5603. FINE ART WAREHOUSING

FINE ART WAREHOUSING

'We ask no questions we don't look in boxes, we have

no clue what people bring in here. Provenance? Don't

know. If we had to check the history of every piece for

proper ownership and the rest, everything would have to

cost a lot more to store. Basically, I don't care where you

got your what from. Not my business here at all.'

-

I grew up here, in Brooklyn, in what's called now the

Midwood area. When I was growing up, it was called

Flatbush. My father was an accountant; but we also was

an ordained rabbi. He did accounting work for Chabad.

There's a lot of funny stuff I remember : I went to Yeshiva

Flatbush, where I got most of it. Jewish jokes: a Jewish 

woman takes her mother to a Cecil B. DeMille type movie,

one of those spectaculars. Christians are put in with the

lions, getting torn up. She starts screaming, 'Those people

are being killed!' The girl says 'Grandma, grandma, it's 

not real, it's a movie. No one's getting hurt.'

-

Then, a few minutes later, a lion is shown on screen,

wandering around in the arena. The grandmother starts

screaming again, 'My God! look at that lion, so skinny!

It's not getting enough to eat!' I always thought that was

pretty funny; I screwed it up some in the re-telling, but in

its funny way it's perversely anti-Christian. My school

chum, Ron, he's still around. I'm told, by him, that every 

morning he and a Philadelphia rabbi named Shemtov, over

the telephone study something together, each day, from the

Torah. For twenty-five years now, he says. 
I want to see his phone bill.

-

I'm an agnostic Jew now myself. I don't believe in nothing,

but with a schmear. You want art? You want to hide art? You

got the stolen artifact, the ancient relic, the architectural

fragment, the purloined painting? I don't want to know what.

You box it, you crate it, you cover it, I don't care nothing.

I store it, no questions asked  -  you figure out the rest.
No lions going hungry here.'