Penguin Press, 688 pages, $29.99
After six days on the S.S. Bremen in 1939, the little Berliner fleeing the Third Reich disembarked in New York. Igor Michael Peschowsky was seven, “a self-contained, unsmiling child,” and bald as an egg – the unexpected result of a whooping-cough vaccine. At the time, said his brother, they had never seen the inside of a synagogue and were about as un-Jewish as it’s possible for Jews to be.
In terms of distinguishing characteristics (no hair, no brows, no lashes) and identity (not Russian like Dad, not fully German like Mom, and not yet American), Igor was undefined. He would spend the next seven decades defining, refining, and periodically reinventing himself, along the way reinventing American comedy and Broadway theatre and taking Hollywood films to psychological places previously unplumbed. Igor Peschowsky? You know him better by his American name, Mike Nichols, improv wizard of Nichols and May, stage director of “The Odd Couple” and