Free Another Life by Michael Korda Page B

Jewish holidays and of Yiddish, which was enjoying a kind of renaissance in publishing circles—at least as a language of insult—partly as a means of reaffirming one’s Jewishness, partly because it had certain tough-guy connotations. Even non-Jews were using words such as putz, schwartze, yenta , et cetera, albeit with a certain self-consciousness and unreliable pronunciation. Yiddish was suddenly “in,” to the surprise, not to say shock, of an older generation that had always looked down on Yiddish speakers.
    People like Henry Simon, Dick Simon, and Max Schuster never used Yiddish words, even in anger. That was perhaps something their parents or grandparents had done, but to those who came from German-Jewish families that had long since been assimilated, the use of Yiddish was unspeakably vulgar. It was the kind of thing that Russian Jews were looked down upon for doing—back in those days, the distinction between the older, more assimilated German Jews and the less assimilated Russian Jews was almost as sharp a divide as the one between Jew and Gentile. It did not pass without notice that Leon Shimkin was of Russian-Jewish origin and that Max Schuster and the Simons were not.
    I had, in taking a job at S&S, unintentionally chosen sides. There was still at Random House and at S&S very much a feeling of us against them, an underlying assumption that the older WASP publishing houses were, to use the title of Jerome Weidman’s best-selling novel appropriately, “The Enemy Camp.” Very shortly, however, the newer firms were to overtake and eventually subsume many of their old-line competitors, and within a decade the division between Jews and Gentiles inbook publishing had simply vanished, as if it had never been there. But in 1958, eroded as it might have been, it was still something people thought about, even talked about from time to time, and it mattered.
    I T TOOK me a while before I could steel myself to mention to Henry Simon Herb Alexander’s message about Harold Robbins.
    Henry sniffed disdainfully. “Robbins belongs downstairs,” he said.
    What exactly was the problem? I asked.
    With a certain reluctance, Henry explained that Harold Robbins was a popular novelist who had been published for years by the distinguished house of Knopf. At one time, it had seemed that Robbins might be a serious writer. Robbins’s second book, A Stone for Danny Fisher (his first was Never Love a Stranger ), was one of those tough novels about poor Jews that occasionally succeeded and even became classics. Since then, though his sales rose, Robbins’s writing had gone downhill with the speed of an avalanche, becoming more and more sexy—so much so as to make Alfred and Blanche Knopf nervous. His latest, of which Henry had only read the first part, was a long novel about the movie business that contained, quite frankly, a good deal of outright pornography. The Knopfs would almost certainly have turned the book down in horror after reading the first hundred or so pages, but they were never given the opportunity, since Robbins’s new agent, a lawyer named Paul Gitlin, had made demands that neither they, nor anybody else in their right mind, could possibly meet.
    Subsequently, Leon Shimkin’s attention had been drawn to Harold Robbins—Henry’s expression made it clear that this was no surprise to him—and Shimkin was neither horrified nor unwilling to come up with a generous, and in many ways unprecedented, offer. His original intention had been to publish the hardcover edition of the book at S&S and then do the mass-market edition at Pocket Books. With that in mind, he had asked Henry to read the pages.
    Henry, to do him justice, thought the pages made pretty good reading, if you liked that kind of trash, and would probably make a lot of money. But he also thought they posed some tricky moral problems, so he gave them to Max Schuster, who took them home and returned the next day badly shaken and in a state of high