bankruptcy fraud. In 2014, from the minimum-security Canaan prison camp in Waymart, Pa., Mr. Esmerian emailed a reminiscence of his collecting career to Scudder Smith, editor-publisher of Antiques and the Arts Weekly. Someone called my attention to the following passage, which is so well-written that it’s worth quoting in full:
In 1973, just one year after the Durands, I had another fortuitous first-time visit to a dealer in Salem, N.Y. Martin Zweig had a strong reputation as an excellent picker for several of the antique dealers in New York City and New England. I was greeted at the door by him and his wife, and we immediately began a walk through their home to view the inventory set up in various rooms. Martin appeared shy and self-conscious, ill at ease with perfunctory small talk, but he came alive and sparkled when pointing to objects and discussing their relevance as antiques. Upon completing the house tour, the Zweigs suggested we sit down in the living room – adding the caveat that none of the pieces in the parlor were for sale.
As I entered this dimly lit room, I was mesmerized by the sight of a great white rabbit carousel figure. Short-tailed, glass eyes and long-eared with an original paint surface showing slight wear and tear, the rabbit dominated the room and all the inventory I had seen – giving a reason for my visit as it appeared to bound over its surroundings of formal furniture and folk art.
Not for sale was the very quick retort to my question. As we talked some more, I exclaimed over certain pieces but always returned to the fabulous rabbit. Perhaps 15 minutes later, the husband asked his wife to call Jason from his room, explaining that Jason was their son whom I had not met on my tour. Martin admitted that he was never comfortable discussing not-for-sale objects for fear of risking a client’s hostility at the apparent conflict of interest between being a dealer and a collector as well. Thus he wanted his son included in our conversations. I nodded sympathetically, feeling for the man’s innate awkwardness.
Enter Jason – my expectation of the adult son evaporated on the sight of a boy, small of stature but serious of demeanor. We shake hands, exchanging names, as his father explains my interest in folk art and the rabbit. Jason immediately picks up when Martin has finished and proceeds to elaborate on the Zweigs’ love of pieces and that they are not meant to be teasers but simply the furnishings they want to live with. I am impressed by the kid’s delivery and merely repeat my request to have the rabbit, adding that I own a rooster and horse carousel figures that I feel are of similar workmanship quality as the rabbit.
Jason never takes his eyes off me, listening intently, then turns to his father and declares that the family should sell the figure to me, that the rabbit would have a good home. Martin asks if he is sure of his decision. Although shocked by the turnaround, I never get the sense that I am being set up, listening to a duet sung by good cop, bad cop. Jason never breaks stride and affirms he would sell it. Martin then instructs him to put a price on the figure since that is his decision.
Jason has yet to smile since entering the room. He continues to look at me and without glancing away out of embarrassment or hesitancy, proceeds to price the rabbit at a value three times the individual costs of my horse and rooster. As politely as I can, I ask Jason his age. “I’m 10,” he says. I stare back, slumping slightly in my chair as I feel the room spinning. Have I followed Alice down the hole in Wonderland? Maybe Dorothy’s tornado has tossed me into this scenario, starring a live American Gothic dealer and wife, a 10-year-old son precocious beyond the experience of most lifetimes, and the four of us absorbed by the great white rabbit.
Still smiling and noticing that even Martin was aghast at his son’s temerity, I asked Jason how he had determined the price so quickly, so definitely, all on his own. Without hesitation he elaborated, and I got up to shake a congratulatory hand and to thank the Zweig family.
And so the white rabbit came home, a superb painted carved figure from the Dentzel works in Philadelphia at the beginning of the Twentieth Century when carousels twirled their spin throughout the country. Every time I looked at him I remembered a very first visit with a dealer in Salem, a memory filled with a youngster’s fluency and audacity that matched the magic of a white rabbit. I paid two more visits to the Zweigs over the years, but never saw the filial prodigy. I have heard that a Jason Zweig is considered one of the more respected financial writers in this country. No surprise for one who remembers his 10-year-old presence and reasoning.
It is a strange feeling to find yourself written about without, at first, remembering what the writer describes about you. But, yes, that was me. My parents – literate, cultured, ambitious people – raised me to be peculiarly knowledgeable about the past at a very young age. I was, effectively, junior partner in their antiques business before I was a teenager, although I hadn’t thought about those days in many years until I read that reminiscence.
I remember Ralph Esmerian well, although I confess I don’t recall the specific conversation he describes. And a few of his details are incorrect – understandable, of course, with the passage of four decades. My father’s name was Irving; my family isn’t related to Martin Zweig, the mutual-fund manager who died in 2013. My parents weren’t itinerant pickers who scavenged antiques from yard sales and the like, but respected dealers who exhibited at prestigious antique shows and frequently sold to fine museums.
Nor was my dad quite as shy as Ralph described; he was contemplative, but not diffident. My dad had taught political science at Ohio State and seemed to have committed every significant moment of American history to memory – no trivial advantages for him once he became an antique dealer. He also had been the proprietor, editor and publisher of newspapers in small towns for more than a decade, so he could turn any great antique into a great story. Finally, I would have been 14, not 10, at the time of the event Ralph is recounting – although I probably looked as if I was 7.
But everything else Ralph says sounds right to me. He had extraordinary taste and elegant manners, even as he insisted that I call him “Ralph.”
My parents did trust me in the way he described. I accompanied them on most of their buying trips to auctions and shows, and I regularly crawled around under tables, peered behind desks, turned furniture upside-down, rummaged through boxes of old books, went into attics and basements and barns with a flashlight, and so forth. Every once in a while I would spot something wonderful that everyone else, including my parents, had missed. That was partly because my parents had taught me extremely well – and partly because I was patient.
I think my youthful enthusiasm for the hunt and chase, the intellectual puzzle of connoisseurship, must have appealed to Ralph, a kindred spirit. I had no qualms about going down on my hands and knees in dust or dirt to distinguish fake from real, or about going through enormous piles of old papers in search of one document of historical importance, or about turning the bottom of a drawer back and forth in the sunlight for ten minutes until I could finally read a feather-faint pencil inscription that my intuition had told me could be the cabinetmaker’s signature.
I have no recollection of what price Ralph paid us, but I know my only motivation would have been to match the rabbit with its rightful owner at a price warranted by its quality. I would simply have said what I thought it was worth; if he was worthy of owning it, then he would accept the price – as he did. And he is right that my dad wasn’t using me as a kind of stooge; we often would set prices in this kind of informal discussion, right in front of the customers. Warren Buffett does something similar when he buys businesses: He asks the seller to name a price. If it’s acceptable, Mr. Buffett buys; if not, he politely declines to negotiate and walks away. While my father did like to haggle when he bought, he refused to haggle when he sold. It was as if, once he owned something rare and beautiful, it was beneath the object’s dignity for him to negotiate over it.1
1. I interviewed Ralph Esmerian briefly over the phone this week (December, 2016); he was released in March after serving four-and-a-half years in federal prison. He told me the price I gave him for the rabbit was $3,500 (or approximately $20,000 today, adjusted for inflation). “That came right out of your mouth,” he said. “You were staring at me. You didn’t look to either of your parents for approval. I had never seen anything like it, this little kid acting that way.”
The rabbit was one of four carousel figures my parents