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A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York

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Andre Schiffrin gives insight of what happened to the left in America and a great understanding of the problems of corporate greed. He was born in France and escaped the Vichy government to the USA where his father continued as a publisher.

An interesting analysis of the demise of small independant publishers and how it affects free speech.

A whole lot more packed into this facinating memoir.

I found A Political Education by André Schiffrin to be an eloquent, charming and captivating read. It is an autobiography of a man who has had dual national allegiances, born in France and with a father prominent in French intellectual circles as a publisher, but who as a child had to flee with his family to America due to the antisemitism of Vichy France. He tells of his memories of growing up in NYC, a precocious and socially activist student, who although his family now struggled economically to establish a new life, succeeded through Yale and Cambridge to eventually become a prominent publisher himself. An acknowledged, but undoctinaire socialist, he managed to wed the best of French and American intellectualism. Schiffrin has good tales to tell, good insights to convey. A fine memoir, pleasurable, of which his father and mother would be proud.

Andre Schiffrin's unique story about his "coming of age" in New York, Paris and New Haven should be read by those who have "come of age" in more recent generations. Schiffrin's intelligence and wide-ranging experiences are an historical treat. We discover him taking a rather dangerous trip by freighter to post-World War II France at age 13 to meet family and his father's writer friends, including Andre Gide. A few years later Schiffrin is learning about left-wing politics first-hand in New York City through the lens of French socialism. Anti-semitism at Yale, the wide net of the CIA, the increasing importance of the "bottom line" and its fallout among the publishing conglomerates --are all counterbalanced by Schiffrin's enduring optimism and reformism. He spends much of his energy trying to change things --notably by setting up The New Press in the 1990s which publishes Noam Chomsky, Studs Terkel and many other writers who had a fundamental disdain for the conglomerates. This book is a "must read" as a personal history of a very gifted activist and publisher in the 20th century.

This is most instructive reading -- and never boring. The private in Schiffrin's life is pretty much left out but the political is all there. The climate at Yale in the 1950s, the entirely different feel of the university in England (a fine chapter; yes, there is or rather used to be such a thing as a university in the original sense of meaning), the big biz integration & doleful decline of the major publishing houses, the resistance of independent minds such as André Schiffrin and Studs Terkel, all of this and more comes alive on paper. Interesting detours back into the work and times of exiles like Schiffrin sen. and surprising insights into the intricacies of living & feeling/thinking within the reference frame of two cultures (tracing the parallels to Raymond Federman would be interesting), yes, this makes for excellent reading. If one wants to know more about the changed face of publishing Schiffrin's The Business of Books is the title to read.Either title is to be recommended.

I first met Andre Schiffrin at a party celebrating the sale of Schocken Books to Random House. Andre was then head of Pantheon, the publishing house originally begun in Paris by his father, Jacques Schiffrin. My late wife, Miriam Schocken, was then head of Schocken Books. The two houses, though specializing in books of different sorts, were alike in that their founders were European Jewish intellectuals.

This book, in tracing the Schiffrin family history, describes how the elder Schiffrin had moved from a comfortable life in Baku on the Caspian Sea (growing rich through Nobel money), to becoming secretary to Bernard Berenson in Florence and then hired by Peggy Guggenheim to teach her Russian, and thence into publishing, becoming responsible for Editions de la Pleiade, which eventually enabled him, through his friendship with Andre Gide, to join Gallimard, France's most prestigious publishing house. This was, of course, as with most Jews, to end with the infamous "Aryanization" of firms headed by or employing persons of Jewish ethnicity. There is an enlightening side-bar on the activities of Varian Fry, whose activities of Jewish and non-Nazi intellectuals were so important in bringing them to America.

This book was a delightful read, describing how a European youth was "Americanized" without losing his European heritage. Not least in this progression was his passionate interest in Socialism. Schiffrin's urge to publish this account of his (and his family's) history owes its debt to his previously-published "The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read" (2000). In this book we are led to a better understanding of the connection of his life's preoccupation to the evolution of his personal politics.

My wife's position in the aforementioned sale of Schocken Books to Pantheon rests in the origin of that publishing house. Her grandfather was the firm's founder, and a more complete review of his remarkable life can be had from reading "The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken,1877-1959" by Anthony David, Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Company., 2003). The poison of Nazism was far-reaching, but it affected particularly those who dared to bring before the reading public those ideas that were out of current fascination but are rooted in the oldest, and I think best, thoughts of those whose roots go back to ancient times.