The story of Andre Schiffrin is well-known in publishing circles. His father, French Jewish publisher Jacques Schiffrin, fled Europe with his family to escape the Nazis in an exit orchestrated by author Andre Gide. In America Jacques Schiffrin joined Pantheon Books, an esteemed house that published Albert Camus and authors of the French Resistance.
Andre Schiffrin, as he recounts in his memoir “A Political Education” (Melville House, 282 pages, $24.95), attended Yale University, where his political activism led him to found a chapter of an organization he later renamed Students for a Democratic Society. He followed in his father’s footsteps, joining Pantheon, where he published authors like Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault.
Schiffrin’s taste, however, was not limited to the densely written work of leftist intellectuals. His great discovery was a Chicago radio host named Studs Terkel. After he was fired from Pantheon, Schiffrin started the foundation-supported New Press, and some authors, including Terkel, loyally followed.
His memoir touches on those episodes, but its real strength is in its depiction of a childhood that included attending a Quaker school in New York City and growing up with parents displaced from Europe yet deeply connected to it. Schiffrin focuses on how he came of age intellectually, not emotionally. Now Schiffrin divides his time between Paris and New York, two of the cities his father once inhabited. When he was in Chicago a few months ago, Schiffrin spoke with Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor about his life and publishing:
Q. You have referred to this book as a political memoir. Why not simply a memoir?
A. The idea was to contrast it with a sentimental education, and I was not going to talk about my private life, and I wanted to warn readers that that is what was going to happen.
Q. Did you envision an audience that would be most interested in politics over personality?
A. I had thought people who were interested in American politics since the war would be a primary audience, and also people who are interested in the history of the media and publishing and so on. I called it a biography of ideas, so it was primarily to look at the changes from 1948 to ’68.
Q. Book sales are declining, bookstores are closing. I have attended so many panel discussions on “the crisis in publishing.” Where are books headed?
A. The same problem exists everywhere. It is a problem of globalization. The major American book companies are owned by foreigners. So this is not something limited to us, it is all over the place. And having the really impressive growth of the small independent publishers here has helped, but it hasn’t become a solution.
I think the whole Iraqi thing is very telling. The only books critical of [President] Bush in the fist two years were from the small presses. And the large firms just didn’t do anything for a long time.
Q. How do small, independent publishers like The New Press stay in business?
A. It is hard. People say, “What are you most proud of?” and I say, “It is surviving.” Because there was never an assuredness that we would do so. It is partly because Studs helped us keep going.
There are still a series of moral decisions that people can make.
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Q. And what about readers? What kind of “moral decisions” can readers make?
A. Paris now has more bookstores than New York had in 1945. We had 350 in New York when I was working in a bookstore, and we have under 30 now, and that is including the chains.
So the fact that Paris and France are filled with independent bookstores makes it possible for small publishers, and even big publishers, to publish things that aren’t going to be best sellers, or that will have a more specific audience.
So, obviously people can make a choice as to what kind of books to buy, where to buy them.
Q. What can U.S. booksellers learn from Paris?
A. In Germany and France, you know, bookstores can’t discount books. And that is what killed off American bookselling. And, ironically, Barnes and Noble, which killed off independents, is now threatened by Costco and the others who sell more Harry Potters than they do.
Q. Is there anything that you have learned through writing this book?
A. An interesting thing about being an immigrant in America. I had assumed I was totally an American teenager. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t. And as I looked back and saw how much of my original culture was still in me, I began to think it was such a shame that all these kids that now come from China and Korea now just forget their languages and don’t know anything about their own countries.
Q. It sounds like you reflected on the assimilation process.
A. Right — it is a two way street. I was very glad that I was American and became as committed as I did to America. On the other hand, I think that the bargain is not necessarily the one we should make, that people shouldn’t forget where we came from and what their parents learned.