them in the United States, and almost overnight the greatest minds of the twentieth century, such as Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, were among my father’s first clients. He also represented the estates of Franz Kafka and Alfred Adler.
My father’s salon sensibility made him a perfect American counterpart to European publishers. After the war, he maintained his transatlantic affairs, not only continuing to represent their authors but also pioneering the editorial scouting business by advising European publishing houses on the best American writers to translate and publish for their markets. But if he had the right literary temperament, my father remained a poor businessman, constantly settling for too little compensation or loaning money to his authors, who were anything but good for it.
I had resolved to talk to my father about one issue in particular that could no longer be ignored—the agency’s longtime deal with Rowohlt Verlag. Faragó’s surprise visit temporarily delayed the discussion, but as soon as Leo agreed to disagree with my father, who returned to his office, I got up from my desk and walked the four steps it took me to arrive at his door. I had to act fast since I didn’t know who or what might distract my father next.
“Dad, can I talk to you for a second?”
“Come in. Sit, sit.”
He put the Saturday Evening Post he’d been reading back on top of a stack of other papers and magazines, including the New Yorker, New York Times, Herald Tribune, and Publishers Weekly. When he wasn’t chatting with Leo or any of the other characters that took up his day, his nose was always in the papers or magazines, not books. He preferred the excerpts in the Saturday Evening Post or the New Yorker to the whole works. Although he loved publishing and books, I never saw him reading one.
“I think Leo is being too hard on Lazi,” he said. “No one is saying he’s a saint. But any man who won’t give up chasing the Nazis is okay by me. Lazi continues to find new revelations about those bastards when everyone else says World War II is over. Over? Tell that to the victims. Saints are boring and so is their writing. Boredom is the root of all evil, as they say.”
I didn’t know where this was going, but with my father it could go on for quite a while, and I had business to discuss.
“Dad.” I cut him off. “Are you aware of how much Rowohlt is paying us a month?”
“Sure.”
“Three hundred a month.”
“Right, three hundred a month.”
“It’s a very, very small amount.”
“Well, it’s something, isn’t it? And it comes on time every month. That’s worth quite a lot in this business. We had a French publisher who was paying us $500, but the problem was that we never got paid. They never gave us the money they were supposed to. With Rowohlt, the paycheck is sure and steady.”
I felt my frustration level rising rapidly. Talking to Father was always complicated and roundabout. For him, choosing a morning pastry could inspire a lengthy monologue. He loved to reason things out to interesting arguments although not necessarily logical ones. I wasn’t in the mood right now to ride the endless merry-go-round.
“It might have been good during the war, but it’s not enough for the work we do—keeping track of all their foreign rights contracts here in the US and advising them on what American books to buy for their territory. We have to renegotiate our contract.”
“Oh, Francis, I don’t know . . .”
“Look, you can’t make money this way. Rowohlt is not a charity. But it’s turning us into one.”
My father leaned back in his worn leather chair and gave me a look that was not easily discernible: part confusion and part dismay, yes. But did I also detect an undercurrent of pride? People get into the book business for different reasons. For my father, it definitely wasn’t for money. Though it didn’t seem to be about books either. It was always more about people than anything else.
Wherever he went, my father created a club. Before he married my mother, quite a number of people had keys to his apartment and stayed there unannounced whenever they were in New York. In fact, for the first year or so of my mother and father’s relationship, people were constantly showing up who had the key but didn’t know that he was now married.
There were many iterations of this hospitality: Leo, unaffordable loans to friends, and forgiving almost any character flaw. Even my father’s fluency in three languages fed his social reach. I admired my father’s generosity with his friends.
Born to Hungarian immigrants living in Glens Falls, New York, he learned to speak his parents’ native language while spending his formative years in Hungary following what must go down as the most poorly timed holiday in history: When my father was ten years old, the family went on vacation to their native country. World War I broke out, and they were stuck there until peace was declared.
Later, my father attended Columbia, where he studied German, the language he, my mother, and Leo spoke much of the time. After university, he started his career as a press secretary for the successful actor, director, and producer Leslie Howard. He then worked as a story editor in New York for Warner Brothers during the late twenties, until he hung out his own shingle in the form of Sanford J. Greenburger, Literary Agent.
My father, Sanford Greenburger
Sitting across from me at his desk, my father put his hands up in defeat. The contemplative nature that kept my father meandering through the vagaries of life and in good company with his writers invariably bowed to my bolder American directness.
“Okay, fine. You’re in charge of the numbers,” he said. “I’ll call Ledig and ask for an increase to $350.”
“Let me call.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m going to ask for $1,500 a month,” I said. “And bonuses if the books we recommend are successful in Germany.”
A look of amusement sparked in my father’s eyes and just as quickly went out. He knew I was serious and that I understood things he didn’t. So we agreed I would talk to Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt.
Although the head of Germany’s most prestigious publishing house was regarded as one of the great publishers of the twentieth century, having published everybody from Ernest Hemingway to Marilyn French (and he was friends with all of them: Baldwin, Nabokov, Havel), I was undaunted. Out of all the big names and personalities that came through my father’s door, he was the one who became a mentor and more. There was something in the fantastic story of how he came to his position that I related to.
Ledig, whose name means “unmarried” in German, was the illegitimate son of Ernst Rowohlt, the founder of the Rowohlt Verlag publishing house—a fact that he was unaware of until he turned nineteen. A year or two before that, he had approached his mother, a well-known German actress, Maria Ledig, about his dream career.
“I don’t know why, but I want to go into the book business.”
“Well, let me see whether I can help,” his mother replied.
She called the old man and said, “Look. Your son wants to work in publishing.”
“Send him over,” Rowohlt said. “But don’t tell him who I am.”
So off Ledig went to work at Rowohlt’s publishing house, thinking a friend of his mother’s got him the position. After a year or so on the job, he received a call that he was wanted at the big boss’s office. Right away. He was scared out of his wits; this was autocratic Germany, where lower-level employees weren’t summoned by the head of the company.
Once Ledig was inside the dark, imposing office, Rowohlt did not exchange pleasantries but barked out an order: “Sit in my chair.”
“What?”