I know this doesn’t quite fit the theme of this blog, but I couldn’t resist.
A friend recently sent me a link to a cool blog about old New York. The posts themselves were fascinating enough, but then I saw something in the blog roll that really caught my imagination: a digitized collection of the old Brooklyn Daily Eagle. I clicked the link and saw the search feature and couldn’t resist typing in my own name. This is what came up:
Yup, I apparently descend from an assassin. And, to be honest, there’s something cool about it. Other than my grandfather who fought for the Russians in World War I (and got his ass shot up for it), it’s not like I come from a family of war heroes or cowboys or even Communist labor goons. We weren’t athletes or scholars or spies, although my Dad did once run for office as a way to improve business. He ran for the State Senate in New York as a member of the Liberal Party in 1950. Here’s his flyer, which indicates he was a member of the “Odd Fellows.” I would think that would have been a good enough reason to vote for him, but apparently I was in the minority. Â I think he got about fifty votes.
I don’t know anything about Kisseloff the assassin, except according to the story he wasn’t, I gather, a very competent assassin. That sort of fits in with my family’s history. What motivated him? Was it politics? Was it poverty? Was it my great-great grandmother’s lousy blintzes?
I’d like to think he was a hired hit man for the good guys, or that he was kind to his mother or the shtetl idiot. It doesn’t say Kisseloff’s full name. I’m thinking Levi Harvey Kisseloff or Yonatan Shpilkes Kisseloff. I imagine him riding through the Russian steppes with the theme from the Soviet western, “The Gonnifs , The Bad and the Ugly” playing in the background, an outlaw, but a man who still brought home a good report card.
When I showed the article to my friend Bill, he wrote back, saying, “I always knew you were trouble.” Maybe I was. Maybe I am. After all, Â murder is in my blood. Yup, I’m trouble. Jeff “Trouble” Kisseloff. Chuck Liddell better watch out. I’m thinking of joining the MMA.
Fascinating. I just listened to Eric Koningsburg’s Moth podcast on a very similar note (his uncle was a mob hit man — he got a New Yorker piece and then a book out of it. So there’s that.)
We did an episode on West Wing about Toby having a mafioso ancestor, that was based on Richard Schiff finding out he had one in real life. Most likely the hardscrabble way of life was not so much chosen as necessity back then, before Jews ran international banking and Hollywood.
PS how is this “off topic”? It’s historic and it’s definitely Kisseloff.
It didn’t quite fit until I decided to toss in the flyer. By then I was too tired to alter the first line. It was a long day of secretly running the international banking system.