The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877-1959
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The rags-to-riches story of one of Europe's great entrepreneurs and a founding father of modern Jewish secular culture
The name "Schocken"--now primarily associated with the prestigious publishing house--was once emblazoned over a vast commercial empire; across Europe, it stood for quality consumer goods and uplifting culture made available for working people.
A sweeping, colorful saga, The Patron is the first biography of Salman Schocken, founder of a large department store chain and Jewish philanthropic titan. We follow Schocken's transformation from an impoverished migrant selling textiles door-to-door to a captain of German industry, at once media magnate, collector, talent scout, and patron. The merchandizing millionaire then harnessed his fortune to a vision: to disseminate Jewish secular culture to the Jewish masses, in much the same way as he marketed well-designed coffeepots to the working class. His task, as he saw it, was not to spread culture but to create it, through publishing houses, newspapers, and the patronage of such influential modern thinkers such as Martin Buber and Thomas Mann. But as the Nazi regime closed in on Schocken's empire, the resilient tycoon transferred his energies and passions to Palestine and New York.
In The Patron historian Anthony David fills in a missing piece of twentieth-century history, the towering life of a self-made man who, with courage and tenacity, helped fashion a people's national and cultural renaissance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Salman Schocken (1877 1959) led an extraordinary life. An East European Jew by birth, he flourished as a businessman and cultural entrepreneur in Germany, Palestine and Israel, and the United States. His great marketing insight was that common people desired quality goods, so long as they were affordable. Before WWI and into the 1920s, he turned a small retail shop into a modern department store chain, following the most efficient business principles and commissioning the great modernist architect Erich Mendelssohn to design his flagship store. But Schocken's true loves were books and Jewish and German culture. He amassed a library of treasures, including medieval Jewish manuscripts and first editions of Goethe and others. A modern Medici, Schocken supported with stipends and advice (not always desired) many of the great Jewish cultural figures of the first half of the 20th century, including S.Y. Agnon, Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. Like so many German Jews, his belief in German rectitude and culture blinded him to the seriousness of the Nazi threat, and only very late and with a great deal of good fortune was he able to move his family and some of his wealth to Palestine. His greatest legacies were the establishment of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in which he played a key role, and Schocken Books, which remains to this day an important imprint. This biography by David, editor and translator of Gershom Scholem's letters, is serious and illuminating, but the writing can barely keep pace with the colorful character that was Salman Schocken.
