(Jewish Group) Jewish character actor Nehemia Persoff looks back at ups and downs of his first 102 y

Jewish character actor Nehemia Persoff looks back at ups and downs of his first 102 years



When actor, painter and writer Nehemia Persoff, at times dubbed “the last survivor of Hollywood’s golden age,” was a three-year old growing up in Jerusalem, he fell in love with his kindergarten teacher. Desperate to attract her attention, little Nehemia got on his trike and rode it in smaller and smaller circles until the trike and its rider fell over.

“I pretended that I was hurt,” Persoff writes in his just-published autobiography, “The Many Faces of Nehemia.” “So the teacher ran over and hugged me. I was in heaven.”

Nearly a century later, the now-102-year old reminisced, “I learned then that I could make people believe my exaggerations and make fiction accepted as truth. I guess I was born an actor.”

Now, with some 200 stage, film and television credits on his resume, including roles in screen classics “Some Like It Hot,” “Yentl,” “The Wrong Man” and “An American Tail,” Persoff sits in an easy chair propping up his legs at his home in the California coastal community of Cambria, recalling the high and low points of a very full life.

Listening to him, via Zoom, was a JTA reporter, himself 96 years old. Adding up the ages of questioner and responder yielded a total of almost two centuries, matching the longevity of some of their Biblical ancestors.

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