Mayer Matalon

This biography of Mayer Matalon, an influential Jewish Jamaican, traces his path from humble origins to innovator, public servant, political insider, and leader of his family’s conglomerate, from the 1940s to the end of the twentieth century. Mayer Matalon was not born into the Jewish-Jamaican elite who traced their ancestry in Jamaica back hundreds of years and who were successful entrepreneurs, prominent intellectuals, and politicians. Mayer Matalon’s father, Joseph, was one a handful of Jews who came to Jamaica in the wave of turn-of-the-century Levantine emigration, and his mother, Florizel Madge Matalon, was a young, beautiful, poor Jewish-Jamaican girl. A failed businessman, Joseph’s legacy was eleven children who created their own legacy in Jamaican business and politics.

The Matalon siblings built a conglomerate, venturing into businesses and experimenting with business models that had never been tried in Jamaica, enjoying success for the first twenty years, struggling to retain viability for the next twenty years, and fighting to keep the family together throughout.

Matalon rose to wealth and prominence through his talent for numbers, his innovative ideas, and his extraordinary emotional intelligence. He was one of Prime Minister Michael Manley’s closest confidantes, in and out of power, and he advised every Jamaican premier and prime minister from Norman Manley to Bruce Golding, with only one exception. That one exception resulted in a sidelining that had a blowback that set Jamaica back decades and that sealed his family’s business’s fate.

This is a story of race, class, and power in postcolonial Jamaica. Through the lens of Mayer Matalon’s life, the book outlines Jamaica’s political and economic trajectory over the sixty years before and after independence. This biography peels back the surface layers of the many citations and public accolades, and goes beyond the often uninformed speculation on the Matalons’ beginnings, revealing in rich detail the unusual life of an extraordinary Jamaican.