Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (24 page)

Schocken has a long tradition of publishing primarily nonfiction Judaica, most particularly works dealing with the basic sources of the Jewish inspiration—the classic texts that speak to both religious and secular Jews seeking access to the sources of their culture. As one of the few Jewish publishers still functioning in Germany under the Nazis until 1938, Schocken played an instrumental role in bolstering the morale of the assimilated German Jewish community by introducing them to their proud cultural legacy, often for the first time. Their list, then as now, included works by Buber, Agnon, Scholem, and Franz Kafka. Upon the reestablishment of the firm in New York in 1945, many of these classics, such as Buber’s
Tales of the Hasidim
, were translated and published in English.

This distinguished list chugged along, largely subsidized by the Schocken family, until it met up with a fortunate advent coming out of the American Jewish community itself during the late 1960s—the rise of Jewish studies courses at secular universities. As a leader in the new field of quality-size paperback books intended for course adoption, Schocken Books became the mainstay of many of these courses, and also for the Jewish adult education market that gained momentum at this time.

This impressive history has guided my selection of books from the beginning of my tenure as senior acquisitions editor for Judaica in 1982. The books I publish are all trade books, aimed at the general trade reader in hardcover, but also have a second life in college courses and adult education markets in paperback. Trade books are notoriously ephemeral; I always acquire with an eye toward the paperback backlist; I look for books that I know will have a consistent market for at least a decade.

A major part of my program is translations—translations of classic texts and, equally important, books by contemporary authors that make these sources accessible. (Books like
Everyman’s Talmud
by Abraham Cohen,
Understanding Genesis
and
Exploring Exodus
by Nahum Sarna, and
Women and Jewish Law
by Rachel Biale serve this function.) It is no accident that the most important events in Jewish publishing in the last decade were translation projects—the publication of
The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition
by Random House and
Tanakh
(the Hebrew Bible with commentaries) by the Jewish Publication Society. American Jews are desperate to educate themselves in a tradition that they can only read in translation. Since our readers come from a variety of backgrounds, there is no substitute for making the sources themselves available. In the fall of 1992, Schocken will publish the first complete English translation of Bialik and Ravnitzky’s
The Book of Legends/Sefer Ha-Aggadah
—a giant compendium of legends and
parables from the Talmud and Midrash. It’s thirty-three hundred pages in manuscript, an incredible job to edit, and I should have my head examined for taking it on. But I feel that making this classic available in English is a service to the Jewish community and one that they will value.

Schocken’s Library of Yiddish Classics series, which so far includes newly translated volumes of Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, and Ansky (author of
The Dybbuk)
, aims to give a coherent presentation of a secular Yiddish legacy. Each generation needs its own translations of the classics, to keep them vital.

Times change, and so does the community, and we have to keep pace with it. I’ve noticed some definite changes in tastes and demands over the years, most recently an increasing demand for Jewish books that deal with spirituality, a topic Jews have traditionally shied away from in the past. I’ve seen it with the success we’ve had with Aryeh Kaplan’s
Jewish Meditation
, a book that developed a grass-roots following largely by word of mouth. I’m seeing more books from other publishers as well that address spiritual needs and concerns, often in highly personal styles.

Numerous books are still published every year on the subjects of contemporary Israel and the Holocaust, but I don’t think these two themes are the exclusive foci of the American Jew’s Jewish identity the way they were a decade ago. Contemporary Jews seem to be struggling less with issues of identity and more with issues of content, meaning, and relevance. Since the publication of
The Jewish Catalog
by Richard Siegel and Michael and Sharon Strassfeld (Jewish Publication Society) in the early 1970s, which was the first of the do-it-yourself guides for Jewish adult education, there has been an ever-increasing demand for intelligent how-to books for Jewish living and guides for Jewish learning. The latter received an enormous boost from
Back to the Sources
, edited by Barry W. Holtz (Summit). The key word in education generally these days is “empowerment”; these books encourage and equip the reader with the skills to experience parts of this tradition firsthand. These developments have forced me to reassess our backlist and adjust our program to meet current needs. In addition to translations, I find these days that I am doing more of what I call books “for living Jews, by living Jews.”

Schocken’s acquisition by Random House in 1987, where it now functions as a Judaica imprint, also forced me to reevaluate my editorial policy. When I first entered this large commercial conglomerate I defended every title on the backlist on the grounds of sheer merit; I was the zealous “defender of the faith.” Gradually it dawned on me: if no one is reading the heavier works of philosophy and intellectual history written by a former generation, then for whom are we doing them? Some classics are timeless,
others are not, and the Jewish public shows us what it wants. I’ve also seen new books emerge as classics of our own generation, such as Primo Levi’s
Periodic Table
(Schocken).

While the books I publish are for laypersons, I need qualified teachers to write them. Most often, the writers I work with are rabbis and professors of Jewish Studies, and the major task is getting them to write for the general reader. Once, as I congratulated an author on a completely revised and quite wonderful manuscript, he told me that a piece of advice I had shared helped him to find his voice. I had reminded him of a maxim from our days teaching Hebrew school: “First they have to like you; then, maybe, they’ll let you teach them something.” This had alerted him to the fact that he had plunged into his subject without taking his reader along with him. He started the next draft with a personal account of how his own interest in the subject began, allowing the reader to identify with him, share his excitement, and join him on his journey. Our readers are sophisticated adults who are not necessarily versed in Judaica or used to the catchwords used by professionals in the field. Moreover, their questions are different from the ones an academic may find fascinating. Bringing the fruits of contemporary Jewish scholarship to a broader public entails finding a voice other than the one scholars use in writing for their colleagues. Working with these teachers of our own generation is one of the most exciting parts of our program.

My most valuable time is spent outside of the office, at academic and educational conferences, where I get my inspiration, and ideas for new books. I sell books myself—mainly because I want to hear what people are saying about them. Rabbis, teachers, and professors are all eager to tell me what books they’ve used in courses and whether they’d use them again. They tell me about the books they wish existed, and suggest the authors who might write them. They tell me when to revive, reprint, or replace a book that has become dated.
The Schocken Guide to Jewish Books
is an example of a book born out of such a discussion of contemporary needs, in this case the need for a really useful reader’s guide to books on Jewish history, literature, culture, and religion.

Sometimes a book emerges whole from a lecture series I’ve attended, or an idea for a book arises from an informal post-synagogue discussion. A major part of my job is finding the right author for these unwritten books. A sample chapter quickly tells me, as well as the author, whether this is a match made in heaven or not. It’s always worth a try.

A word must be said about the commercial side of this kind of publishing. As a full-time Judaica editor in charge of a small but prestigious imprint at one of the largest commercial publishing houses, I am constantly balancing conflicting imperatives: the need to maintain the caliber of Schocken’s list,
the profit expectations of its parent company, and serving the Jewish public, which doesn’t always know what it needs, especially when we enter the realm of the things that do not yet exist.

For example, I’ve always dreamed of doing a collection of essays by Berdichevsky—that early Zionist ideologue without whom it is impossible to understand the mentality of the secular Israeli. But I also know the sales potential of a volume by this virtually unknown essayist, and the kind of marketing effort it would take to put such a book on the map. Even with aggressive marketing, I doubt if we would ever make Berdichevsky a household name. Is it worth doing? Of course! Is it worth putting the survival of the Schocken imprint at risk—with accountants running around with calculators on every floor? Definitely not. This is a project for a subsidized press, a university press, or the company I’d start if I wind up with a very rich husband.

Let’s get back to “putting the book on the map”—because that’s also part of the job as a Judaica editor within a large company. Other departments depend on you for your firsthand knowledge of the community. The Jewish market is a very diverse one, as I mentioned earlier. There are splits not only along denominational lines, but genre ones as well. The passionate fan of secular Yiddish literature is not the same reader as the person who would buy a book on the Bible or biblical theology—or, for that matter, a guide to some aspect of Jewish practice or holiday observance. It’s up to the editor to pinpoint the market, select the right journals in which to advertise the book or get it reviewed, and pick the people whose blurbs will matter in that market. I still remember the ambitious young sales rep who got thrown out of an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish bookstore when he tried to sell them a book by Mordecai Kaplan (the founder of Reconstructionism, one of the nontraditional approaches to Jewish practice). I went back with him to show the book buyer which titles were Orthodox enough for his clientele—and distributed that list to the reps as well. I always try to target the book’s audience for the sales force. I also do a lot of direct mail, since different sectors of the Jewish market are so well defined, and because interested readers in many parts of the country will never see these books if they depend on chain bookstores. Ultimately, a book sells well if it is
besheret
(destined to)—but
besheret
also means that
your
efforts have already been figured into the equation.

In terms of promotion, nothing compares to what an author can do for his or her own book. Every speaking engagement, every Jewish book fair and Jewish community center appearance that the author can line up helps, and most publishers are delighted to make copies of the book available for sale at these events. Basically, an author can utilize all of his connections to promote his book, and can help his publisher utilize them as well. I am very
much aware of the difference an energetic author can make because I also do a lot of classics in translation; with dead authors, you obviously do not have this opportunity.

Before you get the idea that being a Judaica editor is the most enviable job in the world, let me explain why we as a group are characteristically prone to spurts of zeal, depression, and melodrama: it is due to a searing sense of responsibility. Gazing out his window on the Brandeis University campus, Professor Glatzer, my mentor in Jewish publishing whom I mentioned earlier, remarked: “This is a generation that gets its Judaism from
Encyclopedia Judaica.”
What a profound and sobering observation! American Jews depend on
books
for their first serious exposure to the culture—the fullblown civilization—that gives content and meaning to their identity as Jews. And those of us involved in Jewish publishing dare not fail them. As a colleague once confided in me, “I’d like to go sailing just one afternoon without the fate of the Jewish people on my shoulders.” I know exactly what he means. I myself often identify with the prophet Jeremiah; Jeremiah had his mission, and once he took it up, he couldn’t lay it down, although he kvetched about it all the time. I am sure that if Jeremiah came back in the twentieth century, he would be a congregational rabbi or a Judaica editor.

Each year, articles appear in
Publishers Weekly
and
Judaica Book News
surveying the current crop of Jewish books, celebrating the variety and vitality of this field. I’ve written a few of these upbeat pieces myself. But the flip side of this celebratory air is a much more sobering consciousness of the stakes involved. At the back of all of our minds is what Leslie Fiedler has termed “the silent Holocaust”—the attrition of American Jews from the Jewish community through assimilation. And for most, assimilation is not a deliberate choice, which must be respected, but a de facto occurrence resulting from sheer lack of knowledge and exposure to Jewish life. For those of us who believe that humanity would be poorer—actually frighteningly poorer—without the unique insights of Jewish culture and the Jewish people, this is a source of unbearable pain.

It would be a mistake to gear Jewish publishing to the reader who wouldn’t think of buying a Jewish book in the first place. Certainly we have our hands full keeping up with the needs of a high-caliber, Jewishly educated community, both professional and lay, people who love, use, and need Jewish books. But I also feel strongly that our books should be accessible to anyone who cares enough to open one: books that are true to the tradition they represent and provide keys to seekers from many backgrounds. And if they inspire one of those readers to feel, in a personal, heartfelt way, that the Jewish legacy is indeed his or her own, that in itself would validate my commitment to Jewish publishing and the Jewish community.