Searching for Schindler

  The reactions of Patricia Solomon and my UK editor, Ion Trewin, to the book were positive. But the fact that Nan Talese, the initial enthusiast, was gone remained a shadow over it. In those days I had not reached the sort of maturity which I have tried to achieve in later life. The beginning of sanity for a writer is to see the beloved work as an item on a conveyor, a listing in a catalogue, holding a position, probably not too high a position, in the plans of a publisher who has a season’s worth of books to produce and sell to the public. The woman who would be, as its commissioner, its best advocate was through no fault of hers missing from that whole process. The writer should simply celebrate the miracle that someone as plain as most of us are could have produced anything halfway worth reading. But seeing things that way is a hard thing to do if the writer depends on the book for his living and for a measure of who he is.

  A dear New York friend of mine, Irv Bauer, was then enthusiastically promoting one of my failed plays, Bullie’s House. It was about the plunder of holy totemic items from Aboriginals. It was as predictably wordy as any novelist’s play, but Irv loved that. Plays were incarnations of ideas to him, and a wealth of ideas could justify some lack of technique. Judy and I went from Sydney to New York for the workshopping of the play at New Dramatists in an old church in Hell’s Kitchen.

  We were to occupy a flat at the top of the studio, a lonely place at night, when the entire building was darkened except for our little hutch. A Hell’s Kitchen local, employed because, as a reformed thief, he was good at retrieving stolen items (including New Dramatists’ coffeemaker), would knock on our door about ten-thirty every night to check that we were well.

  It was during this journey that the Simon & Schuster legal department got to work on the dramatis personae of the book. They wanted all the former associates of Schindler and Schindlerjuden mentioned in the book to sign a legal release. They wanted me to seek a release even from SS men who had long since died or migrated to remote places—maybe Australia, Canada, Argentina. And they sought and got a release from Mrs. Schindler as well, based on what I had written about her part in the rescue.

  To help ensure that these releases of the former prisoners and the many others were signed, I enlisted the help of Poldek again, whom we had seen in California on the way through to New York from Sydney. Schindler’s lawyer, Irving Glovin, also helped, though he was a little edgy at the way the raucous, riotous, subversive aspect of Oskar had been depicted. To him the question was still the nature of altruism, as if it were almost a glandular, chemical entity. Glovin called the British and American publishers for reassurance. Poldek rang them to ask them in detail what their plans for publication were, and to urge them along. In any case, thanks to Poldek, the clearances drawn up by Simon & Schuster’s lawyers were signed.

  In this period, too, I met up again with Oskar’s former lover, Ingrid, and her husband, and made a last attempt to organize an interview—since there was still time to write a few things into the book—with a very successful shipping executive who was a Schindler survivor, and indeed had been one of the younger prisoners who escaped westward with Poldek in the small hours of the first morning of peace. He was sympathetic to the project, but very tense about being asked to re visit the pain of those years. Poldek was, of course, dismissive of the man’s decision, but I could by now sympathize with his reluctance. It was not a matter of ingratitude, as Poldek perceived it, but trepidation at opening the box of disabling horror. The man did not want to look back and be ossified by what he saw.

  Poldek was coming through New York on his way to Italy and Hong Kong to buy leather goods for his wholesale business and the store. He insisted on meeting the urbane Patricia Solomon at Simon & Schuster. Patricia was eager to have the meeting since she had heard all my Poldek stories. First of all, Poldek praised Patricia’s features, the old bone structure stuff. It was surprisingly not a tiresome act. Then he told her I was fussy when he mentioned the “Novell Prize” and asked her to convince me we were bound to win it with this book. “Oh, possibly,” Patricia indulged him. “Simon & Schuster publishes many Nobel Prize contenders.”

  He seemed appeased. Then he asked her how many copies she would print for the first run.

  She replied, “Somewhere around thirty-three to thirty-five thousand copies. This is in hardcover.”

  “Only thirty-five thousand? Patricia, my darling, you’re going to need more than that. Print one hundred and fifty thousand copies and they’ll go in a week.”

  “Hardcover?” asked Patricia.

  “Of course, hardcover,” said Poldek, from the depths of his expertise in the publishing industry. “You’ll be a legend by the next weekend. Your bosses will love you, and why shouldn’t they? Beauty and brains!”

  His hopeful prophecy would in fact prove closer to what the demand would be, though it would certainly take more than a mere week to sell that number. He did not understand that the decision would not have been made by Patricia alone. Patricia laughed nervously, and I wished Poldek would just stop extolling the book.

  “We can always go back to print,” she said.

  This was an assurance publishers often gave, but in those days going back to print meant three lost weeks. When writers meet in bars, they always trade horrifying tales of a book’s momentum stalled when the first printing was snapped up early because of radiant reviews, and the second printing came too late to revive the initial impact.

  Dan Green, Simon & Schuster’s head of publishing, had made his repute by publishing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Pumping Iron and The Jane Fonda Workout Book. He took an unexpected stand on the title of the book. I had suggested two titles—Schindler’s Ark and Schindler’s List—indicating to Ion Trewin in London that I liked Ark better than List. It was not only the question of evoking Noah’s Ark, but also the Ark of the Covenant, a symbol of the contract between Yahweh and the tribe of Israel. A similar though very rough compact existed between Oskar and his people. If they did their work properly—if the accountant kept the books well, if the engineers and the people on the floor produced, or, later in the war, if they appeared to be producing for the sake of covering his black-market operations—then he would rescue them. I call it a “rough compact” because of those people who were lost to the list through factors Schindler could not control. His behavior in regard to the three hundred women sent to Auschwitz, however, indicates that in all probability he did what he could to keep his list intact.

  Patricia now took us along to see Dan Green himself. He was an athletic-looking man and seemed to have benefited from the advice of Arnold himself. He adopted something of a tough-guy air. He raised the issue of the title.

  “I’ve discussed it with the Brits,” I told him. “Hodder’s are going with Schindler’s Ark rather than Schindler’s List. And I prefer Ark too.”

  Green said that it was impossible to have Ark. I asked him why. He said that American Jewry was very sensitive to the accusation that the Jews had been somehow passive in the face of their destruction. And Ark implied passivity, the prisoners entering two by two.

  I told him there was no way that I wanted to offend Jewish people in America, but the issue had not been raised in Britain. He said the Jewish community in Britain was more diffuse, less focused on apparent slights.

  “But what about the Ark of the Covenant?” I asked. “The idea that there had been a covenant between Schindler and his people?”

  “No,” said Green. “People wouldn’t get that. They’d only get this passive thing, and see it as a slur.”

  For once Poldek didn’t have an opinion. As long as they printed one hundred and fifty thousand copies as a first print run, he was happy, and that was his objective with Dan Green. “It is the great story of humanity man to man,” as his mantra went and as he now told Green. “You’re printing too few. But whatever you call it, you and Thomas should subtitle it A Great Story of Humanity Man to Man.”

  Green thought that such a subtitle was “clunky,” and I had already t
old Poldek as much. I argued with Green, though, that the British proofs were about to arrive at my place in Australia, and that as soon as I got home I had to correct them. Not only that, but the book had already appeared in Hodder’s autumn catalogue as Schindler’s Ark. A change now was impossible for them. Naturally, Pat Solomon did not buy into my debate with Green, but I could see that what British publishers were doing was always something of a minor matter with their Manhattan counterparts.

  In between arguments with Green, I asked a few of the Jewish kids, young playwrights and directors who hung around New Dramatists in Hell’s Kitchen, whether they would be offended by the title Dan Green abominated. They had certainly heard of the issue: the accusation of some supposed endemic passivity in Jews was raised by many Gentiles. Others, including Poldek, were not so fussed.

  After a week, rightly or wrongly, I consented to Green’s proposition. I did not have quite Poldek’s scale of confidence in the story. I certainly had no sense that this would be my best-known book, and that the two-title issue would haunt me and generate questions for the next twenty years and more. Ultimately, I thought that I couldn’t take the risk of offending American Jewry, not only because I wanted to sell them books, but also for Green’s reasons. And I had other things to concentrate on, being still busy with legal and other matters. I had also sent the full text for correction to Poldek, Pemper, Bejski, Mrs. Stern and the Dresners. I had sent sections of the text to the Fagens, the Korns, the Rosners, the Horowitzes, Dr. Schindel, and so on. I would incorporate their corrections.

  Now came the question of whether the book should be categorized as fiction in the Library of Congress classification system. For both commercial reasons and reasons of passion, I didn’t want this book stuck in that section against the back wall of most American bookstores labeled JUDAICA. Books classified as such are often splendid works, but I feared that Gentiles might feel they need not apply. Poldek agreed with me on that. I felt that in Schindler I had written as a novelist, with a novelist’s narrative pace and graphicness, though not in the sense of a fictionalizer. If three or four people told me that Schindler had more or less said certain things, I certainly put them in quotation marks, but otherwise the manuscript was largely innocent of dialogue.

  Dan Green agreed on this proposition. People would ever afterward ask why it was classified as fiction—apparently deniers would later point to that classification to undermine the book’s clear faith in the Holocaust’s reality. I was convinced at the time that this “documentary novel” qualified as fiction, though was at the extreme end of the phylum or genus. I might have made both of these decisions the same way if I had them to make again, but I would certainly not defend them to the death.

  Twelve

  * * *

  The final legal permissions and revisions of the book were done, and Judy and I left our perch in Hell’s Kitchen and flew back to the stillness of Sydney’s Bilgola Beach, impinged upon merely by the noisy traffic of waves.

  My mother and father, as we so automatically expected, had done a splendid job looking after the girls.

  By the end of the process of reediting according to the notes of sundry associates of Oskar, I had got to become friends by correspondence and telephone calls with genial Ion Trewin, the editor at Hodder’s. I could tell from his letters that he was one of those Englishmen who were passionate about writing, and who also loved cricket as an art form—indeed, when I got to know him and his broad, piratical, bearded features in person, I would see he generally wore a Lords Cricket Ground member’s tie, when not wearing the tie of the Garrick Club, which was frequented by actors, publishers and newspapermen (no women). He appeared to me a good blend of artist and British establishment.

  As the book neared its October 1982 publication in Britain, I heard from Ion that on the basis of the proofs, it had been short-listed for the Booker Prize. This is the premier British literary prize, for which writers from all over the Commonwealth can be nominated. Hodder’s considered Schindler to belong to the species Novel, had submitted it, and the book had now been short-listed. I had had three earlier books of mine short-listed, so I didn’t think there was much danger of winning the thing, especially given what one could call the genre uncertainty of the book. When I told Poldek, he took the news calmly. “There you are, Thomas. What did I tell you? What did I tell you?”

  The Booker had become so renowned in part because of a literary scandal, an attack the prolific and ever-entertaining Anthony Burgess had made on it two years previously. I was in London for a book tour at the time, and had had to do some editing in a suite at the BBC, the Shepherd’s Bush studio, of a documentary I had made for a series named Writers and Places. I had been formed by two localities—the Sydney suburb of Homebush, in which I had spent my late childhood and adolescence, and the Macleay Valley, four hundred kilometers north, in which I had spent early childhood, and which had always had a very strong impact on my writing.

  Another writer was in the editing suite that evening, also involved in a final edit of his Writers and Places segment. It was Anthony Burgess, who came with his Maltese wife and a satchel of Tiger Beer, the beer of Singapore, to honor the impact that city-state had had on his writing career. He was in robust form, and told us that later that evening he would appear on television with William Golding, who had won the 1980 Booker Prize ahead of Burgess’s own brilliant book, Earthly Powers. He considered Golding’s book, Rites of Passage, the third part of a trilogy about a voyage to Australia in the nineteenth century, effete by the standards of Golding’s earlier work, which included Lord of the Flies and Pincher Martin.

  So, after we had worked for a while on the Steinbeck editing machines with our producer, Burgess did descend to a studio at Television House where he made his robust denunciation. That controversy seemed to be stoked far more by Burgess than it was responded to by Golding, but like all literary brawls it drew considerable attention, and irrationally added to the mystique of the Booker as a prize which caused some people to read all short-list contenders and take passionate positions on this book or that, often positions undercut by the jury’s final decision. By the time the glamorous young writer Salman Rushdie won the prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children, it had become more than a literary event, with notable British actors reading segments from the short-listed novels on awards night, and Ladbrokes betting agency running a book on the result.

  Flown to London both to promote Schindler’s Ark and to attend the 1982 Booker dinner, I discovered with astonishment that Ark was firming up as second favorite at Ladbrokes. What fatuity for a book on life and death, heaven and hell. My price was 7–2, but the splendid William Boyd’s An Ice-Cream War was the favorite.

  I began to see the new importance of the Booker when Ion Trewin collected me from the quaint but wonderful Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge to take me out to sign books around town. The bookstores each had a table with the books of the six short-listed writers on it. The playwright John Arden’s Silence Among the Weapons, Lawrence Durrell’s Constance, or Solitary Practices. Alice Thomas Ellis, the fey contributor to The Spectator, had a book named The 27th Kingdom, which no one, including her exuberantly ironic self, expected to win. Then there was Boyd’s An Ice-Cream War, and Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet. Tim Mo was perhaps the first notable Anglo-Chinese writer, and his book, which I began to read, was complex and engaging. I could not imagine the quasi-novel Schindler’s Ark succeeding over it. To be nominated had itself become a mechanism for selling books.

  I was a little bemused to find out, though, that I would need a dinner suit for the Booker evening at the Guild Hall. But Moss Bros, the traditional London outfitters, were very kind and exacting in that regard. I went to Ladbrokes and put fifty pounds on the nose of William Boyd, and a smaller sum, which my wife had given me, on myself. On awards night, as Ion and I both detoured for a safety urination in the Guild Hall toilets downstairs, my Moss Bros rented dinner suit didn’t look too inferior to Ion’s own, which, by the ja
unty bulge at his waist-band, I judged he might have had since his university days.

  A famous Australian-born publisher, Carmen Callil, one of the judges, came up to me as I entered the glittering dining room with its escutcheons and wonderful stained glass, and gave me a vague message that I took as a mere compliment. She said later it was a coded message that I’d won, but if so, I was unable to interpret it as such. I felt no sickening tension as we sat at our tables, though my English agent, Tessa Sayle, was breathless with hope. Despite being an Austrian baroness connected to the Hapsburgs, Tessa had always had a soft spot for Australians in general, and Australian clients. She had been married to an Australian named Murray Sayle, a renowned London Times journalist, and the breakup of the marriage didn’t seem to diminish her enthusiasm for the outrageous and sometimes unconsciously inappropriate things Australians were likely to say among the British.

  The dinner began in culinary splendor, and it was not until afterdinner drinks that the BBC Two producer gave us our instructions as an audience and the television show started—Derek Jacobi reading a segment from Schindler’s Ark and other actors reading segments from the other short-listed novels. Dessert and then calvados were served, and I opportunistically drank Ion’s, seeing that he was much too nervous. I was happy to have met and to be in the company of renowned Londoners. I was content to have seen the dazzling interior of the Guild Hall. The Stoics would have been proud of my repose of soul.

  When a fashionably stammering Professor John Carey read out my name from the rostrum, I felt momentarily electrocuted by an electric pulse of disbelief as direct as an arrow. Walking forward with a dazed half-smile on my face and two glasses of calvados the worse, I remember at the rostrum commending the judges for the recklessness of the great mistake they had just made. I thanked Poldek, not only for his merchandise, I said, but for the wonderful tale he had harbored and then surrendered to me. As I descended for interviews, there was barely time to caress Ion and Tessa Sayle before I was taken by a phalanx of Booker-minders to a press conference. I said an occasional daring thing, such as that, being the first Australian to have won the Booker, I hoped it was the beginning of the death of our cultural cringe and their cultural contempt. I was asked to defend Schindler’s Ark’s claim to be a novel. It must be, I said, opting out perhaps too cutely, because the judges thought so, and who am I to argue with them? But the controversy was well away by the next afternoon’s papers, and would not cease for some time. Like most controversy, it initiated a frenzy of interest in the book.