Har­ry Alt­man: Buffalo’s Mas­ter Show­man tells the sto­ry of the son of Jew­ish immi­grants who fled the Russ­ian pogroms of the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and arrived in Amer­i­ca with lit­tle more than deter­mi­na­tion. Born into pover­ty, Alt­man began his entre­pre­neur­ial jour­ney at twen­ty, claw­ing his way upward through per­sis­tence, risk, and rein­ven­tion. By forty, he had cycled through more than a dozen ven­tures — test­ing ideas, fol­low­ing trends, and adapt­ing to chang­ing tastes — before his efforts col­lapsed dur­ing the Great Depres­sion. Forced to begin again, Alt­man rebuilt his career in mid-cen­tu­ry Buf­fa­lo, first at the Glen Casi­no and lat­er at the Town Casi­no. With lim­it­ed access to tra­di­tion­al financ­ing, he relied on pri­vate investors out­side con­ven­tion­al chan­nels to build large-scale night­clubs that brought nation­al­ly known per­form­ers to West­ern New York. At their height, his venues drew the same cal­iber of acts appear­ing in New York and Chica­go. As tele­vi­sion, Las Vegas, and chang­ing tastes reshaped Amer­i­can leisure, Altman’s busi­ness­es declined as his health failed. After his death, both his venues and his sto­ry dis­ap­peared. This book recov­ers Altman’s accom­plish­ments and explores how Jew­ish con­tri­bu­tions to Amer­i­can cul­ture were vital in their time — and how eas­i­ly they were lat­er erased.