This biography of Mayer Matalon, an influential Jewish Jamaican,
traces his path from humble origins to innovator, public servant,
political insider, and leader of his family's conglomerate, from
the 1940s to the end of the twentieth century. Mayer Matalon was
not born into the Jewish-Jamaican elite who traced their ancestry
in Jamaica back hundreds of years and who were successful
entrepreneurs, prominent intellectuals, and politicians. Mayer
Matalon's father, Joseph, was one a handful of Jews who came to
Jamaica in the wave of turn-of-the-century Levantine emigration,
and his mother, Florizel Madge Matalon, was a young, beautiful,
poor Jewish-Jamaican girl. A failed businessman, Joseph's legacy
was nine children who created their own legacy in Jamaican business
and politics. The Matalon siblings built a conglomerate, venturing
into businesses and experimenting with business models that had
never been tried in Jamaica, enjoying success for the first twenty
years, struggling to retain viability for the next twenty years,
and fighting to keep the family together throughout. Matalon rose
to wealth and prominence through his talent for numbers, his
innovative ideas, and his extraordinary emotional intelligence. He
was one of Prime Minister Michael Manley's closest confidantes, in
and out of power, and he advised every Jamaican premier and prime
minister from Norman Manley to Bruce Golding, with only one
exception. That one exception resulted in a sidelining that had a
blowback that set Jamaica back decades and that sealed his family's
business's fate. This is a story of race, class, and power in
postcolonial Jamaica. Through the lens of Mayer Matalon's life, the
book outlines Jamaica's political and economic trajectory over the
sixty years before and after independence. This biography peels
back the surface layers of the many citations and public accolades,
and goes beyond the often uninformed speculation on the Matalons'
beginnings, revealing in rich detail the unusual life of an
extraordinary Jamaican.
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