This is the 13th in a series intended to paint a cumulative portrait of our Jewish community through interviews with randomly selected individuals. Today we focus on Michael Maiman.
Given the choice of laughing or crying, Michael Maiman clearly chooses the former. “If you sit and cry, you accomplish nothing,” said the 57-year-old business consultant during a recent interview in his Brookfield apartment.
He’s had plenty of opportunity to practice what he preaches. Last October, Maiman fell off a chair and shattered his left leg in 14 places.
When the paramedics and police came, he joked that “it was better than if it had happened to Brett Favre. They all said ‘Amen,’” he recalled with a laugh.
That accident landed Maiman in the hospital for 30 days. For five months after he was homebound, clouded by pain medication and unable to walk up or down the few stairs in his apartment, leaving only for medical appointments and physical therapy.
“You go nuts after a while,” said Maimon, a man used to moving around quickly as a former Porsche and hotrod racer. “For a while I couldn’t get to the computer and people who know me know that I get irritable when I can’t work.”
About two weeks ago, Maiman’s leg bore his weight for the first time since the accident and he is beginning to walk with a cane. He foresees another six months before he can walk properly.
But if personal determination has anything to do with it, he may heal faster. “He’s so motivated to get better. I give him credit,” said his wife, Shelly.
Asian culture
Maiman has come far from his beginnings in the former Soviet Union. He was born in 1946 in Fruenze in the Urals to parents who escaped Poland during World War II. “They were greeted by Mr. Stalin,” he explained, “and brought to Siberia as Stalin’s guests.”
Maiman and his parents moved to a small refugee camp in Austria after the war. “I saw the walking skeletons who came out of the camps,” he said. He lived in the camp until he was seven, when the family came to the U.S.
Maiman’s living room reflects his varied interests: a large photograph of his daughter Nicole, Jewish art, a Zen sand garden and several bonsai trees.
“He’s very family-oriented,” said Will Cummings, Maiman’s partner in their company, BCC-Business Strategies and Solutions. “His family’s very important to him and they tend to take priority.”
Shelly agrees. “He’s excessively devoted to his family,” she said, noting that it seems to be a Maiman family trait. “They’re very thoughtful, very romantic and very devoted family people.”
His devotion is apparent in the bonsai trees that dot his home. Bonsai is the Japanese art of dwarfing trees or plants and developing them into an aesthetically appealing shape.
“My wife and daughter gave me my first bonsai on my birthday in 2000,” he said. The following May he took some classes and by August he was helping to teach a class at the Milwaukee Bonsai Society. Now Maiman is known around his apartment complex as The Plant Guy, he said. In summer, he puts the trees outside and sets up a table to care for them.
He also arranges sand in a Zen garden, an activity that allows him to feel peaceful. “You can’t talk to me while I do this. I meditate,” he said.
But his interest in Asian culture goes beyond gardening. “I’ve always studied Asian methods in business,” Maiman said. “They don’t look at today or tomorrow; they look at years in advance.”
“He’s got two different sides,” said Shelly. “On the one side, he’s really hardheaded in business, but he’s also really into plants. He’s got a green thumb.”
Cummings is impressed less by Maiman’s thumb than by his mind. “He has an intuitive grasp of business processes…. He makes what I call intuitive leaps and he continues to dumbfound me when he does this and he’s right.”
“I’ve come to rely on him and it helps me tremendously,” Cummings continued. “In some ways it’s humbling but on the other hand it makes it very rewarding to work with him.”
In 2001, Cummings convinced Maiman out of semi-retirement to start their company. Maiman’s intention had been “to slow down” when he and Shelly moved to Brookfield three years ago after 26 years on the North Shore. “I was tired of working 85-90 hours a week,” he said.
But Maiman regrets nothing, not even his diabetes, related osteoporosis and broken leg. “When people ask me, ‘Do you feel badly that your life is messed up?’ ‘No,’ I answer, ‘I’ve done my share,’” he said.
Individuals for this column are selected at random from the Milwaukee Jewish Federation community database. The Chronicle does not have access to donor information, or contact members of the community with regard to their giving habits.
Loading ...