This is a writing sample by “nycghostwriter,” AKA Barbara Finkelstein. It is “Lakewood silversmith hammers ut a good living and a good life,” a cover story published in the March 2018 issue of B-Tank Magazine. You can get professional ghostwriting services from a published non-fiction writer. Email me or fill out the short form on my contact page.
By Barbara Finkelstein
Yaakov Lantzitsky would be the first to tell you that artists are funny people. They are dreamers who fill their days with doodles and sketches, but they are also the practical hewers of silver, gold, and precious stones. In Yaakov’s long career as a silversmith, dreamer and hewer have negotiated with each other to produce functional objects of beauty while bowing to the demands of running a mercurial business. It hasn’t always been easy.
As with more conventional enterprises, Yaakov’s business model is built on a three-legged stool: design, production, and sales. Managing all three aspects of the business was a lot simpler when Yaakov was younger and he could hire craftsmen to assist him in the midtown Manhattan loft he rented in the 1980s. Between losing his lease and weathering the assaults of the 1987 economic downturn, he has had to reinvent himself many times over.
Rolling with the punches has characterized Yaakov’s entire career, beginning with his education in 1972 at a Manhattan trade school sponsored by the Jewelers Board of Trade, a not-for-profit, member-owned association.
“I had arrived from Israel, newly married, and eager to professionalize my skills as a silversmith,” Yaakov says. “I knew a lot, but I had a lot to learn, too.”
As a boy in Jerusalem, Yaakov already had crafted mezuzahs and mailboxes without the benefit of blue- prints or templates. He had also studied a variety of metal-working techniques soldered together from books he found in Jerusalem bookshops. Many of the most influential texts were by British writers who acknowledged the Welsh Allgoods, early 18th century craftsmen who developed the domestic utensils industry. Yaakov also studied the British silversmiths of the 19th century, famous for instituting four hallmarks struck into silver to indicate its purity, place of manufacture, date of production, and silversmith identity. When Yaakov finally began his formal studies in New York, he was as knowledgeable as many of his teachers. Still he had to learn metal-cutting, mold-making, die-making, engraving, overlay, inlay, hand engraving, and calligraphy (in Hebrew and English) from the world’s masters of silver, gold, and stone.
Like many an artist with an engineering mind, Yaakov was able to combine his formal training with an innate ability to look at a finished product and break it down into its design and production components — much the way a gifted chef can identify the ingredients in a restaurant meal and recreate the dish in his own kitchen. Moreover, Yaakov has acquired techniques straight out of the automotive and aviation industries and integrated them into his practice. The hammers, ovens, presses, hydraulic power tools and computer-aided design software arrayed today in his Lakewood, New Jersey-based workshop would not be out of place in a large-scale foundry.
“I knew that the skills I taught myself as a boy in Jerusalem and learned as an apprentice in New York put me on a par with many of the old-time masters,” Yaakov says.
The business opens and closes . . .
With his Jewelers Board of Trade education complete, Yaakov opened a small shop at 53rd Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan. In addition to designing jewelry that required diamonds, he imported and sold precious stones.
By the time 510 Madison Avenue was slated for demolition, Yaakov had morphed his business entirely into the wholesaling of semi-precious and precious stones. He opened up a new office on 47th Street in Manhattan’s diamond district that was, as Lantzitsky puts it, “one hundred percent business.” The office hummed along for about seven years until January 1980 when a troy ounce of silver, priced at $5.44, leapfrogged to $49.45. The price of gold, priced between $216.55 and $524.00, catapulted to $850.00 before dropping to $474.00. Meanwhile, a one-carat D-flawless diamond rose in price from $10,000 to $65,000.5 Yaakov’s second business sustained a knock-out punch with the October 19, 1987, stock market crash, and once again he had to close up shop.
“The problem wasn’t me, not as an artist, not as a businessman,” Yaakov says. “It was the economy. It could go up or down, and the commodities trade was often the first casualty.”
Yaakov had to retrench. The volatility of the stock market, as well as the notorious manipulation of silver by billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt and his two brothers in 1979 and 1980, had made silversmithing an unreliable way to earn a living. How could Yaakov parlay his artisanship into a business that would support his family?
. . . and reinvents itself
As it turned out, Yaakov had often worked with antique restorers in Manhattan and Connecticut. Over the years he had restored family heirlooms and other treasured objects, some- times producing entirely new parts for articles that had seen better days.
“I thought, why not enter the restoration business?” Yaakov says.
He opened up a shop and studio in Stamford, Connecticut, as well as Monsey, New York, and worked, as he had for years, with antique dealers in Manhattan. Instead of going into eclipse, his reputation as a trusted silversmith continued to grow. In fact, the skill he acquired by working on Tiffany silver, as well as art nouveau pieces he had made or restored for silver purveyor Georg Jensen, stood him in good stead with customers who would not let anybody else touch their prized possessions.
Yaakov tells the story of a customer who came by back then to show him a photograph of a middle-aged man walking down a German city street and carrying a brown bag. The photo was taken a few days after Kristallnacht in November 1938. Inside the bag was a menorah that had survived the Nazi pogrom against Jews and Jewish property. To make the menorah look less valuable, the man — the customer’s own grandfather — had taken the various components apart and camouflaged their luster with dirt.
“Restoring an 18th-century menorah was a tremendous task,” Yaakov says. “This one was an extraordinary contraption in the shape of a palm tree, with different animals soldered onto the branches. I would have to put myself into the head of the artisan who had chased and hammered the silver more than three hundred years ago.”
The customer also wanted Yaakov to make a matching box for the menorah. He told Yaakov that if he had to escape from the United States the way his grandfather had to from Germany, he wanted a more secure carrying-case than a brown bag. Yaakov obliged by crafting a box in keeping with the style and eminence of the menorah itself.
A good name is more desirable than silver and gold
Despite the downturn in the economy, and in Yaakov business circumstances, customers from around the country continued to seek him out. A dealer who came upon a Tiffany-produced silver snake vase bought it with an eye to asking Yaakov to restore it. A previous owner had punctured the vase in several places to adapt it for use as a lamp.
“The dealer almost fainted when he saw what had been done to a vase crafted by human hands in a Tiffany studio more than a hundred years ago,” Yaakov says.
“To this day that dealer asks me to show him where I used new material to cover the holes,” Yaakov says. “My greatest satisfaction comes when my customer cannot see where the repair was done.”
Sometimes people come to Yaakov with requests that strike him as irreverent.
“A rabbi asked me to enlarge a menorah he inherited from his father,” Yaakov says. “I teased him. ‘For your father it was good enough, but for you it’s not?’ He was embarrassed, but he wanted what he wanted.”
Yaakov was able to double the menorah’s size while retaining its integrity. The customer was happy.
“From my point of view, I turned a questionable request into a successful blend of redesign and restoration,” Yaakov says.
Dealing with dissatisfied customers
Now 71, Yaakov fits all of his operations into the garage of his family’s Lakewood, New Jersey, house. A typical day can start with a customer asking him to rehabilitate a candelabra that ended up in the path of a lively child. Soon another emotionally dis- tressed customer can show up with a gold bracelet she accidentally ran over with her car.
“Even though these heirloom pieces are not always fine pieces, they have sentimental value to their owners,” Yaakov says. “While I am not a miracle worker, I give each special treatment and make them whole again.”
It would not be the world we know if every customer went away happy and if, in fact, Yaakov himself was satisfied with every project he undertook. Often he tries to head off problems by making a facsimile of an object in copper or brass. Even so the customer may approve the facsimile and dislike the finished silver object.
“I have my imagination, another person has his imagination, and sometimes it is impossible to reconcile the two,” Yaakov says. “It’s the nature of the business: Sometimes we need to live with imperfection.”
Yaakov has learned to be philosophical about the tension between the imagined and the real, especially when an occasional customer concludes that he does not have to compensate the silversmith fairly for his time and expertise.
“Of course I am disappointed,” he says, the shrug heavy in his voice. “In myself for not satisfying a customer, and in the person who takes possession of my work without paying the full amount. My attitude is, let him take the piece and live with it. Maybe he will wake up the next day and see that what I produced is not so bad.”
Yaakov believes that his quiet way of handling customer dissatisfaction avoids pointless conflict.
“I look at my customers as my friends,” he says. “We work together to accomplish a task. Sometimes our collaboration doesn’t work out because executing a design is complicated. What you see in a sketch is one thing, but the actual product takes on a life of its own.”
When he can, Yaakov encourages an unhappy customer to embrace the “mistake.”
“Sometimes he finds that the mistake is better than what he originally asked for,” Yaakov says. “If I had argued with him, he might not have been open to seeing the object in a new way.”
Pursuing his dreams in down time
The everyday stresses and strains of designing, producing, and selling his work does not get Yaakov down. Indeed, when demand for special order work abates, he has time to follow the drift of his own imagination. One project he made for his own pleasure: A besamim spice holder in the shape of a medieval European tower, complete with precious stones, chasing, a handwritten Megillah and a crank shaft.
“Every now and then a person stops by and asks me, ‘Yaakov, what do you have for me today?’” Yaakov says. “He might handel with me more than I’d like, but I can come to terms if I believe my work will go to somebody who truly appreciates it.”
Handlen and other less-than-ideal sales interactions have not deterred Yaakov from following the business practice he values more than any other.
“Honesty,” he says. “Be honest and straight and tell the truth.”
Despite the times he has gotten burned, Yaakov Lantzitsky remains moved by his loyal customers. “Several have come to me forty years after I sold them a piece of jewelry, a becher, a kiddush cup, a tray, and they tell me they still love it,” he says. “That makes my day. That’s how I know I have done a good day’s work.”
A good lifetime’s too.
