The smart money is on the jackal

Revolutions produce unlikely heroes, and the Digital Revolution has produced a very unlikely one in the form of a man that many believe is so wanting in ethical principles that he is nicknamed The Jackal. Yet it is on literary agent Andrew Wylie’s fangs and claws that the populist dream of a fair e-book royalty rests as he dares the world’s highest profile trade book publisher to do something about the slap he has administered to its face.

The smart money is on The Jackal, and to understand why you have to think like a jackal.  While pundits debate contract law and publishing ethics, the real war is being conducted on a less visible battlefield. But it is one on which Wylie holds the high ground.

To understand Random House’s reluctance to protect its rights from Wylie and other marauders you need to understand a number of not so obvious factors.  The most salient of them is this: Publishers are loath to sue authors (or the widows and children of authors).

Let’s see how these factors play out in the power struggle unfolding before our eyes.

Random House not confident of its legal position

In 2001 Random House sued Rosetta, an e-book startup that acquired directly from authors the digital rights to books by such Random House lions as Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Robert B. Parker and William Styron, books that were still in print in paper format under Random House imprints. Random had published them before there was such a thing as e-books, but nevertheless considered a book is a book is a book whether in tangible or digital form. The courts however rejected Random’s position, denying their request for an injunction against Rosetta. Random filed an appeal and the court turned it down. A second appeal was rejected too, forcing Random to work out a settlement with Rosetta. The critical issue – what is a book? – remained unlitigated and left Random uncertain about its legal position.

Random Backs off from Open Road Threat

When publishing superstar Jane Friedman launched her Open Road e-book venture she declared her intention to start with several works by Styron including Sophie’s Choice and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Confessions of Nat Turner. The problem was, Random House claimed it owned those rights (presumably having recovered them from Rosetta as part of the settlement) and it issued a stern warning to all “third parties” without naming Friedman specifically. Authors, stated CEO Marcus Dohle, are “precluded from granting publishing rights to third parties that would compromise the rights for which Random House has bargained.” By drawing a line in the sand, Random expected Friedman and other potential interlopers to back off or face the full wrath of the publisher’s litigators. (see Random House Serves Notice on Would-Be E-Interlopers)

It is  a fundamental business principle that you don’t make threats you aren’t prepared to act on. And that is why we were flabbergasted four months later to learn that Random House had released e-rights to the Styron estate (See Random Returns Sabre to Scabbard in Styron E-Book Standoff). What was that about?

“The decision of the Styron estate is an exception,” Random executive Stuart Applebaum explained. “Our understanding is that this is a unique family situation.”

Why, after rattling its saber so truculently, did Random give in? In our estimation it’s because ultimately, to make good on their threat, they would have had to sue Styron’s widow and children. And that would be a public relations disaster.

Whether Styron was truly an exception or Random blinked, one thing was clear to publishing professionals: sooner or later there would be further tests of the publisher’s determination. How would Random react the next time?

We’re about to find out.

Don’t Bother Suing Agents

Claiming that he hates the low e-book royalties paid by traditional publishers (see Random House Changes E-Book Royalty Policy), agent Wylie, representing hundreds of distinguished authors such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and the late John Updike, announced that he is starting his own e-book publishing venture and intends to launch it with books published by Random House and other trade book publishers.

Does he have the right to do that? Wylie says he does: “The fact remains that backlist digital rights were not conveyed to publishers, and so there’s an opportunity to do something with those rights,” he declares.

Despite what happened with Open Road, some industry observers expected Random House to threaten to sue Wylie’s ass into pebble-sized pieces. But Wylie knows they won’t, because, generally speaking, agents are not legally liable for breaches of contract committed by their clients. A lawsuit against Wylie would in all likelihood be thrown out of court, and the judge would tell Random that if they have a beef it’s with Wylie’s authors, they’ll have to sue Wylie’s authors. Which brings us back to our thesis: Publishers are loath to sue authors (or the widows and children of authors).

So? How does Random intend to punish Wylie? “Regrettably,” Applebaum declared, “Random House on a worldwide basis will not be entering into any new English-language business agreements with the Wylie Agency until this situation is resolved.”

This is known as the We’ll Cut Off Our Nose to Spite Your Face ploy, and it will avail Random nothing. Wylie’s clients are so coveted by Random’s rivals that if Random made good on its threat you’d see the greatest migration since the Aleuts crossed the Bering Land Bridge.  Jackals are standing by!

Buyer? Seller?

Though legal threats won’t faze Andrew Wylie, handling the challenge of being both an agent and an e-book publisher might. A number of knowledgeable people like Macmillan’s John Sargent have not only deplored Wylie’s decision to put all his authors’ eggs in Amazon’s basket but have questioned whether it’s in the best interests of his authors. There is arguably more money to be made selling not just to Amazon but to Sony, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and other retailers.

Navigating the shoals of conflict of interest between buyer and seller is another daunting task. Even if he is able to build a “Chinese wall” insulating the two functions from short-circuiting each other, Wylie’s own clients will reasonably want to know how it’s going to work: “If my agent is now my publisher, who am I supposed hire to negotiate with him?”

Will Wylie’s stratagem succeed in forcing publishers to raise their royalty rate?  Not a chance.  E-book royalties will eventually go up, but it will be no thanks to Crusader Wylie. But we thank him for articulating the dissatisfaction of authors and agents with low royalty rates and for so fearlessly acting on his convictions.

Richard Curtis

Mummified remains of literary agent, Jurassic Period

A fierce debate about the role of literary agents has burst into flames. Agent Victoria Strauss has summed it up in a posting in Writer Beware entitled Are agents underpaid?

Those who are sympathetic towards the agents’ plight point out that “agents’ job descriptions have expanded over the past couple of decades, and that they must now do much more for the same 15% they earned twenty years ago.” writes Strauss. “They also get no payment at all for a good portion of what they do on a regular basis–reading queries and manuscripts, editing, submitting books that never sell. In a highly competitive environment, with shrinking advances (at the midlist level, anyway) and cautious publishers, it’s getting harder and harder to make a living.” (That’s putting it mildly.  See What Your Agent Has Done for You Lately.”)

A variety of remedies for suffering agents is being promulgated. One is to shift their compensation from a contingency basis to charging for billable hours the way lawyers do.  Another is charging for specific services that are now freely offered, such as editing, lecture and tour arrangements, marketing, promotional activities, website management, and social networking. Still others are setting up publication programs for clients who contemplate self-publication. Another answer is for agents to raise their commissions. About this option Strauss reminds us that “During the 1980s and 1990s, US agents raised their commissions from 10% to 15%; it seems to me that an increase to 20% could be undertaken with relatively minimal pain on all sides. This would acknowledge the ways in which agenting has changed and expanded, but wouldn’t unfairly burden writers.” (Strauss does not seem to have confirmed that with any authors.)

These are all viable alternatives, and some of them are being implemented as agents urgently strive to redefine themselves. Many of them will work. But will agents still be defined as agents as we know them today? Or are we witnessing the birth of a new species?

Years ago, in anticipation of the changing identity of authors in a digital paradigm, I asked the question “Author?  What’s an Author?” Implied in that question was another question: “Agent? What’s an Agent?” As the nature of authorship evolves, so will the nature of agentship. But a day will come when agents are unrecognizably transformed from the fearsome breed that tramped the Earth in the late 20th century. Which leads me to wonder if we’re asking the wrong question. It’s not “Are agents underpaid?” but rather, Are agents doomed?

The inescapable fact is that agents are intermediaries in a disintermediating world, and digital technology is remorseless in its dissolution of those who stand between buyer and seller. The chasm between writers and publishers, for so long occupied by literary agents, has narrowed as authors realize that they are but one touch of their Send key away from their readers.

That depressing but inescapable truth should be borne in mind as you read Strauss’s Are Agents Underpaid? and the equally thought-provoking response by Jane Friedman, Director of Content & Community Development at Writer’s Digest, entitled Agents Need to Develop Alternative Models.

Richard Curtis

Not much left of the client after this jackal was through with him

Alleging that another agent tried to poach one of her agency’s clients, ICM mega-agent Esther Newberg lit into rival Andrew Wylie in a public denunciation aired at the recent Book Expo of America in New York’s Javits Center. The author in question was not named.

Wylie’s reputation for raiding literary chicken coops is so well known in the agency field that he is nicknamed “The Jackal”. “The British press,” reports the New York Post, “is usually credited with tagging Wylie with the Jackal nickname back in 1995, when he obtained a $750,000 advance for [Martin] Amis after persuading the British writer to dump his longtime agent, Pat Kavanagh, even though she was the wife of Julian Barnes, a best friend of Amis’ at the time.”

Newberg declared war on Wylie, vowing “I am just lying in wait for the moment when I can get back at him.”

Client-stealing is not uncommon in the literary agency profession, but it is usually conducted with more finesse than the Newberg-Wylie fracas.  As I pointed out in Are Literary Agents Friends or Rivals? “Antagonism between agents flares up over the interpretation of just how loudly, sweetly, and aggressively an agent sings his firm’s praises to an author represented by another agent. You might think of it as the Smoking Gun theory of client-stealing: if the author walks in the door of another agency in a state of uncertainty but walks out clutching a signed agreement with his new agent, it can be inferred that something considerably more than a soft-sell occurred behind that door.”

Though agents can gain a certain degree of protection by issuing client contracts, it’s hard to keep an unhappy author against his or her will.

Every agent has been the recipient of a “Dear John” letter citing “differences in philosophy” and similar nonsensical explanations that are really thinly disguised pretexts for the fact that another agency filched the author. One agent told me he’d been informed that his former client had decided to go with a big bicoastal agency because it had movie clout. What kind of books did this author write that were perfect vehicles for major motion pictures?  Regency romances! Though a gentleman, the exasperated agent told this author, “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

You can read all the gory details in Secret agent clash by Keith J. Kelly, Jennifer Gould Keil and Michael Gray.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Post.

Asked to free-associate with the name “Bowker” most publishing people think of such publishing services as ISBN book-identification numbers and similar tedious but essential data.  But, in a surprising announcement emailed to publishing professionals, Bowker today announced a service for authors, and one guaranteed to raise some eyebrows.

“I am writing to inform you of the exciting release of Bowker Manuscript Submissions,” writes Natalie Piccotti. “a new online service allowing authors to submit their manuscript ideas to a number of publishing houses from one central location.

“BowkerManuscriptSubmissions.com will be featured at Book Expo America in May 2010, and will officially launch in June 2010.”

The initiative is designed to “streamline the process of sorting through an overwhelming volume of unsolicited manuscripts publishers receive. Built off the success of Christian Manuscript Submissions, Bowker will now provide a similar service to the trade and higher education publishing communities.”

For an annual fee of $295 the program will…

* Sort by subject of choice and submission date
* Search by keywords in title, description and topic
* Identify proposals that have been professionally edited
* Cut down on wasted time – our system remembers your last date of entry so you do not read previously reviewed manuscripts
* Contact the writer directly
* Find proposals by author’s name
* Review an author’s publishing history, book summary, and writing style in one step

Before literary agents’ noses go out of joint, the announcement reassures them that the submission program will enable them to promote their services and match their clients’ ideas to the best possible publisher.

Our nose remains in place (though permanently deviated 5 degrees by a football injury), but we suspect many an agent will wonder if the program can substitute for or even supplement a lifetime of knowledge and wisdom, experience and cultivation of relationships.  Will Bowker Submissions know if the science fiction list of Publisher A is inventoried, or the romance editor of Publisher B just jumped to Publisher C, or if Publisher D just acquired the same idea from another author six months ago?  Will Bowker Submissions buy us lunch? Will it hold an author’s hand when her idea has been shot down at ten houses?

These mean-spirited observations aside, we welcome the program as an interesting attempt to offer vital information for authors and agents.  And here’s the best part – if Bowker makes a match between an author and a publisher, it won’t ask the agent to split a commission.

Richard Curtis

Don’t start the e-book revolution without us. That seems to be the message coming out of the literary agent community as reflected in their response to invitations to a major conference taking place in New York City’s Sheraton Hotel and Towers at the end of January and presented by F+W Media (publisher of Writer’s Digest and Writer’s Market)

The revolution has overcome countless obstacles on the road to the tipping point, but one stubborn source of resistance has been the agents. Their intransigence has not been so much a matter of hostility as uncertainty. Caught flat-footed by developments that went from zero to warp-drive speed in the blink of an eye, agents have struggled to get a handle on their role in the new e-world order. Though they take pride in being ahead of their clients, in the case of e-books many of their authors are way ahead of them, doing things or at least thinking thoughts that do not involve services commissionable by their agents such as self-publication of unsold books. Other agents simply want to be able to answer author questions or help their clients find a place in a universe that seems to be hurtling out of control. One wag described it as “Agents on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” (See Why Don’t Agents Want to Play?)

Mike Shatzkin, chairing Digital Book World on January 26th-27th, is determined to draw agents into the e-book process by designing a number of programs specifically to interest them. “The Changing Agent-Author Relationship: How It Will Affect the Business Model,” chaired by Oprah’s Book Club’s Sara Nelson, is one such. Another, “Tomorrow’s Book Contract,” chaired by yours truly, features several agents, a lawyer and a publishing company rights manager presenting wish lists of contract language and provisions reflecting changes in the publishing landscape.

Other panels and speeches will address non-e-book topics of concern to agents such as “Back-Loaded Book Deals: No (and Low) Advance Contracts, Profit-Sharing and Other Innovative Business Models”.

With its glittering roster of publishing industry star speakers and panelists, we’re told that the conference is almost sold out, but if you’re a literary agent you can be sure Mike Shatzkin will do his best to squeeze you in.

For complete information, visit Digital Book World.

Richard Curtis

“At least one major publishing company will be acquired by a retailer,” predicts Richard Curtis in Galley Cat. “For instance (and this is NOT a prediction, just a for-instance), Amazon could acquire Random House or Apple could buy Simon & Schuster.”

That is one of eight prognostications offered by Curtis in a response to an invitation by Jeff Rivera to share his vision for the publishing business in the next ten years.

“A combined publisher/retailer solves many problems for both.” Curtis amplified on his prediction of a publisher/retailer hybrid. “The retailer owns the content and doesn’t have to pay a premium for it. The publisher does not have to pay a premium to distribute its books. There would be huge efficiencies of manufacturing and distribution.”

You can read all eight here.

Don Congdon, one of the world’s great literary agents, died Monday at the age of 91.

In his New York Times obituary, William Grimes described the seminal moment in Congdon’s career – his discovery of Ray Bradbury when Congdon was working at the Harold Matson agency. He represented Bradbury for 53 years. “’I married Don Congdon the same month I married my wife,’” Grimes reports Bradbury in a speech. “’So I had 53 years of being spoiled by my wife and by Don Congdon. We’ve never had a fight or an argument during that time because he’s always been out on the road ahead of me clearing away the dragons and the monsters and the fakes.’” Mr. Bradbury dedicated his novel Fahrenheit 451 to Mr. Congdon.”

Congdon’s agency is now run by his son Michael.

Read Grimes’ full obituary here.

Every literary agent owes a debt of gratitude to Don Congdon, a pioneer, a role model and a legend.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Last week Amazon flew a dozen top New York book agents to Seattle. The purpose was to debrief their attitudes towards e-books in general and Kindle in particular. After reading an account of the meetings and festivities, I did some rough calculations and figure Amazon spent upwards of $10,000 to pick those splendid brains. I estimated $600 per agent for round trip airfare, $150 for hotel accommodations, and $200 for food and incidentals. All multiplied by twelve.

I could have saved Amazon all that money. I’ve known for ten years what’s been holding agents back from plunging into e-book pool, and in fact I can tell it to you in one word: advances. The agents have been waiting for something they can identify with the traditional business model. And advances are as traditional as Thanksgiving turkeys.

Who can blame the agents for being standoffish? Picture a macher like Lynn Nesbit or Bob Gottlieb calling an author to say “I have great news for you! I’ve made a deal for e-book rights to your new book plus half a dozen of your old ones!” And you say “Great! What are they paying?” And they say “Um, nothing, actually.” Oh, that’s really going to bind them to their clients!

The truth is that up to now the infant business could not afford advances. As Mike Shatzkin brilliantly pointed out in a speech at last spring’s BEA, the digital revolution has been costly for publishers confronting a tear-down of an infrastructure based on something tangible and replacing it with a virtual one.

However, now that the old indusry is getting with the program and accepting the need to heavily reinvest, we will see a transition into that most familiar of publishing concepts, the advance against royalties.

But that raises an interesting question: who exactly is going to be paying these advances? Because e-rights have been close to worthless for agents who have battened for decades on six- and seven-digit deals (even a few for eight digits), they have simply thrown the e-rights into their deals with publishers for no extra front-money. There are signs however that independent e-book houses are starting to offer advances. When that becomes more of a rule than an exception, major publishers will be forced to compete.

And if they decline to compete? Then you will see agents pushing to split e-book rights away from the basic rights package they negotiate with publishers, and e-book will take its place as a reserved right like movie and audio. In fact, audio offers a perfect parallel: at the beginning of the audio revolution, authors and their agents tossed audio rights into a book deal for nothing. Who cared about audio? But in time those rights became so valuable – they are now a billion dollar business – that, today, no self-respecting agent would think of including audio rights in a deal unless the publisher was prepared to sweeten the advance.

Is this the message that the Magnificent Dozen communicated to their Seattle hosts? I hope so. There’s a ton of great material being held off the market by agents waiting to hear that one delicious word that will make them open their gates.

Richard Curtis

Jofie Ferrari-Adler, an editor with Grove Atlantic Publishers, has taken it upon himself to conduct, for Poets & Writers, a series of lengthy Q&A’s with distinguished editors and literary agents whose careers exemplify values and virtues that are rapidly fading from the daily discourse of the publishing business. It is absolutely incumbent on every member of our community 40 years old or younger to listen to their voices and imbibe their experiences so that you can understand what publishing was like when men and women of charm, taste and integrity walked the earth.

Ferrari-Adler’s most recent interview is with literary agent Georges Borchardt, who has represented and in some cases discovered such towering figures as Marguerite Duras, Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Samuel Beckett, Elie Wiesel, John Gardner, Charles Johnson, and even General de Gaulle.

A brief excerpt or two…

J F-A: Let’s talk a little about the industry. You’ve been in it for several decades, over the course of which it’s changed a lot, or at least that’s what people seem to say. What’s your take on that?

GB: It has changed. Mainly it’s the shift from individual ownership to corporate ownership. The individuals who owned the firms were, for the most part, the sons of millionaires. They didn’t need to take money out of the firm. They lived well before, they lived well during, and they had something very valuable afterward. Knopf became very valuable. Farrar, Straus became very valuable. So the heirs, I suppose, got a good amount of money. But the purpose [of founding those firms] wasn’t really to make money. The purpose was the excitement of publishing. It’s totally different now. Not so much at Grove/Atlantic or Norton—those are two firms for which what I’m saying doesn’t apply—except that they are competing against these giants. So if Grove/Atlantic has a book that becomes a major best-seller, it can’t hold on to the author, even if the author has made lots of protestations about how he will never leave the firm because he’s in love with all the people who work there. Either he, or his agent, or both, will decide that rather than taking a million from little Grove/Atlantic, they’re better off taking six million from somebody bigger. So they are affected by it too. The corporate thing has sort of poisoned the whole industry.

J F-A: What has that meant for writers?

GB: It’s mainly meant that they’ve become products. And that their main relationship is more with their literary agent. In a way it has worked well for the agents. Their main relationship is much more seldom with the editor because the editor’s position is very precarious. You’ve already changed jobs like four times. That was most unusual when I started in publishing. If you were an editor at Knopf, you stayed an editor at Knopf. There are still editors at Knopf who have been there forever: Judith Jones; Ash Green, who just retired; Bill Koshland, who was not an editor but more the business person. When Bill was chairman emeritus, well after Alfred had died and Bob Gottlieb had taken over, he would still take all the royalty statements home and look at them to be sure they were right. Now there’s no one on the editorial side of a publishing house who even sees the royalty statements. They have no idea what’s on them. They have no idea whether the reserve for returns is outrageous or justified. The person who decides on the reserve doesn’t know either. The whole climate has changed.

Ferrari-Adler has also interviewed literary agents Molly Friedrich, Nat Sobel and Lynn Nesbit, editors Janet Silver, Pat Strachan and Chuck Adams, plus a host of young editors and agents. Each Q&A is a gem, and their cumulative effect is to transport us to a culture that is every bit as worth preserving and revering as the our rapidly dwindling glaciers and forests.

Richard Curtis

In the 1930s, more than 3000 years after Moses led an enslaved Jewish population out of the land of Egypt, a small but thriving Sephardic Jewish community flourished in Cairo and Alexandria. Some settled there from the Middle East, others from Europe, particularly Spain and Portugal after the expulsion of the Jews in the 15th century.

They had become affluent and influential through finance and trade. Though devotedly clinging to their Sephardic customs and practices, by the middle of the 20th century they were well integrated into the public life of their host country, contributing to the common weal and even underwriting many significant civic works and public services. They did not flaunt their faith, indeed most of them thought of themselves as Egyptian citizens who also happened to be Jewish, not unlike German Jews in the early 1930s.

Indeed, the fates of the German and Egyptian Jews of that era are strikingly parallel. Reading Jean Naggar’s recently published memoir, Sipping from the Nile, I thought of Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns, a wrenching tale of a well-to-do Berlin family of Jewish furniture merchants who in 1932 and ‘33 were subtly but inexorably sucked into the maelstrom of Nazi antisemitism until it ruined and destroyed them. Naggar’s book is a series of snapshots — literally, for it is illustrated with wonderful photos of her family and home — of a robust and bountiful Jewish society just before, during, and after its destruction and the dispersion of its citizenry.

The author, born in 1937, was raised in a luxurious home built in Cairo by her grandfather. There she enjoyed a carefree, almost fairy-tale upbringing amidst a large, distinguished, prosperous and tightly knit clan. Sipping from the Nile lyrically evokes the sensual beauty of the place — the shimmering sun-drenched atmosphere, the weight of Nile history and culture extending back to the dawn of civilization, the aromas and textures, colors and clamor of an exotic land. In this lush and magical milieu her family and other members of Cairo’s and Alexandria’s Sephardic enclaves were not merely tolerated but honored.

The young girl experienced what Sybil Steinberg described as “a privileged childhood in a halcyon time,” pampered by loving parents, grandparents, “aunties” and servants. The splendors of an elegant mansion and well-tended gardens saturated her senses. She was sent off to the best schools, and to escape the withering heat of high summer her family traveled to luxurious watering spots in Europe. They surrounded themselves with influential men and women in politics, business and the arts. In short, she wanted for nothing. Her parents managed to shelter her from the conflagration consuming Europe so that it did not deeply penetrate her innocence and cheerful spirits, not even when it almost lapped up on Egypt’s doorstep in the battle for North Africa. Reports of concentration camps and extermination of Jews circulated in her home, yet she was insulated from the worst news of horror and atrocity.

But grand forces were at play in this part of the world, and in time they pressed ever harder on the day to day life of her family and neighbors. The creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in 1948 and the military triumph of the newly formed state of Israel over the Arab League (including Egypt) isolated the Jewish residents of Cairo and Alexandria, and their continued presence was a knuckle rubbed in the eyes of their neighbors. Yet they might have survived this setback had not a second and this time fatal blow made life in Egypt intolerable. Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, riding a wave of anticolonial fury, nationalized the Suez Canal, unleashing a frenzy of rage against the Jews who had lived in peace with their neighbors for hundreds of years.

Naggar’s account of her family’s hasty and perilous escape and subsequent exile from their homeland is almost unbearably poignant. Unlike their forefathers whose Exodus was assisted by wonders and miracles — the mighty hand and outstretched arm of God, as the Bible declares — the author’s family escaped by its wits, assisted by the good will built up with servants and neighbors. But that is small consolation: an ancient and vibrant community of some 40,000 was all but obliterated.

The family’s spirits were not, however. Naggar writes,

My father never allowed his discouragement to surface. It ate at his health, but left his spirit undamaged. His family had owned and managed the largest private investment bank in Egypt. In five generations the Mosseri [the author's paternal] family had owned and managed the largest private investment bank in Egypt. In five generations the Mosseri family had built a considerable fortune, had achieved dizzying heights of ease and recognition, and had become woven into the financial, social and political fabric of the country that now disenfranchised him and claimed all that was his. My father internalized the wrenching dispossession and hid the frayed ends of the rupture from view as he set about reinventing himself and wresting a future for his wife and children. He had done it before as a very young man when fate had claimed the lives of his brother and father, and he would rise to this new challenge even as he faced middle age. My mother, too, plunged into the intricacies of loss and displacement without dwelling on her losses. She looked to the future with optimism and energy. As long as we were all safe, she could learn what was needed, and she could and did make do with what she had. Tangled and enmeshed in their own challenges and preoccupations, my parents were unwilling to recognize the extent of my distress. They deal with my pain in the only way they could, by attempting to ignore its existence as they struggled to build a new life for all of us.

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And now for a personal postscript. Jean Naggar, a leading literary agent, has been a close colleague of mine for many years, and she and her husband Serge (who occupies a warm and wonderful place in her memoir) have dined with my wife and me on a number of occasions. Yet, until I read her book, I knew absolutely nothing of her remarkable upbringing or the extraordinary world she has depicted so beautifully and tenderly. I was completely astonished by these revelations and have to wonder how one can know another person professionally without so much as a clue about her personal history. Which leads me to reflect, how many so-called close acquaintances do we know whom we actually do not know at all?

When I learned she had published a book I purchased a copy from Amazon.com and consumed it in two days during jury duty while waiting to be empaneled. The more I read the more I hoped I would not be wrenched from my growing absorption in the bygone world of Jean’s youth.

It is important to state that I have written this review unsolicited and unknown to her, so that I can truthfully tell you that hers is one of most stirring and affecting memoirs I have read in years.

Richard Curtis