He told the story of the waiter every time anyone asked. He told it with consistent emotional specificity — the detail about never knowing the man’s name, the detail about trying to find him later and failing, the regret that never fully resolved. The 2013 CBS Sunday Morning interview, in which tears came to his eyes as he described what the man had given him, was not a performance. He was eighty-five years old. The regret was still there.
## The Unnamed Man: What Poitier Said and What It Means
It is worth pausing on what Sidney Poitier actually claimed about the Jewish waiter, as opposed to what has sometimes been implied or assumed.
He said: the man was elderly. He said: the man was Jewish. He said: the man noticed him struggling with a newspaper and offered to teach him to read. He said: they worked together every night after the restaurant closed, for approximately six months. He said: he never knew the man’s name. He said: he tried to find him later and couldn’t. He said: it is one of his great regrets that he never had the chance to properly thank him.
He did not say: the man was an immigrant. He did not say: the man had survived persecution. He did not say: there was a particular religious or ethical framework behind the man’s willingness to help. He did not attribute to the man a backstory, a motivation, a philosophy. He described an act.
The act is the story. An elderly man in a closing restaurant in postwar New York, with a young dishwasher who couldn’t read, who decided without apparent deliberation or calculation to share what he knew.