12 | JULY 8 • 2021 

PURELY COMMENTARY

continued on page 14

essay

South Florida and the 
Jewish Imagination
U

ntil a 12-story 
building inexplicably 
collapsed in the 
middle of the night, placing 
the whereabouts and lives of 
159 residents 
in doubt, few 
gave Surfside, 
Fla., very much 
thought. The 
town was, 
after all, a 
South Florida 
misnomer. 
There’s no surfing. The 
white caps on the Atlantic 
Ocean never provide enough 
tubular lift. The people of 
Surfside skew older. Nearly 
half its 6,000 residents are 
Jewish, and of those, many 
are Orthodox.
You can call Surfside 
sleepy, but even that wouldn’t 
describe it. Nothing truly 
special had ever happened 
there. Now, with a tragedy so 
titanic — and still unfolding 
— its name will become 
synonymous with misery.
To the casual observer, 
Surfside was a breakaway 
township from its more 
widely known neighbor, 
Miami Beach, just to its 
south. 
Those over the border 
on Miami Beach, and in 
Bal Harbour, the village to 
Surfside’s immediate north, 
for many decades had good 
reason to regard themselves 
as South Florida’s very own 
Old City of Jerusalem — a 
mixed enclave with a major 

Jewish quarter, and a bit 
more decadence.
Surfside didn’t have the 
Art Deco Jazz Age sparkle 
or swinger elegance that the 
Eden Roc and Fontainebleau 
hotels offered back in the 
1950s into the ’70s. 
In Surfside, the Americana 
was the swankiest hotel. It 
once showcased a very young 
Jackson 5, long before any 
Billie Jean took notice of 
Michael. A rare excitement, 
but the town’s residents 
didn’t beg for more. Surfside 
enjoyed the stillness — on 
land and sea.

MIAMI BEACH ROOTS
I know about Surfside. I grew 
up on 74th Street on Miami 
Beach. The horrific spectacle 
that FEMA has now declared 
to be a national emergency 
site is on 87th Street. By the 
time the Champlain Towers 
were built in 1981, I had long 
decamped for college and then 
New York. 
I frequently return to 
Miami Beach, but mostly 
in my imagination. Many 
of my novels have featured 
scenes with Miami Beach as 
the backdrop. My last one, 
How Sweet It Is!, selected 
by the city of Miami Beach 
as its Centennial Book, is a 
nostalgic return to 1972 — a 
valentine, I call it — when 
Miami Beach was, oddly, the 
center of the world. 
During that summer, 
Miami Beach hosted 

both the Democratic and 
Republican nominating 
conventions. Unlike the 
infamous Democratic 
National Convention in 
Chicago in 1968, the Miami 
Beach police somehow 
avoided clubbing the heads 
of Vietnam War protesters. 
Jackie Gleason, who no 
longer had his TV variety 
show — once filmed live 
on Miami Beach — was 
palling around with his 
buddy, Frank Sinatra, 
who had recently retired 
— for the first time. You 
could find them drinking 
in hotels along Collins 
Avenue, recapturing the easy 
camaraderie of their younger 
days at Toots Shor’s saloon 
near the Theater District in 
Manhattan.
Meyer Lansky, the 
notorious Jewish gangster 
who two years later would 
be fictionalized in The 
Godfather Part II, had, in 
1972, just been extradited 
from Israel back to Miami 
Beach to stand trial for tax 
fraud. 
He would spend his days 
at Wolfie’s Restaurant on 
21st Street surrounded by 
an aging crew of Jewish wise 
guys still smarting over Fidel 
Castro’s takeover of their 
Havana casinos in 1959.

I.B. SINGER IN SURFSIDE
All of them appear in 
How Sweet It Is! (yes, 
Gleason’s signature signoff), 
reimagined, of course — 
along with one more special 
guest. The Yiddish novelist 
Isaac Bashevis Singer, not 
long thereafter a recipient 
of the Nobel Prize for 
Literature, was spending 
the winters in Surfside. 
While there, he unsparingly 
fictionalized the Jews of 
Poland before the Holocaust, 
and those who survived and 
lived in New York thereafter, 
capturing their comical lives 
of heartbreak, betrayal and 
loss.
Ensconced just over the 
Miami Beach city line, 
situated right in between two 
Jewish enclaves populated 
with those who had fled or 
escaped one hardship or 
another, Singer made a canny 
choice for a writer with a 
gravitational pull for the 
shortcomings and desperate 
moral choices of humankind.
One wonders what Singer 
might have written about the 
Champlain Towers today, a 
short distance from his own 
apartment.
All the avenues of Surfside 
were named for American 
and British authors. (Just 
west of the Champlain are 

Thane 
Rosenbaum
JTA

Miami Beach, Florida, April 1974. 

BERNARD GOTFRYD PHOTOGRAPH CCOLLECTION/LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS/JTA

