Schocken Books, New York
After World War II, Schocken established Schocken Books in New York (1945). Describing American Jews as “people with motorcars and electric refrigeration who live in empty houses – empty of books and spirit”, he sought to facilitate access to the “Jewish creative world”. He wrote: “in a few years we can produce a series of books that will give the young American Jew the opportunity to become acquainted with the treasures of thousands of years of our Jewish culture. If we succeed, it will most likely be the greatest accomplishment among the many things connected with the name Schocken over the past forty years.”
As editors, Schocken hired the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt and the scholar Nahum Glatzer, who continued his relationship with Schocken Books for over forty years. The first book catalog, which came out in 1947, introduced American readers to the works of Franz Kafka, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, S. Y. Agnon, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. Kafka’s masterpieces The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika were first translated and published in English by Schocken Books. Schocken also translated and published Kafka’s letters, including Letters to Milena. Owning the original letters, he edited this volume himself.
The catalog described Agnon’s story In the Heart of the Seas as the “universal journey of faith in search of a homeland.” Wolfskehl Poem Sequence was said to document how the poet “turned to his Jewish heritage for spiritual and creative sustenance” during the Nazi period. According to the catalog, Bella Chagall’s memoire Burning Lights “recreates a childhood in the now-vanished Jewry of Eastern Europe, the same world that inspired the magic art of Marc Chagall”. Another notable mention is Roman Vishniac’s photographic masterpiece Polish Jews: A Pictorial Record, which the catalog described as “a last portrait of a community and a tradition from the Baltic to the Carpathians taken before the descent of the cataclysm upon that life.”
After Schocken’s death, the publishing house was run and expanded by his son, Theodore Schocken, and his son-in law, T. Herzl Rome. Following their untimely deaths, Schocken’s daughter Chawa Rome became president, and her second husband, Julius Glaser, became chairman. They were followed by Schocken’s grandchildren Miriam Schocken and David Rome, who managed the company and kept it in the family during a time when niche publishing houses could hardly operate independently.
Today Schocken Books operates under the parent company Random House Penguin. It continues to publish Jewish and non-Jewish fiction and non-fiction, keeping the Schocken imprint.
