Joshua Lambert, The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature (Yale University Press, 2022)
By Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D.
RICHMOND, California — On Sunday, December 11, 2022 at 2 p.m. about 40 people zoomed into Josh Lambert’s presentation on his new book The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature (Yale Univ Press, 2022) sponsored by the San Francisco Jewish Community Library and hosted by Howard Freedman. That evening Karen and I met Donald and Nancy Harrison in Walnut Creek for dinner at a Burmese restaurant. We had not seen each other since COVID and had a lot of catching up to do.
Extended book tours traditionally involved planning, travel, bookstore and hotel bookings. Since COVID zooming and streaming simplified marketing. The author is at home, the bookseller does not arrange chairs or provide water and coffee. The author does not hit the grueling road. The potential reader watches the screen from the comfort of home. A new genre book talk has emerged, remote marketing.
Lambert’s 58-minute presentation on The Literary Mafia at the Harvard Bookstore on September 16, 2022 accrued 130 views. On October 4, 2022 he gave a 31 minute presentation for the JBS “In the Spotlight” series hosted by Abigail Pogrebin; it netted 308 views. Your author has listened and watched about 2 and a half hours. Sunday’s San Francisco performance was by far the most animated and exciting of the three.
Jewish families started Random House, Simon and Schuster, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Alfred A. Knopf. The owners came from well off wealthy families that loved literature. They hired Jewish and gentile literary editors. Jews were print culture pioneers who promoted paper backs and the book of the month club. Lambert suggests they were resented by some writers who thought they had been unfairly treated, including Truman Capote, T. S. Elliot, Jack Kerouac, H. L. Mencken, and Flannery O’Connor. Lambert dove into publisher’s archives especially Alfred A. Knopf. He researched editors who were not publicly well known and found no basis for the existence of a Jewish publishing cabal favoring Jewish authors. Again canards, misinformation, micro aggression, and unabashed antisemitism fit into the spurious Protocols of the Elders of Zion trashcan.
Josh Lambert is the Sophia Moses Robison Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and English, and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College. His prior publications include Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (NYU Press, 2014), and coeditor with Ilan Stavans of How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (Restless Books, 2020). Readers are invited view the author’s YouTube presentations and contemplate Lambert’s book in print or the audio version.
The next day, Monday, the New York Public Library provided another hour of watching and listening two octogenarians. Robert Caro, magisterial biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson appeared with Robert Gottlieb, leading Knopf editor of between 600 to 700 titles including Caro. Gottlieb is wonderful author of ten titles in his own right, including Avid Reader, A Life (2016). His daughter Lizzie Gottlieb spent seven years producing “Turn Every Page, The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” a documentary of the half century author-editor, Caro and Gottlieb, relationship. The almost two-hour-long film premiers on December 30.
Sunday and Monday’s extraordinary conversations at San Francisco and New York libraries were made possible by eager readers and generous benefactors.
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Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D., J.D., a professor emeritus of history at the University of
Nebraska at Omaha, and a lawyer, a member of the Institute of Historical Study, is a correspondent now based in Richmond, California. He may be contacted at oliver.pollak@sdjewishworld.com