Gatsby and Meyer Wolfsheim's business partnership

The business partnership between Jay Gatsby and Meyer Wolfsheim is the hidden economic engine behind Gatsby's wealth and the source of his criminal vulnerability, linking the glittering surface of the Jazz Age to the underworld of bootlegging and fixed sporting events.

Origins and First Meeting

Gatsby and Wolfsheim met just after World War I, when Gatsby was a young major covered with medals but so destitute that he had to keep wearing his uniform because he could not afford civilian clothes. Wolfsheim first saw him when Gatsby walked into Winebrenner's poolroom on Forty-third Street and asked for a job, having not eaten for two days. Wolfsheim took him to lunch, and Gatsby ate more than four dollars' worth of food in half an hour. Wolfsheim later boasted, "I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter." He recognized Gatsby as a fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when Gatsby told him he was an Oggsford man—Wolfsheim's pronunciation of Oxford—Wolfsheim knew he could use him. He got Gatsby to join the American Legion, where Gatsby stood high, and soon Gatsby was doing work for Wolfsheim's clients, including a trip to Albany. Wolfsheim described their closeness by holding up two bulbous fingers and saying, "always together."

The Nature of Their Business

Wolfsheim was a gambler, and Gatsby coolly revealed to Nick Carraway that Wolfsheim was "the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919." The idea staggered Nick, who had thought of the fixed World's Series as something that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain, never imagining that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe. When Nick asked why Wolfsheim was not in jail, Gatsby replied, "They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man." The partnership extended into drug-store fronts: Tom Buchanan later revealed that Gatsby and Wolfsheim bought up side-street drug-stores in New York and Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. Tom also claimed that Wolfsheim had scared Walter Chase into silence after Chase went to jail for a month in New Jersey on a betting-law charge connected to their operations. Gatsby did not deny the drug-store business, only retorting that Walter Chase had come to them dead broke and was glad to pick up some money.

Wolfsheim's Character and Appearance

Wolfsheim was a small, flat-nosed Jew with a large head and two fine growths of hair that luxuriated in either nostril. His tiny eyes were hard to discover in the half-darkness. He wore cuff buttons made of human molars, which he described as "finest specimens of human molars." He was a denizen of Broadway, a sentimental man who became very emotional at times. At lunch with Gatsby and Nick, he spoke of the old Metropole, where he had been present the night Rosy Rosenthal was shot—six of them at the table, and when the waiter came to say someone wanted to speak to Rosenthal outside, Wolfsheim pulled him back down, saying, "Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don't you, so help me, move outside this room." Rosenthal went anyway, and was shot three times in his full belly on the sidewalk. Wolfsheim's tragic nose trembled when he became sentimental, and he spoke of the old Metropole as "filled with faces dead and gone."

The Partnership's Collapse and Wolfsheim's Refusal

After Gatsby's death, Nick Carraway tried desperately to reach Wolfsheim. The butler gave Nick Wolfsheim's office address on Broadway, but by the time Nick got the number it was after five and no one answered. Nick sent a letter urging Wolfsheim to come out on the next train, but Wolfsheim's reply was a refusal: "This has been one of the most terrible shocks of my life to me I hardly can believe it that it is true at all. Such a mad act as that man did should make us all think. I cannot come down now as I am tied up in some very important business and cannot get mixed up in this thing now." He added a hasty postscript: "Let me know about the funeral etc. do not know his family at all." Nick went to the Swastika Holding Company, Wolfsheim's office, where a hostile secretary tried to turn him away, but Wolfsheim eventually appeared. He spoke reverently of Gatsby, recalling their first meeting, but when Nick asked him to attend the funeral, Wolfsheim shook his head, his eyes filling with tears. "I can't do it—I can't get mixed up in it," he said. "When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out." He offered Nick a cigar and a maxim: "Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. After that my own rule is to let everything alone."

Significance

The partnership between Gatsby and Wolfsheim represents the corrupt foundation of Gatsby's dream. Gatsby's wealth, which he used to pursue Daisy, was built on bootlegging and the fixing of the World's Series—operations that placed him outside the legitimate social order. Wolfsheim's refusal to attend the funeral, despite his sentimental memories, underscores the transactional nature of their relationship and the isolation of Gatsby in death. The partnership also serves as a key piece of evidence in Tom Buchanan's destruction of Gatsby's image: when Tom exposes the drug-store business at the Plaza Hotel confrontation, Daisy's confidence in Gatsby visibly crumbles. Wolfsheim's cuff buttons made of human molars and his nostalgic recollections of gangland murders mark him as a figure from a violent, amoral underworld that Gatsby could never fully escape, no matter how many shirts he threw or how many parties he gave.