The first time Martin Greenfield took up needle and thread was at Auschwitz, to mend the shirt of the SS guard who had just beaten him. Prior to his death in March 2024, he was recognized as "America's greatest living tailor," the man who dressed presidents and movie stars. Measure of a Man is Greenfield's story. More than an unforgettable account of survival and triumph, it's the testimony of a man who came of age amid the darkest evil in modern history but never lost hope. The Nazis came for the Jews in Greenfield's Carpathian village in 1944-Separated from his parents and siblings as soon as they arrived at Auschwitz, Martin was the only one of his family to survive the Holocaust. "Where was God?" he asked the rabbi who came with Eisenhower's liberating army a year later at Buchenwald, where Martin had been moved. Greenfield arrived in America in 1947, nineteen years old and penniless. He went to work as a floor boy at a Brooklyn clothing factory and quickly became a virtuoso tailor, making suits for the president and the biggest names in Hollywood.

Within thirty years he owned the firm. His insistence on the highest standards, his humility, and his humor made Martin Greenfield the clothier-and inevitably the friend-of many of the greatest legends of American politics, entertainment, and sports. He passed foreign policy advice to Eisenhower on notes tucked into his suit pockets, encouraged a disillusioned Paul Newman on the brink of abandoning his acting career, and coaxed both Bill Clinton and Carmelo Anthony into tails. Throughout his long and improbable career, Greenfield never lost his sense of gratitude for the country that plucked him out of hell and enabled him to build a new home and family. "America is dreams," he wrote. "In Yiddish, we have a proverb-'Heaven and hell can both be had in this world.' But America is the only place I know that lets you turn your hell into a heaven. It did for me.

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