Luck: A Personal Account
of Fortune, Chance
and Risk in Thirteen
Investigations
By David Flusfeder
4th Estate, £16:99
Review by David Conway

On being approached to write a book about poker, our author — a university lecturer in creative writing and one-time poker correspondent for a Sunday newspaper — declined, claiming that the genre was already sufficiently well stocked. Instead he proposed writing a book about luck which he envisaged thus:

“It would have an ‘I’… who would embark on a journey… and along the way… uncover some important truths… What, it would ask, is luck? Is there any such thing? And how do I become luckier?”

These are questions of particular pertinence for Flusfeder, since certain members of his family would appear to have been very lucky indeed. His mother, Trudi, we learn, grew up in London’s East End after her parents, of Galician shtetl background, fled antisemitic pogroms in 1905.

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David Flusfeder's Luck

While she and her mother retained many traditional Jewish superstitions, such as a belief in the “evil eye”and in the idea that “everything happens for a reason”, Flusfeder’s father, Izio, harboured an entirely secular outlook, deeming mere chance or dumb luck the chief determinant of much that befalls us. Certainly, much good luck befell him.

As a 17-year-old Jew in Nazi occupied Warsaw, Izio narrowly escaped being conscripted by the Nazis to clear up a typhus-infested swampland outside the city. He sought sanctuary in the Soviet Union only to be arrested and transported to a Siberian labour camp, sharing a similar fate to hundreds of thousands of other Polish men whom the Soviet Union deemed a potential security threat after it annexed the eastern half of Poland a fortnight after the Nazi invasion.

Izio remained interned in Siberia until the summer of 1941, when he was released together with all other Poles held by the Soviets following the Nazi invasion of the USSR. He then joined what became a brigade of the British army, taking part in the Battle of Monte Cassino, from which he also lived to tell the tale.

When asked by his son whether he thought any special quality of his had enabled him survive these odds, Izio simply shrugged, responding he had been lucky.

Those seeking a scholarly disquisition on the nature of luck will be disappointed by this book, not least since the author admits he is not a philosopher. Rather, across 13 discrete chapters, their running order decided by a randomiser, Flusfeder provides a highly readable tour through his family history and the history of ideas and Western literature, recounting the multifarious theoretical and practical encounters with luck of a host of famous and lesser known figures from antiquity to the present. The very first chapter is given over to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who nowhere wrote about it.

It comes as a surprise, therefore, to read how often the supremely this-worldly philosopher would wish close friends good luck in his letters to them. More importantly, we learn of Wittgenstein’s stoic and deep resignation to fate and the ways in which he never allowed himself be disheartened by misfortune, including the cancer from which he died at the age of 62.

The closest Flusfeder gets to expressly stating what he considers luck to be is this: “Luck is the operations of chance, taken personally”. By this he means that someone’s apparent good fortune is often the result of their having been prepared to seize some opportunity that risked significant misadventure. Typically, we all fail to seize such opportunities from fear of possible adverse consequences.

Flusfeder admits this of himself in the book’s concluding chapter. During a trip to Las Vegas to play poker during its annual World Series, he folded on what he subsequently judged a likely winning hand. He admits: “I am not a high roller. I’m more timid than I would have ever chosen to be.”

Still, however true of himself as a poker player Flusfeder’s assessment might be, he emerges from his book a clear winner, having produced an eminently enjoyable and engrossing page-turner.

David Conway is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Middlesex
University