Jack Hartzman

Never take a break at Christmas! It might serve as Jack Hartzman’s epitaph, but learning of his death belatedly on returning from a few days off, I can only echo the many rich tributes to this wonderful faux curmudgeon published by The Baron.

Jack was a giant of his craft, a prince among men and a fount of solid advice to correspondents in the field. I recall the feeling of relief when as a green bureau chief in Israel I was having trouble with the military censor, phoned the desk one night and heard Jack’s grumpy voice. In a few seconds, he had analysed the problem, suggested the solution and ended with a gruff injunction to “send a goddam skedline”.

As a fellow Jew, I too used to volunteer for Christmas Day duty, not out of any dislike for holiday but to give other colleagues the day off. It became a tradition for a decade that Hartzman and I would exchange seasonal greetings in Yiddish on the service wire at the start of the Christmas shift. To my “Gut yomtov, pontiff”, he would reply “gut shobbes, lobbes”. Look it up!

Editors tend not to bark or drink as much as they did when we were young. Nor, alas, do they have such colourful personalities and forensic skills. We will not see his equal again. ■