Georges Borchardt made a life from a love of reading

AFTER the war, he and his oldest sister tried to reclaim their family’s apartment in the Trocadéro section of Paris. They had, after all, never sold it. They had simply fled. The boyfriend of his sister’s friend warned them ahead of the Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup, during which French police arrested 13,000 men, women and children for the crime of being Jewish. Most of them would end up being sent to Auschwitz.

Heeding the warning, 14-year-old Georges, along with his mother and two older sisters, hid briefly in Paris before making their way south to Chalon-sur-Saône, where Georges crossed out of Nazi-occupied France with a group of French schoolchildren. From there they went to Nice. After the French militia arrested his mother, he feared they would be next, so they fled again—his sisters to a remote hilltop village, and Georges to Aix-en-Provence, where he attended lycée, unofficially and using a pseudonym (Borchard, after a pianist and composer whose productivity during the occupation made the name seem safe).

When they made their way back to Paris, they found the apartment empty. Georges’s stamp collection was gone, as were his books—his beloved books. For Christmas, he used to ask his parents either for a new book, or to have a favourite one bound. He loved selecting the end papers and leather binding, loved books not just for their content, but as objets d’art. At school he excelled at memorising and reciting scenes from Racine and Molière; on his own, he devoured Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, Proust and Gide. Various people had lived in the apartment, and in wartime unattended objects have a way of wandering off. Paper was scarce; books were valuable.

But being in the empty apartment was unpleasant, and his sisters wanted to emigrate to America. Georges had tried law school, and hated it. They had no family left except each other. His parents were German Jews who left Berlin after Hitler came to power, hoping that Paris would be safe—which it was, until it wasn’t. Their father, a record-company executive, had died of cancer shortly before Jews in Paris had to start wearing the yellow star. His mother, like so many others, died in Auschwitz.

And so at 19, without connections and speaking schoolboy English, Georges turned up in New York, unsure of what he wanted or was able to do. He put a pair of employment-seeking ads in the New York Times, and received one letter for each of them, both from the same person: Marion Saunders, who ran a literary agency that represented French authors, and had recently sold American rights to “The Stranger,” by a then-obscure Albert Camus, for $350. She hired him, and he did what countless other ambitious young literati seeking a career in publishing have done: filing, bookkeeping and errand-running while reading manuscripts and hunting for overlooked gems.

In 1953 he thought he found one in a middle-aged Irishman who was writing novels and plays in French. Editors did not share his enthusiasm: “Pale imitation of Joyce”. “Unreadable”. But he persisted, and eventually Barney Rosset at Grove Press—which would go on to publish “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, “Tropic of Cancer” and other avant-garde, controversial works—offered $1,000 for “Waiting for Godot”, “Malloy” and “Malone Dies”. Samuel Beckett won the Nobel prize in literature 16 years later.

Later that decade he championed another future Nobel laureate—a Romanian-Jewish journalist who had written a memoir of his time in Auschwitz, published first in Yiddish, and then two years later in French. In his cover letter to publishers, Georges said he felt “more strongly about [this book] than any other I ever sent you”. Still, 15 of them rejected the book. It was too soon; nobody wanted to hear or talk about the Holocaust. “He will never find an audience in this country,” wrote Blanche Knopf, co-founder of one of New York’s most illustrious publishing houses.

She was wrong, but it took some time. Georges sold the rights to Elie Wiesel’s “Night” for $250, conditional on finding a British publisher to share translation costs. Its first print run, just 3,000 copies, took three years to sell. By 2018 it was selling that many copies each week. Wiesel won his Nobel, for peace, in 1986.

In 1967 Georges and his American wife Anne—whom Philip Roth remembered as “the most beautiful girl in Newark”—started their own agency. The work suited him. It required judgment, taste and a degree of arrogance: just as writers must believe they have something to say that nobody has said before, agents must believe they can recognise this ability before, and better than, anyone else. His client list steadily grew. He eschewed smash-and-grab bestsellers and genre fiction, preferring the sorts of novelists, critics and historians whose books won highbrow prizes.

Talking made up a lot of the job, and he was good at it, with his wry humour and the French inflections he never quite lost. He could negotiate fiercely, though he was reserved and polite, with, as one author recalled, a “formality that was a kind of courtesy”, and seemed to come from a bygone age. He extended it to everyone: on Port-Cros, the southern French island where he and Anne had vacationed since the 1950s, he would precede his granddaughters down a favourite walking path, brandishing a long stick to clear away the spider webs they disliked touching.

He grew distressed at the turn America was taking, especially the rudeness that pervaded public life. He was dismayed by publishers’ short-term thinking that prized instant smash hits over the sorts of books that would sell steadily for decades. He had enough stories to fill a memoir, but he demurred: he was a reader to the end, and preferred helping writers to being one. Asked what he looked for in a piece of writing, he responded simply, “I just want to fall in love with it…You don’t know until you’ve found it, but when you find it, you know.” ■