I don’t think this league can succeed,” Negreanu wrote. “Of course I could be wrong … but I’m not.”

Bettman, however, has faith in his kid brother and some knowledge of the facts and figures behind Epic. “He has a business model and capital to see it through,” he said. “People will be surprised.” Duke, who clearly has a personal interest in supporting Pollack, is especially effusive: “I think Jeffrey will be seen as an integral figure in the mainstreaming of poker, taking it from a fringe sport into the mainstream the same way that golf is.”

Either way, Pollack insisted he’s in the poker world to stay. “In everything I’ve done, there’s always been a wave of skepticism and curiosity, but I’ve proven I know how to make the difference” he said. “And I’ll prove it again.”

• Ethan Bronner has the Israelis and the Palestinians tentatively tipping back toward U.S.-brokered talks in exchange for no statehood vote at the United Nations in September. [NYT]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Joseph Dana reports from Athens that Israel is exerting heavy pressure on the Greek government to stop the flotilla, which is scheduled to push off soon. [+972]

• Howard Jacobson weighs in on Alice Walker and the flotilla. [CNN]

• The Goodmans—Las Vegas Mayor Oscar and Mayor-elect Carolyn—updated. [NYT]

• Great profile of incoming New York Times editor Jill Abramson. Peter Kaplan: Whatta guy! [Forward]

• Elliott Abrams has a long, fair, excellent essay on Israeli settlements that is worth the time even for those who will disagree with it. [Foreign Affairs]

• Judaism is increasingly only for women. #slatepitches [Slate]

• Mimi Sheraton sez: Bagels are too big! [City Room]

• Harold Grinspoon and “the Jewish mind.” [NYT]

• The next Woody film will be set in Rome, star Alec Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg, be called Bop Decameron, and not be at all didactic. Okay, one of those four statements is a lie; can you guess which? [Speakeasy]

• The lost Jews of … Argentinian cowboys! [WP via Goldblog]

• Two streets in Jerusalem are to be named for the Mizrahi Black Panthers. [Haaretz]

R.I.P. Peter Falk. Here he is in The In-Laws (the original, you doofuses).

If you want to learn more about the idiosyncratic, massively pro-Isael Berkley, look no further than Steve Friess’s profile of her from last October in Tablet Magazine. Among (many) other things, she discussed the prospect of running for Ensign’s seat: “I wouldn’t have a primary,” she said at the time (to a Chabad rabbi, as it happens). “I would capture the Democratic primary without a problem. I have to decide if I’m willing to forgo a sure thing to go for the gold. If I lose, then I’m out. I’d be risking a lot.” Looks like she decided to take the risk.

Pro-Israel Rep. Shelley Berkley in Bid for Senate [JTA]
Related: Showgirl [Tablet Magazine]

As they sat side by side in the lounge of a Claim Jumper restaurant greeting constituents last Wednesday, the incumbent mayor, a stocky, bespectacled, and constantly smiling figure, was asked to clarify just how much gin he consumes every day. A few months earlier, he had said he drinks “a bottle a day.” At the time, the journalist who inquired hadn’t thought to ask whether that was a standard bar bottle or, perhaps, one of those little airplane bottles, and so the question is being revisited. “A bottle a day, just like I said,” Mayor Goodman replied with a ruddy Cheshire grin.

The candidate quickly objected.

“In your dreams,” cackled Carolyn Goodman, with a fluffy bowl of blond hair and a persistent New York drawl, the 72-year-old front runner in the race to replace her 71-year-old husband now that his maximum three terms are almost up. “He never has a drink before he gets home, which is usually 5:30 or 6. And if he has two drinks, that’s a big deal.”

In any other city, only the very rare politician would wish to exaggerate his alcohol consumption. But it’s hard to imagine anyplace other than Las Vegas quite so hospitable to a politician who proudly refers to himself as a degenerate gambler, a publicity hound whose appearances usually feature scantily clad showgirls in sky-high feather headdresses. He has made outlandish remark after outlandish remark—graffiti artists ought to be dethumbed, homeless people should be bused out of town, a New York Times columnist should be beaten with a baseball bat—and earned re-election twice with more than 80 percent of the vote. His wife insists that almost all of his controversial utterances had the ulterior motive of bringing attention to serious problems, although sometimes he’s gone too far even for her. In 2005, he was asked by a student in a fourth-grade class what he’d take with him if he were stranded on a desert island. His answer: a bottle of gin.

“I thought he’d say he’d take me or the Bible, for God’s sake,” Carolyn Goodman said. “There was no purpose in that. But he’s sort of like a dog that chases his tail. He sort of gets the feeling, ‘Ooh, that was cute, that got a good reaction, let me try that one.’ He’s not drunk or anything.”

In fact, the former defense attorney for several infamous mobsters so perfectly personifies the city he has helmed since 1999 that his wife is now atop the polls for Tuesday’s primary in large part because voters are looking for any way they can to prolong the Goodman fix. “Her polling numbers are directly related to the fact that Goodman is the most popular politician in Las Vegas history,” said John L. Smith, a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist who wrote the Oscar Goodman biography Of Rats And Men. “Carolyn is being pulled along with the current.”

Even the mayor’s detractors find it hard to deny that beneath the antics is a record of achievement for the city’s decayed downtown core, including a $475 million performing arts center due to open next year, a new $150 million city hall rising, a recently opened Cleveland Clinic outpost focusing on brain disease designed by Frank Gehry, and a $40 million Mob Museum expected to open by year’s end. Hip new bars, restaurants, and art galleries are populating a formerly blighted neighborhood, the online shoe retailer Zappos expects to relocate its headquarters to Vegas by 2012, bringing more than 1,000 jobs downtown, and Goodman’s pet cause of building an arena capable of housing the city’s first major professional sports team now appears likely to happen.

All of which helps to explain both why he’s ducked political blame for presiding over the nation’s worst unemployment and home foreclosure rates and why he’s so hell bent on his wife replacing him. “She believes in the next several years she’ll be able to get done what I started,” said Goodman at the Claim Jumper event, one of his monthly Martinis With the Mayor gatherings. “God bless her for it.”

***

And to think he was almost a rabbi.

Goodman grew up in a Conservative Jewish household in a rough west Philadelphia neighborhood, where his nose was repeatedly broken by anti-Semitic street toughs as he walked to school in the 1950s. Rather than turn him into an introvert, the abuse somehow emboldened him to rely on his irrepressible personality as a line of defense from attack. At Haverford College in the early 1960s, he fell hard and fast for the former Carolyn Goldmark—a Swarthmore student from the Upper East Side of Manhattan—and quickly asked her father, a wealthy Manhattan doctor, for her hand. Carl Goldmark wasn’t impressed by his future son-in-law, viewing the young man as loud, uncultured, and lower-class, but Carolyn was smitten.

“I knew that Oscar was not only the bravado and phoniness and flamboyant craziness,” she said. “He was a solid human being, and I knew that because of his parents and strong belief in the Jewish faith.”

Carolyn Goodman came from an assimilated family that only attended shul for weddings and funerals, but she did embrace Judaism on her own as a teen after feeling ostracized at a summer camp for being one of the only Jewish kids there. She later learned her paternal great-uncle had been a cantor at Temple Emanu-El in New York. “At one point in time, I was even thinking to myself that I might become a rabbi, but when I met my wife, she said that was the end of that thought,” Oscar Goodman said. “My wife did not want to be married to a rabbi. She made that very clear.”

Goodman instead followed in his father’s footsteps and got a law degree. He was working for future Sen. Arlen Specter in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office in early 1964 when he was assigned to assist some Las Vegas cops who were in town investigating a murder. They enticed him with tall tales of a nascent desert gambling town ripe with big opportunities for big personalities. If he left the D.A.’s office, he could join a somnolent white-shoe firm in Philadelphia or strike out on his own in a place of less than 100,000 people that was desperate for young energy and talent.

“Oscar woke me up and said, ‘How would you like to go to the land of milk and honey?’ and I thought he’d lost his mind he wanted me to go to Israel,” his wife recalled. “That seemed far-fetched.”

They took a B’nai Brith junket plane to Vegas to scope it out in May 1964 and arrived for good on a 120-degree day three months later. Oscar toiled as a prosecutor briefly, then formed a law firm with, among others, future Sen. Richard Bryan. Goodman was the group’s criminal defense attorney, and by the end of the decade his clients were some of the era’s most notorious figures of organized crime. Among his most notorious were Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, whose exploits were the basis for the Nick Pileggi book Casino that became the film with Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone. (Goodman had a cameo in the movie.)

From there, the legend grew.

***

On what passes for a chilly winter’s day in these desert climes, heads twirled and smiles spread across faces as the boisterous mayor barreled down the least-glamorous part of Las Vegas Boulevard. Early on in his mayoralty, he dubbed himself the “Happiest Mayor in America,” and on days like that one it’s believable. He paraded down the sidewalk pointing at the empty high-rise he hopes will buzz once the Zappos employees relocate and asked the shopkeeper of a new hookah lounge how his liquor license application was coming along. He grumbled about the developer who had improbably built a massive, vacant shopping complex without air-conditioning and suggested, in a silly moment, he’d like to build and operate a Ferris Wheel on an empty parcel after he leaves office. Even his introduction by Rabbi Shea Harlig of Chabad of Southern Nevada is refracted through the persona that Goodman has constructed for himself.

“I can tell you one thing,” the rabbi quips to the crowd. “This is the only public event he goes to without his showgirls.”

The Jewish community here embraces Goodman and all his antics at least as much as anyone else. He belongs to Temple Beth Shalom, the Conservative synagogue that was the town’s only shul when the Goodmans arrived, but on the morning of his first election in 1999 he worshipped with Harlig.

“The mayor is 100 percent Jewish. He’s very proud of it,” the rabbi said. “As a matter of fact, the day of his election, he started his day coming to Shabbat services, putting on his tallis. People magazine had a picture of him with his tallis on. He’s very proud of his Judaism. Not always the most observant, but, you know.”

It might also be noted that Goodman’s daughter’s bat mitzvah in the 1980s was monitored by the FBI because several attendees were listed in the Nevada Black Book, meaning they’d been banned from being involved in the casino business because of organized-crime ties.

When Goodman ran for mayor for the first time, he won easily. The showgirls made one of their first of countless appearances by his side at a National Conference of Mayors meeting, and the guy who proudly has a runner lay sports bets for him every night became a media sensation. Bombay Sapphire, the gin maker, gave him a sponsorship deal, his fee going to charities including the prestigious nonprofit college prep school his wife founded, The Meadows.

In addition to getting him elected, Goodman’s flamboyant personality also disguises the fact that the mayor of Las Vegas actually has very little control over the part of the destination that most tourists visit, the Strip. The famous casinos that most people associate with Vegas are outside the city’s boundaries and governed by the Clark County Commission, but out-of-town journalists nonetheless seek comment from the mayor of Las Vegas—and he almost always obliges.

“Everybody thinks I’m the mayor of everything, and I don’t do anything to dissuade them, OK?” he said. “Well, unless somebody’s complaining about the sexually explicit pamphlets being passed out on the Strip. Then I say I have no jurisdiction over that.”

Prior to the late 1990s, Goodman refused to even acknowledge there was such a thing as the Mafia and routinely denounced both law enforcement and prosecutor witnesses as corrupt and dishonest. Yet Goodman is now working arm-in-arm with former law enforcement nemeses in one of his most prized accomplishments, the expected opening by year’s end of the $40 million Mob Museum. The attraction, which will occupy an old federal post office that once hosted famous U.S. Senate hearings in 1950 into organized crime overseen by Sen. Estes Kefauver, was initially dismissed in a hail of criticism when Goodman first suggested it. But then the mayor forged a friendship with FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Ellen Knowlton after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and when she retired he persuaded her to help him bring credibility to the idea of a mob museum.

“I do think of Oscar Goodman as an honorable man, and I believe in his intentions in making this a balanced, accurate portrait of organized crime in this country,” said Knowlton, chair of the project’s board, who has used her FBI leverage to obtain important Mob-related artifacts. “I was not interested in any project that would glorify any criminal activity.”

Goodman toyed with running for higher office but declined. Smith believes he could have been elected governor, but other pundits think his Vegas-fitting antics would repel voters in other, more conservative parts of the state. He said he’s now working with Hollywood producers on a potential TV series about a fictional, corrupt 1980s-era Vegas mayor, and he’s in talks with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority about a role as a traveling tourism booster. A law firm has offered him $1 million to be their rainmaker, which he’s considering: “I may just take the million, put it in my pocket and hang out a couple hours a day. Sure.”

For now, he’s trying to get through the election season without any big gaffes that could reflect badly on his wife. At the Chabad event, he was greeted by 10-year-old twin girls who wanted their photo taken with him. On the dais, he jested that he thought he was seeing double and “I said to myself, ‘Have I started drinking already?’ ”

Later, he admitted a randier quip involving those kids and their future showgirl potential sprang to mind, but he restrained himself.

“No, I wasn’t about to do that,” he said. “It wasn’t the right crowd.”

Steve Friess is a Las Vegas-based writer who blogs at VegasHappensHere.com and contributes regularly to the Daily Beast and AOL News.

But I would consider betting on Foreman. His loss to Cotto was decisive, but Cotto is among the very best, and a bum knee that gave out on Foreman in the seventh round did not help matters. How the knee holds up is the main question leading into this fight, according to Kevin Iole, one of the most widely read boxing journalists. Iole’s profile of Foreman is must-read (if only because it will convince you that Foreman is newsworthy independent of his Jewishness). Here’s a taste:

He’s not just normal in relation to the narcissism that pervades professional athletics. He’s as down-to-earth and as genuine as any man anywhere, virtually absent of any ego. …

No big purchases, but he does frequently speaks to Jewish groups in New York and sheepishly admits he’s begun to rate the food at his various stops. At some appearance stops, the food is tastier and more abundant than it is at others.

“Here in America, at the Shabbos dinner, you’ll say, ‘What’s on the table today? What’s there to eat?’ ” Foreman said. “In Russia, for example, you’re happy if you have some bread on the table and some vodka and maybe a little bit of meat. People are happy with that.”

So, don’t forget: Saturday, Showtime pay-per-view (your local sports bar will probably have it on—admittedly, because of the Cotto fight). Go Yuri!

Rooting for Yuri Foreman is Cheering on Greatness [Yahoo!]
Related: In Training [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Cotto Beats Foreman in Nine

“I’m wonderful! I’m great!” chirps Rep. Shelley Berkley as she scoops ground coffee into a four-cup Black & Decker in her suburban Vegas home on the first morning of Rosh Hashanah. We’re headed out to stop at four different synagogues. “I’ve got to be the luckiest person in the world!” she says.

In this autumn of mass discontent with incumbents in general and Democrats in particular, the six-term congresswoman with nominal 2010 opposition is counting her blessings. At 59, she’s arrived at the place she’s always wanted to be, recognized as one of the most strident, hawkish pro-Israel voices in Washington while not sacrificing a bit of her brassy, Vegas-style pizzazz or otherwise strident left-leaning views. Even the evangelical Christian activist Gary Bauer says of Berkley: “Oh, I like her a lot. I think she’s gutsy, she’s articulate, she has a lot of flair.”

Indeed, her only real political quandary right now is whether to continue to, as she likes to say, bloom where she’s planted in the House of Representatives, or seek grander glory. She is Nevada’s only safe federal Democrat this year—a notable contrast, in particular, to her mentor, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—and her state’s other Senate seat is likely to be contested in 2012 thanks to a sex scandal hounding its Republican occupant, John Ensign. She openly wonders whether she might do even more for her two primary causes, Nevada and Israel, from Congress’ upper chamber.

“I wouldn’t have a primary,” she tells a Chabad rabbi during our day together. “I would capture the Democratic primary without a problem. I have to decide if I’m willing to forgo a sure thing to go for the gold. If I lose, then I’m out. I’d be risking a lot.”

Few politicians do this sort of deliberating and strategizing so publicly, but Berkley is also the sort to call out her own party’s president when she sees him making what she views as grave missteps on Israel. Fewer still would, as Berkley did on Rosh Hashanah, empathize with an irate Jewish constituent and say that President Barack Obama has “blown it” with the Jews.

Then again, Berkley is also willing to stand at the end of her driveway in triple-digit heat waving down a tardy, lost reporter arriving for an interview and then sit him on a breakfast-bar stool to make him coffee. She serves that brew in a blue plastic mug that reads “My favorite congresswoman Shelley Berkley,” and then when I wonder what my journalist colleagues would think of me drinking from it, jokes with a dismissive wave and a cackle, “Oh, puleeze, they all have their own!”

Then, clad in a bold fuchsia suit jacket, a monochrome-swirled skirt, and black-and-white polka-dot shoes she brags she bought at DSW, she drives us away in the Ford Fusion hybrid she recently purchased to replace her gas-guzzling Cadillac. (She drives a SmartCar in D.C.)

We’re en route to Temple Beth Shalom for her aliyah, for which she’ll take out the tiny piece of gum she’s always chewing and leave it in a scrap of tissue on her seat. That seat is at the front row of the sanctuary’s second section, where worshippers must walk by her and she can schmooze.

This is her shul, the one she has belonged to since she was a 12-year-old Rochelle Levine and her parents moved her and her sister here from the Catskills to outrun her father’s gambling debts. The Levines had planned to relocate to California, but her parents were entranced by the glitter of the Strip after a detour to see the Hoover Dam, so they stayed. Las Vegas had about 130,000 residents then, and it had one synagogue.

“The first thing my father did when we got here was go down to the union hall and get a job, and the first thing my mother did was join the temple,” she recalls. It was the summer of 1963, and her dad became a waiter at the Sands Hotel-Casino.

Politics entered Berkley’s bloodstream quite early, motivated as much as anything by the tales her grandmothers relayed of the shtetls her family came from and the Nazi genocide that occurred there. “I wanted to be in a position that, God forbid anything were to happen to my people like what happened in the Holocaust, I would be in a position to help stop it,” she tells me. “When I decided to do this, I decided I was going to be a Jew who happened to be an elected official. I wear my Jewishness on my sleeve. I don’t apologize for it to anybody.”

She first became president of Las Vegas B’nai B’rith Girls, and later she was UNLV student body president. She worked on successful state assembly campaigns in 1968 for two political novices who would become U.S. senators, Reid and Richard Bryan. Berkley paid for her law degree by serving cocktails in Strip casinos, then she served a term in the state assembly and two on the board of regents before her 1998 election to Congress.

That was a heady transition. She attended the 1999 state dinner for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and a breakfast for Jewish members of Congress the following morning at which Barak predicted that a peace deal would come within 18 months.

“I walked out of that breakfast thinking, ‘I’ve only been here five months. I’ve already brought peace to the Middle East,’ ” Berkley says as we sit in the Beth Shalom lobby after her aliyah. “I thought, ‘What is so difficult?’ The reality is not so easy. I remember being interviewed and telling people what happened in the breakfast, but then the peace track with Syria fell apart because Assad demanded Israel give back the Golan Heights before they would sit down. That wasn’t going to happen. Arafat continued and continued and continued until he had wrung out every concession he could make. At Camp David, Israel offered 97 percent of the West Bank, control of Gaza, control of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, and Arafat walked away, started the second Intifada.”

Those early years set the tone for Berkley’s tenure in Washington. To her, it proved that the Palestinians don’t want peace, they want the destruction of Israel, and so it is incumbent upon the United States to stand firmly beside Israeli leaders almost no matter what.

That explains her rocky relationship with the president. Berkley was a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter who endorsed Obama only after Clinton conceded the nomination and only after Obama called and pledged his support for Israel as well as his opposition to storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, one of the top local issues for Nevada.

Then she was apoplectic when the administration “drew a line that didn’t need to be drawn” by condemning West Bank settlements in May 2009. Berkley believes Obama is trying to—and can—recover, and that his performance during the flotilla crisis was “excellent,” but that there is a genuine mistrust in the activist Jewish community toward the Democratic president.

“Nothing is irretrievable,” she says, shortly after making the remark to the constituent that Obama had “blown it” with the Jews. “But right now he’s in a very bad place with the organized Jewish community.”

She’s pleased to see Rahm Emanuel depart as Obama’s chief of staff. Berkley, who chairs a semi-annual gathering of Jewish legislators from the European Union and the United States, recalls often being asked why Emanuel wasn’t doing more for the Israeli agenda. Berkley and Emanuel, former colleagues in Congress, “weren’t the closest of friends then and nothing much has changed,” she says. Meanwhile, while she faults President George W. Bush for many things during his presidency, she believes the Republican president was more personally committed to Israel than Obama.

It’s this sort of blunt talk that impresses folks like Bauer, the former president of the Family Research Council now on the executive board of Christians United for Israel. The two part ways on virtually every other issue, but on this they’ve formed an unlikely friendship.

“I think she’s a leader in this regard,” says Bauer, who recalls Berkley receiving the most rousing applause of any speaker at his group’s annual convention in July from a crowd he described as “overwhelming conservative, Christian, and pro-life.” “There are other people on Capitol Hill that will privately say to their constituents, ‘Of course I’m with Israel and I’m talking to the White House behind the scenes’ to get the policy better. But she’s been willing to say it publicly. This is the way you can tell when a political figure really feels something in their heart.”

Because of her prominence on Israel, Berkley’s own constituents occasionally seem to forget how liberal she is. She supports abortion rights, same-sex marriage, the Obama stimulus efforts, and the health reform bill. On Rosh Hashanah, as she dropped in on one Jewish group after the next, several people cornered her to explain her refusal to condemn the planned Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero in New York. The Chabad rabbi was particularly upset.

“You know what also made me crazy,” Berkley retorts in a thick New York accent, still intact despite a near half-century in Nevada. “Two things. First of all, I didn’t like the fact that opponents keep calling that area ‘hallowed grounds.’ This is downtown New York. There’s a porno place, a bar, and tattoo parlor. Not exactly hallowed ground. And, number two, I’m very cognizant of the fact that we are such a small minority and I thought if a Jewish congresswoman starts condemning other religions and building where they have the right quite frankly to build, that’s going to turn around on us.”

Berkley happens to be on fairly good terms with the Muslim community in Las Vegas. A Muslim friend, Dr. Ikram Khan, played shadkhen in arranging her first date with her second husband, Dr. Larry Lehrner, and Berkley says Lehrner’s practice is half Muslim. The day after our Rosh Hashanah tour, she visited a mosque to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Aslam Abdullah, the executive director of the Islamic Society of Nevada, says he finds Berkley to be accessible, friendly, and respectful.

Accessible, indeed. This is a congresswoman who admitted to me on my “The Strip” podcast in 2006 that she missed a vote on Gulf Coast relief after Hurricane Katrina because she was recovering from plastic surgery. (Republicans reacted with a press release, which still makes her giggle.) She happily indulged the hounding cameras of TMZ.com in July 2009 on why she supported a posthumous Congressional honor for Michael Jackson because of his ties to Las Vegas. And as she walks me around her home pointing out her favorite tchochkes, we wind up in her bathroom taking stock of the framed pictures from exotic worldwide destinations she and her husband have visited.

“I love being the congresswoman from Las Vegas and a lot of the bright clothes and the bling and all,” she says. “I have an image I want to portray. I reflect the glitz and the glitter of the community I represent. And every now and then I take a step back and I just can’t believe that I am fortunate enough to be doing what I’m doing. I’m the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants who couldn’t speak English, and I’m a member of the House of Representatives. I mean, how amazing is that?”

Steve Friess is a Las Vegas-based writer who blogs at VegasHappensHere.com and contributes regularly to the Daily Beast and AOL News.

Except that, as anyone with young sons knows, silence is a good clue something’s up. And sure enough, at 3 a.m., when Susan’s friends went home and she checked on her four sons, then aged 4 to 12, she found them playing their own card games and keeping track of their accumulating debts to one another on pieces of paper that she still has.

“Their father would say, ‘Look what you’re doing to these kids, you’re playing cards every night and they’re just gamblers,’ ” she recalled. “And I said, well, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Two decades later, those apples have grown into a quartet of Jewish card sharks who have taken Las Vegas by storm. Last weekend, early on Sunday morning, the most successful of them, 29-year-old Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi, earned one of nine berths in the World Series of Poker’s Main Event in November. In poker, a “grinder” is someone who slowly wears down opponents by patiently waiting for good hands and attempting to outlast his competitors not with flair but with persistence. It’s an apt description of Mizrachi’s style of play on the weekend, letting other players knock against one another until he was among the final nine players who will compete for a $9.8 million jackpot and the most prestigious title in all of gambling.

What’s even more stunning is that in the past two weeks, as the initial field of 7,319 players in the $10,000 Buy-In No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em event was culled to the final nine, the other three Mizrachi brothers also survived long enough to “cash,” or win money. Robert, 31, notched 116th place and earned about $57,000; Donny, 23, was 345th and earned $36,000, and Michael’s twin, Eric, ended at 718th place, for a $19,000 payday.

“All four of us cashed, which is a record that will probably never be broken,” Michael gloated an hour before play on Friday, sitting back on a red leather couch in a private lounge reserved for players sponsored by a poker website, FullTilt, at the Rio All-Suites Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas. “Hopefully I can win this event and make history.”

The Mizrachis are already the year’s big winners. While families of poker players aren’t new—legend Doyle Brunson’s son is a well-respected pro—the Mizrachis’ dominance has turned their name into a brand and attracted a long list of sponsors. The World Series is actually comprised of 57 events that begin in May. Robert cashed in six of them, for a cumulative haul of $500,000, while Michael won $1.6 million in another tournament in addition to qualifying for the main event’s final table.

“He’s LeBron, Rob’s Dwyane Wade, I’m Chris Bosh, and Donny’s Chalmers or something,” Eric said over dinner Sunday night, recycling a line Michael uttered to ESPN.com a week earlier, comparing the family to the all-star lineup for the Miami Heat. “We’re a team. It’s Team Mizrachi.”

***

A fairly straight line can be drawn from the foursome’s surreptitious all-night card games of their youth to their current lifestyles as globe-trotting card mavens, but the Mizrachi boys didn’t divine a lust for gambling on their own. For all of their father’s protestations, both parents, Ezra and Susan, were inveterate, lifelong bettors. Ezra Mizrachi and his friends and cousins, in fact, would sneak into his family’s kosher pizzeria in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and play poker on Shabbat when the restaurant was closed, Susan said. Susan’s family, too, spent long hours playing cards as she grew up.

The couple—she was a model, he was a cabbie—married in their mid-20s and followed Susan’s parents when they moved to Miami, where all four of their sons were born. Ezra and Susan first owned a donut shop but then soon launched a clothing line that, Susan said, “did really, really well. We made lots and lots of clothing.”

The line is called Get Lucky. And, yes, they named it after their passion for gambling.

“While the kids were growing up, Ezra would hit a lot of jackpots” on the slot machines at Seminole Casino in Hollywood, Florida, Susan said in a phone interview. “We’d go there every night, spend all night there. Every single night. And we’d plug in thousands, literally thousands. He used to always hit jackpots, $40,000, $30,000, $28,000. And Ezra would say, ‘Don’t tell the kids we won all this money because then they’re going to want to be gamblers.’ But I would go home and say, ‘Guys, I’ll buy you anything you want, we won this big jackpot.’ ”

Susan found it entertaining that the boys were playing their own games and gave them money they claimed they needed for school supplies but really needed to pay one another for gambling debts. When she found out the truth, she was more amused than irate. In the late 1990s, she bought the boys computers they said they needed for school work and soon discovered her teenage sons were betting—and winning—big bucks on poker websites. They got themselves cell phones, a rarity at the time for teens, and she’d overhear them asking one another to transfer $5,000 or $10,000. At one point, one of the boys called the bank on speakerphone and she heard the automated voice indicate he had a balance of $28,000.

“Did it worry me?” Susan says. “They were doing good in school—I wouldn’t say they were A students, but that was because they were interested in making money. Their father would always brag, ‘Hey, look, I make more money than doctors.’ So, the kids learned to value the mighty dollar. I can’t say they worried me, though, because I made sure they got their reports out, I made sure they went to school on time, I picked them up every day, I took them to the library, I did my part.”

The boys showed unusually sharp entrepreneurial instincts, too. Susan recalled that when she’d take 4-year-old Robert along to a flea market to sell Get Lucky clothes, the tot would ask her to buy pencils and other small items at the wholesale store. Then he’d resell them at the flea market for a profit. “He made $24 one time and he was so excited, he put it in his little bank.”

Ezra Mizrachi, now divorced from his wife, couldn’t be reached for this article, but Robert remembered their father being less tolerant and indulgent. When he was a teen, Robert said, his father sent the boys to a computer school, but they dropped out. Ezra was angry over the wasted money, but the boys went on to assuage him by paying the outstanding balance on the classes with their online poker earnings.

Susan was the one who suggested that 18-year-old Robert, attending classes at Broward Community College and working as a waiter at Bennigan’s, get a job as a card dealer at the Dania Jai Alai to make some extra money. “I said, ‘Hey Robert, what are you doing, why don’t you learn how to deal and then you make in one day what you make in a week at the restaurant and then you’ll have the whole week to study,’ ” said Susan, who also became a dealer and now plays extensively online under the handle “Mama Grinder.” “Next thing you know, he was making $500 to $600 a night playing poker, and the school books went into the trunk and that was the end of that.”

***

To understand the extent to which Mizrachi Mania gripped Las Vegas last weekend, it is necessary to explain that the World Series of Poker’s Main Event draws thousands of people who come just to watch and be near their heroes. Over 12 days, a field of 7,319 entrants—including virtually every famous poker pro and thousands of unknown wannabes from more than 90 countries—slug it out in pursuit of the game’s ultimate glory. By the time play began on Friday, with the aim of reducing the surviving 78 down to 27, the only player that fans had ever heard of was The Grinder, which is even what Michael Mizrachi’s three kids call him when he doesn’t respond to “Abba.”

Part of Mizrachi’s appeal resides in an affable grin and Jersey Shore speaking cadence that exudes a regular-guy sensibility. But it’s the family element that makes him fascinating; his three brothers and his wife, Lily, sat through hour after agonizing hour of play in the latter stages of the tournament with a boom mike from ESPN dangling over them. Each seems to have a unique role: Robert, with comparable poker skills, serves as coach; Eric is responsible for keeping fans updated with frequent Twitter posts and photos; Donny, a professional magician, provides comic relief by doing magic tricks; and Lily seems to both support her husband and make sure he doesn’t get a swelled head.

Over the two days of play, Michael’s fortunes waxed and waned and waxed again. He started Friday with the second-most chips, but some unlucky hands left him for most of Saturday’s play near the bottom of the pack and in constant danger of elimination. Over the two days, he played for more than 28 hours; his siblings sat with him through virtually every hand. His mother, back in Florida taking care of her 94-year-old mother and her sons’ pets, followed along via the Internet and through text messages exchanged with her daughter-in-law.

While other players had family and friends to cheer for them, few had legions of strangers screaming their nickname or leading chants like, “We will, we will, ’rach you!” When Mizrachi had a good hand, several spectators would make a circular motion with their clenched fists as though they were grinding something. “They’re just what poker needs,” said Theo McDanielson, 45, of Brisbane, Australia, who comes to Vegas every year to watch. “They’re a nice group of kids, very talented and successful. They seem like good family men.”

The Mizrachis all keep kosher in the home, speak fluent Hebrew, and observe Jewish holidays when they don’t conflict with important poker tournaments. Michael’s Cuban-born wife converted before they wed. But Michael also admits that their decision to become full-time poker players hasn’t sat that well with some more Orthodox elements in their family.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a bad Jew, but I’m not what some of my cousins want me to be,” Mizrachi said. “The World Series goes through Fridays and Saturdays. There’s no way could I be Orthodox. I would do it, but I can’t. I enjoy poker too much, and I want to play every day. Maybe later when I grow out of this.”

Another regret Mizrachi has is how much time he spends away from his family. His wife, Lily, is also a poker player—they met in a card room in Florida—and says she’s tolerant of her husband’s lengthy absences. He’s sometimes gone four weeks at a time, playing tournaments around the world, but with the oldest of their three kids turning 6 next month, Michael and Lily recently made a deal that he’ll only be gone for 10-day stretches. “The kids are getting older, and they’re getting to notice that he’s gone,” she said. “It’s very hard. They’re involved in Little League and whatever, and they want you to be there all the time.” Her son recently told her he doesn’t like poker; she thinks it’s because he blames the game for his father’s absences.

Still, there are perks. Lily, for instance, bought a new Mercedes the week before her husband left for Las Vegas for the World Series in May. She said she told the salesman she’d be back the following week to pay for it in cash because she had a sense her husband would win big. A few days later, Michael bested a field of 116 entrants who paid $50,000 a piece to win $1.6 million in the World Series’ second event. Robert, meantime, came in fifth and won $341,000, the first time any siblings made it to the final table of the same event.

All that success has won over the Mizrachis’ father, who wasn’t enthusiastic about this career path earlier on. Now, he keeps a scrapbook of articles about their triumphs, Susan says. “My ex-husband’s friends would say, ‘Look, my son just graduated from Yale, this one’s a doctor, this one’s an attorney,’ whatever,” he said. “After my kids started winning lots of money, Ezra would open a book and say back to his friends, ‘Look, Robert won this tournament, Michael won this one.’ I say, ‘Now you’re bragging!’ ”

If the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, though, then Robert has one important thing in common with Ezra: He’s not keen on his own son becoming a professional gambler.

“Definitely not,” Robert said as he rushed back to the ballroom where Michael was playing after a dinner break on Saturday. “I see all the stress and everything I’m going through in life. I would definitely like to see my son be a doctor or lawyer or something really successful in business. But, you know, this is the family business, isn’t it?”

Steve Friess is a Las Vegas-based writer who blogs at VegasHappensHere.com and contributes regularly to The New York Times. You can hear selections from Friess’ interview with Susan Laufer in his podcast, The Strip.

Paper Linking Valley’s Jews to Fold, Leaving Void for Some [Las Vegas Sun]

We circled this absurd confluence of food kingdoms, piling our plates with foods that had no earthly business rubbing flanks. (Kung Pao chicken, meet chicken fried steak.) By we, I mean myself and half a dozen mangy writers, all of us somewhat confusedly onhand to take part in the Las Vegas Literary Festival.

As so often happens when famished writers find themselves in a buffet scenario, things turned sloppy very quickly. One of our party decided to chugalug his shepherd’s pie. Another (it might have been me) constructed an “Italian style sub,” using pizza slices as bread. In clear violation of many religious laws—as well as common decency—several of us engaged in wanton oral embraces of roasted pork loin.

François Camoin

François Camoin watched these shenanigans with a look of benign forbearance. He was older than the rest of us by a good 20 years, but he seemed to understand that regression is next to Godliness in the realm of art.

When the gorging was done, we piled into a rented Buick and drove down the Strip, past the glittering chintz of pirates and pyramids and palaces, holding our bellies and bracing for the gastrointestinal recoil to come. We wound up playing poker for petty stakes in a room at the Four Queens, the downtown hotel where they’d put us up—one of a passel of hotel/casinos clustered around Fremont Street that had been considered the height of sophistication…in 1971. The bedspreads looked capable of absorbing several pints of blood. The carpets smelled of smoke and failure.

The lot of us drank and puffed pot and indulged in the expectedly tiresome verbal one-upmanship. Camoin seemed happy enough to listen to our prattle. His hair was wispy, his beard white, his eyes blue and tired.

I didn’t think much about him that first night, because my girlfriend Erin was on-hand. We lived 3,000 miles apart back then, and the trip to Vegas was mostly an excuse for a conjugal visit. It never occurred to me that I was in the presence of literary giant. That’s the sort of idiot I am.

I hope you will not beat yourself up too elaborately for not having heard of the Las Vegas Literary Festival. It is not quite yet a marquee event. The problem isn’t with the talent or the funding (both abundant), but the audience (essentially nonexistent). It turns out that Vegas has a small community of readers once you exclude the Daily Racing Form.

There was also the problem of locale. The festival events took place in and around the main library, an area referred to in local guidebooks as “The Cultural Corridor.” I will withhold comment as to the appropriateness of this moniker, other than to place into the record the following exchange, which took place just before a panel on humor writing.

Writer 1: Did you see the guy on the steps outside? 

Writer 2: Which guy?

Writer 1: The one shooting drugs into his bloodstream with a needle.

Writer 2: You’re kidding, right?

Writer 3: Maybe he’s a fan of Burroughs.

Within 48 hours, my lady and I were clinically depressed. We lay in bed and listened to the clink of money down below, the hopeless sounds of debt accruing. It was all we could do to fling civic mottos back and forth.

Las Vegas: Luxury and Suicide in One City! 

Las Vegas: Greed Served Cold!

Las Vegas: Your First Seating at the Apocalypse!

Camoin read on the final day of the festival. I nearly blew it off. But the guy seemed so nice and I knew the crowd was going to be sparse. So I was one of a dozen folks there to hear him read a piece called “American Literature.” It was clear from the start that Camoin was no schmo. Then came this line:

We walked down Bleecker Street with the wind; yellow dogs and bums crouched in doorways, beaten by life. Marty’s talk was filled with subtle dislocations of language that made my head ring. Fat cars trembled at the intersections, breathing steam. We walked. 

I had not heard prose of this sort—fearless, exalted, precise—for quite some time. The story concerned a pair of aging Jewish machers who stumble from a poetry reading to a liquor store, which Marty, King of the Stockbrokers, decides to hold up, lecturing the terrified clerk about literary matters until the cops descend. The story was uproarious, wise and shocking, a tribute to the liberating joys of unreasonable risk. By the time Camoin was done, I was in full rapture.

Camoin smiled at the smattered applause. Then he pulled a box from beneath his chair and handed every person in the room a copy of his story collection Like Love, But Not Exactly. We tried to give him money for the book, but he shook his head. These were gifts. The book was out of print, he explained shyly.

I read the book as soon as I got back from Vegas. Then I read it again. His four leading men were Jews stumbling through late middle age, New Yorkers who despise and love each other in about equal measure. They were, as a group, stunned before their own capacities for trouble—schmendricks who fail ecstatically. Most remarkable were Camoin’s sentences, which bristled with the supple dynamism of Bellow, the jazzy patter of Elkin:

In the water below, shadowy fish move like dark ideas of fish. 

A month goes by; it’s spring, which in New York is a serious enterprise, a time of resurrection, very traditional, very compelling.

The party dragged. Meyer drank sparingly; he wished he could drink more, make himself disgusting and perhaps happy, but he knew it wasn’t in him to let go of reason and dance.

I was in love.

And as so often happens when I fall in love with a writer (or musician or visual artist) I started to feel that crazed groupie indignation that Camoin was not better known, a feeling that zoomed into the stratosphere when I discovered that all six of Camoin’s books (two novels, three original story collections, and an anthology of selected stories) are out of print. Huh?

The second meal I ate with Camoin was in Salt Lake City, where he has lived for two decades, directing the creative writing program at the University of Utah. I was in the midst of driving Erin from Southern California back to Boston. We were married now, Erin was six months pregnant, her car was crammed with all her earthly belongings.

I wanted to ask Camoin how he could write so well, to so little regard, but the dinner was another chaotic affair. My wife was surrounded by women who had given birth, who assailed her with various terrifying labor stories. Camoin was surrounded by admiring former students, who assailed him with their needy attentions.

I didn’t blame them. I could see at once that as a teacher Camoin was wise, generous, and patient to a fault the same way he’d been in Vegas. What struck me hardest was the incongruity between Camoin’s gentle manner and his fiction, which is so often audacious, even anarchic.

It made me wish I’d studied with the guy, or better, that we’d been born into the same family (with him as a far-flung uncle, or some glamorously bohemian cousin), though of course we were born into the same extended family, the troubled, dreamy family of Jews.

And this—along with my abject worship of his prose—led me to conclude that it would be best to skip a third meal with Camoin and proceed directly to an interview, in which I could ask him a series of questions that might reveal to me the secret pleasures of my own sorrow.

I reached him in the midst of his end-of-the-semester anxiety. “Then again,” he noted, “anxiety is where I live anyway.”

Right.

Given the overt Judaic feel of his fiction, I wondered whether Camoin regarded himself as a Jewish writer, or just a plain old writer. As it turns out, his religious status is complicated. He grew up in a middle-class Catholic family in France until he was nine, at which point he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her new Jewish husband. His stepfather’s family was Orthodox, though he didn’t practice. How’s that for cultural whiplash?

“I live in the world as a cultural, existential Jew,” he told me, “and I guess I write from there.” To be clear: Camoin underwent no formal religious study, and he doesn’t practice. It’s more a matter of affinity: “As I got older I found that many of the people who seemed to be on the same wavelength as I was were Jewish. And then also I taught the Bible for many years as part of a Western Civ course, and I found myself much more drawn to certain books of the Old Testament than to anything in the New. There’s nothing in the New Testament to compare to Job, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah…I feel at home with Jewish craziness, while WASP and Catholic craziness makes me angry and fearful.”

It’s worth noting that Camoin’s mother did convert to reform Judaism in the last couple of years of her life. “I think she saw it as a religion based on ethical behavior and thought rather than faith in the supernatural—that’s what appealed to her.”

This line of questioning led—inevitably, obnoxiously—to the Big What If? “As for God, I haven’t seen one I’d care to believe in, except maybe (and that’s where the Jewish thing comes in) the one whose name can’t be written, who is inconceivable. Does he exist? I’m keeping an open mind. But I’d take the other end of Pascal’s bet every time, if I had to choose.”

Not surprisingly, he claims Bellow and Elkin as his chief literary influences, though instigators is the more accurate term. “I never went to grad school in creative writing,” Camoin explained, “so they were my teachers, though they didn’t know it. Well, Elkin did, just before he died, I had the chance to tell him, which was nice. For me, at least.”

Camoin shares Elkin’s verbal exuberance, but also his fearless capacity to find the absurd comic moments within tragic circumstances. I think here of the story “Lost in the Desert of Love” which appears in Like Love, But Not Exactly, and in Baby Please Don’t Go, the fabulous anthology of Camoin’s short fiction.

The story focuses on the depressive Meyer, who botches his suicide attempt and winds up following a crazed anti-Semite into the desert. The reader braces for an assault. Instead, the man makes a pass at Meyer. Then both men fall asleep. Then this: “When he woke up, a full moon floated over the goatish hills, poised there by love’s ineluctable gravity, dimming the lesser stars and casting a pale light on the other man, who Meyer found out when he touched him, was, after all this, dead.”

It might be said that Camoin has made his own pilgrimage to the desert, having settled in Salt Lake City. I was curious how he came to settle in the world capital of Mormonism. “I came to Utah because they offered me the job,” Camoin noted simply. “But also because I like the landscape of the West, the desert, the dryness, the whole thing not smothered by vegetation, the bones of the earth that show through.”

He added: “I’m a stranger by nature and choice, so living among the Saints doesn’t make me feel any less at home than living in New York or Ohio or the upper reaches of the Zambezi River. Camoin among the savages.”

I rather like the image: one of our finest, and most overlooked, modern writers, living a quiet and determined life in the high, Technicolor desert, surrounded by blond zombies with fabulous teeth. It’s like something out of one of his breathtaking stories, which, come to think of it, you should find and read. At once.