New York Times
One translation of Victor Elmaleh’s Arabic last name is “the master,” and he lived up to it. He imported the first Volkswagens to the United States. He developed $7 billion worth of real estate. He painted more than 4,000 watercolors, most of them small-scale, which were shown in many gallery exhibitions. He won national championships in handball and squash and a squash tournament at 81.
One of Elmaleh’s many charities, the Concert Artists Guild, sponsors a competition for young musicians; the winner’s only obligation has been to play a private concert in Elmaleh’s home. He married a beautiful and celebrated ballerina, who went on to play “Miss Turnstiles” in the original 1944 production of the Broadway classic “On the Town.”
Elmaleh’s vastly accomplished life ended Monday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, his son Niko said. He was 95.
Again and again, Elmaleh surmounted tough challenges. When he and his partners became the first distributors of Volkswagens in the United States in 1954, they had to persuade American dealers to stock a product from Germany, which had been their country’s enemy only nine years earlier. He enlisted bicycle shops and used-car lots to sell the cars, to make up for the reluctance of established dealers.
Another problem was the Volkswagen’s squat, buglike look. “It was a pretty ugly little car,” Elmaleh said in a 2011 oral history. The solution was to trumpet its distinctiveness. “Think small” was the slogan the ad agency came up with.
The partners, who also handled Porsches, Audis and other brands, sold some two million cars before selling the business in the mid-1980s.
Under the name World Wide Group, Elmaleh and his partners bought buildings and built new ones. They pounced on sites from which others shied away, building Worldwide Plaza on Manhattan’s still-tawdry Eighth Avenue at 50th Street, the site of the old Madison Square Garden; the first building in the industrial area of Long Island City in Queens, which became known as Queens West; and made one of the first conversions of an office building on Wall Street for residential use.
Victor Elmaleh was born in Mogador, now Essaouira, Morocco, on Nov. 27, 1918, the oldest of six brothers. Elmaleh was an Arabic-Moroccan name that his Sephardic Jewish ancestors had acquired after fleeing from the Spanish Inquisition to Morocco, then a French colony. The name Victor was chosen to commemorate the victory of France and its allies in World War I.He was brought to Brooklyn in 1925 to join family members who had already established roots there.
