Santiago Pollarsky, his eyes on the stars

He came from a small town in Argentina to New York, the big city, in 1961, with dreams of meeting and promoting, becoming a press agent, for Hollywood stars, the glitterati, and through hard work and perseverance, succeeded.

Now a resident of the JASA houses in Far Rockaway, Santiago Pollarsky, 81, still dresses with panache, his scarf tossed casually around his neck, his hat stylishly askew, his spoken English fluid and colorfully accented. He traces his life’s path from the small, northeast Argentinean village of Ubajay, population 300, the youngest child of five siblings born to Samuel Pollarsky and Paulina Luschancoff, Russian immigrants. At the age of 10, he and his family moved to Entre Rios, Concordia. He completed his education and started working as a 6th grade teacher, “all subjects except music,” in different schools and later in Buenos Aires.

Pollarsky visited the United States a few times, ultimately staying in 1961. “I had a mishigaas (craziness),” he said. “I wanted to interview celebrities. I couldn’t tell anybody; they would think I was crazy. My relatives did not know that I wanted to do these things.”

When he came to New York, he received a teaching diploma and taught Spanish at the Educational Alliance, an organization founded in 1889 to help Jewish immigrants to the U.S., and to priests, nuns and social workers in a program of the New York and Brooklyn Archdioceses. Pollarsky is fluent in Spanish, English, Yiddish, French and Portuguese.

A highlight of his life has been his work as a freelance journalist for Latin American magazines and newspapers, focusing on personal interviews with celebrities from the 1960s through the 1990s. “It was not easy,” he stressed. “It is a tough job. You see the photograph and think it’s glamorous but it’s a tough job.” Pollarsky has a DVD power point playing a woman singing “New York, New York,” with black and white photographs of himself interviewing well known personalities: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Bette Davis, Rock Hudson, Salvador Dali, Edward G. Robinson, the Beatles, Josephine Baker, and many others. He is much younger and dressed nattily, focused and self-assured.

Pollarsky developed contacts in the show business industry, then a complicated puzzle of agents, public relations professionals, and lawyers. “I researched the show business newspapers, found the name of the agent, the star, where they stay. They don’t like to give the phone numbers of other stars, but they gave them to me because they trusted me. I called agents, lawyers, secretaries, the actors themselves. I had no problem communicating. I would get their biography, ask a few questions at the interview and develop friendships with the celebrities. I wanted to be a press agent; I read a lot about it in Argentina, but I didn’t know what it was but wanted to be it. I thought the only way was interviewing celebrities. It was challenging. It is not easy to do it in any country. I would interview in English and write in Spanish.” He wrote for publications in Spain and Venezuela: Ecos, Temas, El Mirador. He also arranged for celebrities to visit Spain and some Latin American countries for charities or for interviews on Spanish language television. He worked as a press agent for television stations in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and Spain, working in public relations and writing press releases.

During the early 1970s, Pollarsky was director of a senior citizens center with over 700 seniors, in the Bronx, arranging activities including trips and a fashion show with the seniors, aged 60 to 89, modeling the clothing. He was profiled in the New York Post for this work.

In the 1980s, he worked for the New York State Division of Human Rights, interviewing and investigating complaints, negotiating arbitration hearings. He investigated claims of discrimination for Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act at the Department of Health and Human Services office for Civil Rights, checking compliance of organizations receiving federal grants. He helped prepare legal cases as well. Through his work, he received an Investigation Certificate signed by current Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.

Yeshaya ben Shmuel and Perel, Pollarsky’s Hebrew name, is the last of his siblings still alive. Although he has no family of his own he is very proud of his siblings’ “magnificent” children in Israel and in Argentina. He recounted that he did have an education in Hebrew and went to a Hebrew school when he was younger, in Argentina. “In my mind I was thinking that Yiddish was more important,” he said regretfully. “I learned davening (prayers in Hebrew) but forgot my Hebrew completely. I was speaking Yiddish so I didn’t forget the Yiddish.” He said that he davens sometimes in Darchei Torah, reading the prayers in English, and speaks with the rabbi in the JASA houses. He has lived in JASA for almost three years, after having lived in Manhattan, on 58th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, for more than 30 years.

Pollarsky has lived a multifaceted life and continues to give of himself, volunteering to make phone calls for the Jewish Coalition, a Jewish republican group based in Washington, D.C. He noted that he received a thank you notice from them. He is very aware of and concerned with current events, and notes that he is “proud to be a Jew.” Pollarsky is currently working on his autobiography and hopes to continue to interview celebrities.