Fred Jordan

Fred Jordan , born Alfred Rotblatt (born November 9, 1925 in Vienna ) is an Austrian-American publisher.

Life

Alfred Rotblatt's father was a Pole living in Austria, he was expelled from the Greater German Reich in 1938 after the Reichspogromnacht and was able to flee to Belgium, where he was hidden by resistance during the five years of German occupation . His mother was deported to the Litzmannstadt ghetto in 1941 and was a victim of the Holocaust . His sister Charlotte (born 1922) was able to emigrate to the USA in 1940 with an affidavit . Alfred Rotblatt was sent to England on a Kindertransport at the beginning of August 1939 , where he had been given a place in the camp organized by the children and youth Alijah on the Great Engeham Farm near Ashford . In early 1940 the group moved to winter-proof quarters near Barnstaple . He completed his education in an English village school, trained as a lathe operator at ORT in Leeds and worked in the profession in London . He joined the socialist organization Young Austria . Jordan became a soldier in the British Army in 1943 and was deployed in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and, after the German surrender, in Bergen-Belsen and Celle .

After his discharge from the army, he went to Vienna in 1946 as a journalist for the US Information Agency . He studied journalism at the University of Vienna until 1949 and received his doctorate. In 1949 he emigrated to the USA, where he worked as a journalist. In 1955 he became sales director at Barney Rosset's small publisher, Grove Press . In fact, in the rapidly expanding publishing house, Jordan was in charge of sales as well as head editor for the Eastern European authors in the publishing program. With the printing of a US edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover , a series of lawsuits began for the publisher in which the lawyers Charles Rembar and Ephraim London relaxed the strict rules of book censorship in the USA.

In 1957 Richard Seaver joined the publishing house and expanded the French program. The publishing house later had up to 400 employees and moved into lavish offices in New York. Jordan took over the management of the literary magazine Evergreen Review , which appeared from 1957 to 1973 and sold up to 150,000 copies. An essay by Jean-Paul Sartre appeared in the first issue , and the English translation of Albert Camus 's reflections on the death penalty was printed in the same year . In 1960 Edward Albee's first drama The Zoo Story appeared . The Evergreen Review included essays and works by Samuel Beckett , Jorge Luis Borges , Charles Bukowski , William S. Burroughs , Marguerite Duras , Jean Genet , Günter Grass , Norman Mailer , Henry Miller , Pablo Neruda , Vladimir Nabokov , Frank O'Hara , Kenzaburo Oe , Octavio Paz , Harold Pinter , Susan Sontag , Tom Stoppard , Derek Walcott and Malcolm X printed. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac wrote columns, and the comic adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist and Barbarella appeared .

In 1968 Jordan flew to Bolivia with Rosset to find fragments of the Bolivian diary after Che Guevara's death . The 1968 issue of Evergreen Review , which heralded The Spirit of Che and had a portrait drawing of Che Guevara on the cover, provoked a bomb attack by Cubans in exile on the editorial office of Evergreen.

After almost thirty years at Grove Press, Jordan moved to Pantheon Books as editor , where he succeeded André Schiffrin after changing ownership to Random House . He brought u. a. published a new translation of Franz Kafka's The Trial . Random House separated from him after his three-year contract expired. From 1995 to 2000 he was managing editor of the "Fromm International Publishing Corporation", where Jordan was the first publisher for Václav Havel in the USA.

Fonts (selection)

• United States of America: the subversive role of pornography. In: Dieter E. Zimmer (Ed.): The limits of literary freedom: 22 articles on censorship at home and abroad . Nannen-Verlag, 1966, pp. 139-149

literature

• Loren Glass: Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde . Stanford University Press, Stanford 2013
• Fred Jordan: My Kindertransport . From the American Claudia Curio. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): The Kindertransporte 1938/39: Rescue and Integration . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 230–246. A short biography on page 252.
• Jordan, Fred. In: Susanne Blumesberger, Michael Doppelhofer, Gabriele Mauthe: Handbook of Austrian authors of Jewish origin from the 18th to the 20th century. Volume 2: J-R. Edited by the Austrian National Library. Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-11545-8 , p. 612 (entry 4683).
• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss : Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933 / International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945 , Vol II, 1, Saur, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 575.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birthday in Jordan's autobiographical book Mein Kindertransport . 1926 is also given as the year of birth
2. ↑ Julia Kissina : As soon as the book was there, we ended up with the police . Interview, in: Literarisches Welt , April 2, 2016, p. 4
3. ^ ^{A b} Jack Miles: Pantheon Is Dead, Long Live Pantheon , in: Los Angeles Times , March 18, 1990
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Sten Jordan: Barney Rosset, The Art of Publishing No. 2 , Interview, in: Paris Review , Winter 1997
5. ↑ Ken Jordan: History of Evergreen Review ( Memento of the original from June 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Introduction to Evergreen Review Reader, 1957-1996. Blue Moon Books, at: Evergreenreview, website 
6. ↑ Sharanya: Veteran fails to support tall claims about Big Publishing , Review, The Guardian , September 16, 2012. Other illustration in: André Schiffrin: The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read . Verso, 2000, p. 99
7. ^ Fromm International Publishing Corporation , at Open Library