Recommending “The Most Precious Gift: Memories of the Holocaust, a Legacy of Lisette Lamon”

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Readers of this blog may recall that I worked with photojournalist Ruth Gruber, editing her work and helping her publish six of her eighteen books during her career as a trailblazing woman photojournalist and chronicler of displaced persons (DPs) after the Holocaust. Books we worked on together include Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1000 WWII Refugees and How They Came to America (Carroll & Graf Publishes, 2000) and Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (Union Square Press, 2008).

In the same vein, in 1999 while Executive Editor at Crown Publishing, I acquired rights to IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black. And in the early 1990s, I edited Solly Ganor’s affecting wartime memoir, Light One Candle: A Survivor’s Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem, which recounted his survival in the Kaunas (Kovno) ghetto and as a teenaged forced to labor underground in a dangerous mine. Let it suffice to say that Holocaust-themed titles are very much a part of my publishing persona.

That is why I was excited recently when I had the opportunity to edit a remarkable first-person primary source narrative of the Holocaust titled The Most Precious Gift: Memories of the Holocaust, A Legacy of Lisette Lamon.

Lisette Lamon was nineteen and engaged to Benno, the young man she loved, when with her parents she fled from Amsterdam to New York City prior to the Nazi invasion of Holland. Unable to bear the separation from her fiancé, she returned to Amsterdam so they could marry. Soon after their wedding, the Nazi occupiers of the Netherlands came to their home, to arrest a young man who had been rooming with them. In his absence, Benno was arrested instead and deported to the Mathausen concentration camp in Austria, where he would die  under Nazi captivity. Lisette became a motivated member of the Dutch Resistance, a courier for the movement. However, her work was discovered by the occupiers. She was arrested and sent to the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, then to Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

These shattering developments are established in the first few chapters of this emotive book, followed by a clear-eyed report on daily life in the camps, chronicled in thirty-five vignette-length chapters. In one chapter, “Euphemisms,” Lamon writes about the vocabulary inmates coined to express what they endured—a “Slipper Parade: the shuffling of inmates in the morning on the way to the washroom”; “Transport Noir: a trip to a death camp”; and “Vitamin R: a right connection that might help an inmate gain an extra ration of food.”  She writes about achingly beautiful children and stalwart adults who struggled to survive amid deprivation, overwork, malnourishment, and cruel treatment; the decline of the German fighting machine; and the survivors’ hope that if they could only stay alive long enough, they might be liberated by the Allies.

As Allied armies closed in on Bergen-Belsen, Lisette was placed with hundreds of other prisoners on a train car that was driven to the middle of a high bridge. The Germans intended to blow up the span, sending the inmates crashing into the river below and preempting the Allies’ push across the vital link into Nazi-held territory. But liberation came an hour before the explosives could detonate. When an American soldier asked the English-speaking Lisette if she would serve as an interpreter, she seized the opportunity to ask if a note could be sent to her parents in New York City informing them that their daughter was still alive. The officer gasped in astonishment when he looked at the address and saw it was the same Upper West Side apartment building where his own parents lived in Manhattan!

Lisette Lamon (1920-1982) remarried in the United States, and had a family with her new husband. She became a psychologist who pioneered in providing trauma counseling to survivors of the Holocaust, at a time when the category of survivors of the Holocaust was still a relatively new phenomenon, around the time that journalist Helen Epstein published her seminal book, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (G.P. Putnam, 1979). The manuscript of The Most Precious Gift came to me from David Mendels, the adult son of the author. David and I were friends and classmates at Franconia College in the 1970s, when I often heard from him about his remarkable mother and her Holocaust stories. After I edited the manuscript in consultation with David, the book was recently published in a handsome edition (French Hill Publications, hardcover with jacket, book design by Neuwirth & Associates, 195 pages, 11 photos, $19.45) and I am gratified to help him get the word out about his mother’s written legacy. I consider the title an ideal expression of what makes this book so special—it is indeed a most precious gift, an ideal Mother’s Day present, for instance. It is available as an ebook, as well as the handsomely printed and bound hardcover, which you may order it via this link.

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Sold: “PICTURE SHOW PLAYLIST: Pop Music in Film from the Crystals to Rihanna” by Nate Patrin

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Delighted to announce our sale of the second book by my agency client, music writer Nate Patrin. As a follow-up to his stellar debut, BRING THAT BEAT BACK: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, a Rolling Stone best music book of 2020, published by the University of Minnesota Press, Nate will be writing about music in film in a series of linked essays on eighteen movies for the PICTURE SHOW PLAYLIST: Pop Music in Film from the Crystals to Rihanna. In addition to the music and movie pairings noted in the adjacent Deal Report that’s running today in PublishersMarketplace, he’ll also be  covering these examples of pop music in movies:

  • John Coltrane, “A Love Supreme” — Mo’ Better Blues
  • The Delfonics, “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time” — Jackie Brown
  • Talking Heads, “The Big Country” — 20th Century Women
  • Simon & Garfunkel, “The Sounds of Silence” — The Graduate
  • The Doors, “The End” — Apocalypse Now
  • Steppenwolf, “The Pusher”—Easy Rider
  • Jimmy Cliff, “Many Rivers to Cross” — The Harder They Come

    I’m excited for Nate, whose first book received splendid reviews like this one: “A deeply informed, eminently readable account of a facet of pop music as complex as it is commonly underestimated.”—Music Books of 2020, on the Rough Trade music store blog.

The cover of Nate Patrin’s first book Bring that Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)

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Sold: “The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World” by Ray E. Boomhower

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One of the pleasures of having been an active literary agent for several years now is the satisfaction I get from selling a subsequent book by an author whose earlier book that I sold is already on the way to being published. This is the case with Ray E. Boomhower, whose biography of combat reporter, Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire From Guadalcanal to Vietnam will be published this November under the High Road Books imprint of the University of New Mexico Press. Yesterday we announced that Boomhower’s next book, The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World, has also been acquired by University of New Mexico Press. The book will detail how Browne—a most unlikely war correspondent who switched from life as a chemist to a journalist, and became the Associated Press’s bureau chief in Saigon at age 32—was the only Western reporter on June 11, 1963, to capture, with a cheap Japanese Petri brand camera, the image of Thich Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who immolated himself to protest the Catholic-dominated administration of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem.

Boomhower, who began publishing books long before we began working together (in fact, The Ultimate Protest will be his nineteenth title), has made a speciality of tracking the work of journalists at war, with earlier books on Ernie Pyle and Robert Sherrod, and the forthcoming book on Tregaskis, best known for publishing Guadalcanal Diary, the 1943 bestseller that was the first book in the US to emerge from the Pacific theater.

Chronicling the impact of the gruesome photo inside the Kennedy administration, from the draft manuscript:

“Jesus Christ!”

The sharp expletive uttered by President John F. Kennedy interrupted the telephone conversation he had begun early on the morning of Tuesday, June 11, 1963. The president was talking with his brother, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States, who had called to discuss what to do if Alabama governor George Wallace made good on his promise to deny the entry of two African American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, into the University of Alabama.

The impetus for the president’s exclamation had not been Wallace’s intransigence, but a photograph he saw splashed on the front pages of newspapers delivered to him that morning. Since May 8, 1963, when a company of Civil Guards had killed Vietnamese civilians protesting a new governmental decree outlawing the flying of the Buddhist flag on Buddah’s birthday in Hue, South Vietnam had been wracked by demonstrations. The awful image that had so startled the president showed a man—a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk named Thich Quảng Đức—engulfed in flames while calmly, it seemed, sitting in the lotus posture on a street in Saigon, South Vietnam.

Browne, who had been tipped off about the demonstration the evening before, was the only Western reporter on the scene to photograph the horrific event. Although the monk, as he burned, uttered no sound nor changed his position, Browne could see that his “features were contorted with agony” and could hear moans from the crowd that had gathered, as well as the ragged chanting from the approximately 300 yellow-robed monks and gray-robed Buddhist nuns who had joined the protest.

“Numb with shock I shot roll after roll of [35mm] film, focusing and adjusting exposures mechanically and unconsciously,” Browne recalled. “Trying hard not to perceive what I was witnessing I found myself thinking: ‘The sun is bright and the subject is self-illuminated, so f16 at 125th of a second should be right.’ But I couldn’t close out the smell.” The AP correspondent was almost overwhelmed by the smells of joss sticks—incense burned for religious rituals—mixed with burning gasoline and diesel fuel and the odor of burning flesh.

 

 

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Sold: “Cinema of Swords: A Popular Guide to Movies & TV Shows About Knights, Pirates, and Vikings (Plus Samurai and Musketeers)”

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Proud to announce the latest book by our agency client Lawrence Ellsworth, Cinema of Swords: A Popular Guide to Movies & TV Shows About Knights, Pirates, and Vikings (Plus Samurai and Musketeers), a popular reference tome containing hundreds of reviews of action movies and programs. It will be published in 2023 by Applause Theater and Cinema Books*.

Ellsworth is the pen name of Lawrence Schick (seen below), who is also translator of Alexandre Dumas’s  Musketeers Cycle from Pegasus Books. Early in his career, Schick was a writer on the team at TSR Hobbies that developed Dungeons & Dragons. He’s something of a role-playing game legend. An impetus for the new book is his popular web feature, Cinema of Swords, on his site, and on Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature.

Shots from videos below: 1) Toshiro Mifune as a crafty ronin in Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” (released in 1961); 2) Basil Rathbone ready to skewer Errol Flynn in “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), and 3) “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), with stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen’s ingeniously conceived skeletons clashing with Todd Armstrong as the seeker of the Golden Fleece.

 

 

 

 

 

*We earlier sold Applause Books Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater by Alexis Greene to be published in October 2021.

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Sold to Penguin Random House Audio: Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War, 1930-1949   by Janet Somerville

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I’m excited to announce a deal I’ve made for a major new audiobook to be published on May 18 2021 by Penguin Random House Audio for Toronto writer Janet Somerville’s widely praised book Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War, 1930-1949 (Firefly Books, hardcover 2019). Tony Award-winning actress Ellen Barkin*, a Gellhorn enthusiast and admirer of Somerville’s book, will be the voice of the audio edition. You can pre-order the audiobook via this link.

As with photojournalist Ruth Gruber** (1911-2016), Gellhorn (1908-1998, b. St Louis), was a trailblazer in her field. From the pitch letter I sent to acquiring editor Megan Mills at Penguin Random House Audio:

Journalist. Pioneer. Feminist. Human rights advocate. 

Martha Gellhorn was all of these and more, leaving her role as wife of Ernest Hemingway a lesser light among many noteworthy milestones. Rendered sensitively here by Janet Somerville in a curated collection of letters braided together with a biographical narrative threaded through the correspondence, Yours, for Probably Always brings readers into Gellhorn’s life and career shaped by her combat reporting, all spanning the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, WWII, the refugee crisis following the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Somerville also highlights Gellhorn’s friendships, her lovers, and a life lived intentionally. 

Gellhorn’s work speaks to our times; she was a champion of the poor and dispossessed, a vocal critic of war and brutality, and a warrior against oppression. Her weapons were her pen and her words. Her circle included Gary Cooper, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Beach, Colette, John Dos Passos, Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Adlai Stevenson, and Robert Capa, a dear friend. Among her regular correspondents reflected in this collection were Leonard Bernstein; Eleanor Roosevelt; H.G. Wells; Maxwell Perkins; Charles Scribner; US General James Gavin, a high-profile critic of America’s War in Vietnam, and a romantic partner to Gellhorn; French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel; and of course, Hemingway.

Along with the letters, the book includes examples of Gellhorn’s journalism, fiction, and excerpts from her journals. An ardent anti-fascist, Gellhorn was a life-long advocate of social justice and a strong-willed, self-made modern woman. Yours, for Probably Always shines a light on this intrepid reporter and fearless figure.

The reception for Yours, for Probably Always

When the hardcover edition was published it carried glowing endorsements from Ward Just and Azar Nafisi, seen on the book jacket above, receiving wide coverage and superb reviews, including a starred Kirkus; coverage in the Guardian, where it was their Book of the Day; the NY Review of Books; and some Twitter love from actor Alec Baldwin:

  • “Somerville makes an impressive book debut with a life of novelist, journalist, and intrepid war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, told through a captivating selection of her letters to friends, family, husbands, and lovers. The volume is enriched by Somerville’s biographical narrative and her decision to include responses of many recipients and, in some cases, letters between individuals who were especially significant in Gellhorn’s life… An engrossing collection that burnishes Gellhorn’s reputation as an astute observer, insightful writer, and uniquely brave woman.”—Kirkus Reviews, a starred review
  • “It’s history as it was lived, and shared in intimate emotional detail… Curated with valuable context by Janet Somerville… her own love letter of sorts to a woman she calls ‘a wonder.’”—Lyse Doucet, Guardian Books,
  • “Martha Gellhorn was many things, including a novelist and short story writer, but a ‘relator of Wars”’ is the most important of them. . . . As early as 1935, her regular correspondent Allen Grover wrote to Gellhorn that ‘I should one day publish your collected letters. They’re magnificent prose.’ They are—and they are also precious traces of the turbulent, passionate, relentless, self-examined inner life of a woman of honor whose indomitable character is beautifully summed up by her mother in Somerville’s invigorating collection: ‘She lacks everything that makes living easy, she possesses most things that make it worthwhile.’”—Fintan O’Toole, New York Review of Books
  • The CBC radio program Day 6 aired a feature on Somerville’s book which explained,
    “Though [Gellhorn’s] dispatches from Normandy and Spain, which documented a mother’s grief after her child was killed by a bomb, brought humanity to tragedy for years, it was a report on Dachau…that made her famous. ‘My personal war aim was to get into Dachau,’ Gellhorn [said] in a 1983 TV interview. ‘I did get there and I was there the day the war ended. I didn’t have to be objective, in the sense that what was there to be objective about? It was a total and absolute horror and all I did was report it as it was.'”

Janet Somerville and Ellen Barkin

Somerville learned of Barkin’s interest in Gellhorn in 2019 when she offered to send the actor a copy of the hardcover book. They continued exchanging correspondence, by letter, text, and Twitter. Barkin told Somerville that she loved reading a few pages every night before bed, with Gellhorn’s powerful words, and Somerville’s narrative about her, in her mind’s ear.

In summer 2020, the pair spoke voice-to-voice for the first time, and Janet planted a seed about Ellen becoming her book’s voice, should there be an audiobook. Ellen responded with [almost] unprintable alacrity: “It would be my fucking honor.”

Around this time, I became Janet’s agent and my pitch to Penguin Random House Audio came soon after.

We cannot imagine anyone more suited to give Martha Gellhorn’s words vibrant life than Ellen Barkin. Like Gellhorn, she is intelligent, funny, indefatigable, an outspoken champion of the most disenfranchised among us, and a true supporter of social justice, willing to give voice to important issues when a less brave person would turn away. We are delighted she is adding her singular luster to Yours, for Probably Always.

Hemingway on PBS

We’re excited to announce the audiobook this week featuring the voice of Ellen Barkin, ahead of Ken Burns’s new documentary “Hemingway,” which will air on PBS, April 5-7.

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*  Ellen Barkin was awarded the Tony in 2011 for her role in “The Normal Heart,” her Broadway debut. She broke out as a film actress in 1982 with her performance in “Diner.” She’s also known for her performances in “Tender Mercies” (1983), “Big Easy” (1986), “Sea of Love” (1989), “This Boy’s Life” (1993), “Ocean’s Thirteen” (2007), and “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (2017).

** Like Gellhorn, Ruth Gruber was a foreign correspondent. I’ve often wondered if Gellhorn and Gruber crossed paths, as their careers tracked closely. Along with reporting from abroad, both women served in the FDR administration—Gellhorn in the Federal Relief Emergency Administration (FERA), and Gruber as Interior Secretary Harold Ickes’ Special Representative to Alaska. I worked with Gruber for twenty years, publishing six of her eighteen books, including Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 WWII Refugees and How They Came to America (Three Rivers Press, 2000, and a CBS mini-series with Natasha Richardson as Ruth Gruber) and Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (Union Square Press, 2008).

 

 

 

 

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