Today's letter, the last in the series, comes to us from the Fatherland. And actually the letter didn't come to us, it came to my brother Larry, who was kind enough to share.
The writer of the letter, Michael Elias, is from a town just outside of Dusseldorf called Feldenhausen (which sounds like a perfect name for a concentration camp, but then so many German names sound like concentration camps.)
In any case, he mistakenly assumed my brother was the same Larry Siegel who wrote for MAD Magazine. This is funny for several reasons. The funniest or most creative writing my CPA brother ever does is when he fills out his scorecard on the golf course or on a tax return when a particularly aggressive client doesn't want to pay income taxes.
Furthermore, we were not a Mad Magazine family.
The satirical tastes in the Siegel household ran along a more sophisticated line. I had subscriptions to both National Lampoon and Spy Magazine. And favored the writing of Doug Kenney, Michael O'Donoghue and P.J. O'Rourke. Though we did own the complete set of Mad's paperback book series entitled: Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. (Which in retrospect could have been the title for a training manual for a career in advertising.)
Toward the end of the letter, Michael requests signed copies of collectibles which we don't have. He even included a couple of dollars to handle the postage for any packages sent back to him in Germany.
No self-respecting Jew sends money back to Germany, so we just pocketed that money and put in our own personal Holocaust Reparation Jar, next to the pens and coffee mugs we heisted from the local Volkswagon dealership.
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