The Return of the Slow Mirror

I mentioned a short film by Richard Zimler a posting or two back, being shown at Jewish Book Week... Back in 1996 Sonja Lyndon and Sylvia Paskin were editing a book of "New Fiction by Jewish Writers" for Five Leaves. Most of the short stories came in following a note round writers we knew, and the grapevine did the rest. Out of the blue though came a short story called "The Slow Mirror" by a writer none of us had heard of; Richard Zimler, an American living in Portugal. Immediately that became the title story of the collection. It was very good. Curious, we wrote to Richard asking who he was, what had he done... it did not feel like the work of a complete novice. He said he was, essentially, an unpublished writer and he had this novel which his ex-agent had failed to place... and he sent The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, which could be described as a kind of Jewish Name of the Rose. At Five Leaves towers we loved it... but what to do? If we had published it at the time we'd have printed 750 copies, sold 500 and had a review in a Jewish paper or two. And this was too good. At the time we knew someone in a fairly big indie publishing house in America and asked them to read it. They loved it, bought it, sold UK rights to Arcadia who sold 75,000 copies of the trade ie posh edition, followed by a mass market edition. It sold to many languages and Richard has never looked back. We were thrilled. Five Leaves could not have done that, nor could we now.

But what a collection that was... it contained a story by Zvi Jagendorf which was later turned into a Booker longlist title and one by Tamar Yellin that also became a novel. Contributors Jonathan Wilson and Shaun Levin joined our list with later books, and we published a "classic" by Frederic Raphael. Michelene Wandor has appeared in several parts of our list. One decade soon we'll finally publish a Jewish lesbian anthology edited by another contributor, our friend Ellen Galford who we see from time to time at the Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society.

Now Richard Zimler has made a short film. It will be at Jewish Book Week on February 28, at the New North London Synagogue on February 26 and won the Best Dram Award at the New York Downtown Short Film Festival. Richard will also be speaking about his latest book The Warsaw Anagrams at Keats House in London on March 17 in an event organised by Daunt's.

The Gradgrinds of County Hall

Last night in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, a very articulate child received a sad political lesson. She was one of 100 people attending a protest/organising meeting about library cuts in her area. When she heard that the County Council book fund was to be cut by 75% she asked whether that included books for children. Sadly yes, and because the Library service is now told to stretch the life of a book from 5 years to 21 children's books will be even more at risk because children are more robust with their books than adults, so the books have to go out of commission earlier. Can't see her joining the Young Conservatives. The speakers' list comprised Mike Scott from UNISON, Gail Cooke from the UNISON group of library workers (there were many library workers there) and me, presumably to provide the odd literary reference. The outcome is a read-in at Beeston Library at 11.00am on Feb 5th, part of the national day of action on library cuts. Bring your library card. The meeting was organised by "Nottingham Save Our Services".

Five Leaves' review coverage

This has been a good month for reviews of Five Leaves' books so far. Here's a summary: PN Review for Feb includes a long review of Three Men on the Metro by Andy Croft, Bill Herbert and Paul Summers, drawing attention to a collective poetry venture being truly collective in its writing. Hackney citizens can find a wonderful two page feature on our Roland Camberton novels in the January Hackney Citizen (http://www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2011/01/23/scamp-and-rain-on-the-pavements-reviews), the only pity being they did not mention the publisher or price. Jewish Renaissance also features both books, concentrating on Rain on the Pavements. Ken Worpole has a big feature on our other current New London Editions writer, Alexander Baron, in the current New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/01/baron-novels-war-jewish-class), though the Morning Star was not big on his Rosie Hogarth. Carousel for spring will include reviews on Alan James Brown's Tolpuddle Boy (also covered in the RMT journal) and Dan Tunstall's Big and Clever, while Teen Titles likes Follow a Shadow by Robert Swindells. The current Leicestershire Chronicle lifts a couple of pages from Ray Gosling's Personal Copy. Southwell Folio features Next Year Will Be Better by John Lucas and Fae Nation goes for The Rose Fyleman Fairy Book. Evergreen gives review coverage to Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy's Goodnight Campers. The only international coverage we've had in the last month has been for Jazz Jews, picked up by the San Diego Jewish World, Shalom Life and the jazz programme on the Canadian station CKCU, though that is really piggy-backing on coverage of Mike Gerber's now regular jazz Jews programme on UK Jazz Radio, which is available on their play it again, Sam, scheme. Now then, does review coverage lead to sales... a bit. But not as many as you would think and in some cases not at all. The big test will come for some forthcoming Scottish books where we expect a lot of coverage in that small nation.

Jewish Book Week 2011

No sessions on Five Leaves' books at this year's Jewish Book Week. Mustn't grumble. But there is a short film by Richard Zimler, The Slow Mirror, based on the title story by him in our collection The Slow Mirror and other stories: new fiction by Jewish writers. Here's a trailer for the film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOCCob62WzE&feature=related. The Slow Mirror is still available through our website.

Several of the contributors to our more recently anthology of short fiction by (mostly) Jewish writers, The Sea of Azov, appear in their own right - Nicole Krauss from America, Eskhol Nevo from Israel and Tania Hershman from Bristol, while Shaun Levin (who was in The Slow Mirror as well as being the author of our A Year of Two Summers) runs a writing workshop. Similarly Joanne Limburg and Ruth Fainlight, from our Passionate Renewal book of Jewish poets are appearing - Ruth reading from her "New and Selected" from Bloodaxe, Joanne is taking part in a Bookniks salon. Michael Rosen, also in Passionate Renewal and author of several Five Leaves' books appears with John Hegley and Jackie Kay, who we have anthologised a few times.

The full programme appears at http://www.jewishbookweek.com/

How poetry can be written after Auschwitz, by Billy Mills

Back in November, Guardian books blog readers were asked to name their favourite book of 2010. For me, the answer was, and is, an easy one; it has to be Holocaust by Charles Reznikoff. Now, I'm pretty sure most of you have never heard of either this book or its author, and that would hardly be surprising given that Holocaust has long been out of print and that Reznikoff has never been a fashionable writer. Now, thanks to Five Leaves Publications, you can get your hands on a very nice paperback edition, complete with an introduction by George Szirtes, and judge yourself whether or not I'm wrong.

Reznikoff was born in Brooklyn in 1894, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and studied law at New York University, although he never actually worked as a lawyer. New York, Jewishness and the law were, one way or another, to dominate his poetry and his fiction. In fact his Complete Poems 1918-1975, sadly still out of print, consists mainly of observations of life in his native city and verse reworkings of episodes from the Old Testament and Talmud.

Reznikoff is on record as saying that his legal studies led him to the insight that poetry should be like the evidence given by a witness in a criminal trial; "not a statement of what he felt, but of what he saw or heard". It was this approach that made him a kind of patron and model for the Objectivists in the 1930s, and its full flowering was to come in his late 500+ page long poem sequence Testimony: the United States (1885-1915) Recitative, the first volume of which was published in 1965.

Testimony draws on the records of hundreds of court cases to present a portrait of society in ferment; the society, incidentally, into which the poet was born. It is, indeed, a picture of things seen and heard, with, ironically given the material, very little by way of judgemental interpretation. The original manuscripts are arranged and lightly edited as, essentially, found poetry. For most of the cases used, we don't even get to read the verdict or sentence handed down.

Published just a year before his death in 1976, Holocaust was Reznikoff's last book. It, too, drew on court records, this time The Trials of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. The literal, matter-of-fact style that Reznikoff uses in the poem is not accidental; it is a conscious technical choice. The horrors of the death camps are placed starkly before us in the words of the survivors, and the poets selection process denies the reader the opportunity to look away. It also deprives us of any sense of catharsis; these things happened and no good came of them. There is no redemption, and no place for the reader to hide in the flat surface of the writing:

The woman begged for their lives:

they were young, they were ready to work.

They were ordered to rise and run

and the SS men drew their revolvers and shot all five;

and then kept pushing their bodies with their feet

to see if they were still alive

and to make sure they were dead

shot them again.

And for me it is this matter of technique, the unblinking gaze of the invisible poet that makes Holocaust such a vital book. It's as if Reznikoff took up the challenge implicit in Adorno's much misunderstood "Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch" ("It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz"). If Adorno's question is "how can anyone write poetry that can comprehend the barbarity of the Holocaust", Reznikoff's response is "by doing what the artist has always done and finding the appropriate technical means". The result is, in my opinion, one of the very great long poems in English to be written in the last century.

And so, there you have it. Not fashionable, not even a novel, but Holocaust is certainly the best book I read last year. And like any January drunk in a pub, my intention is to grab you by the collar and insist that you must read it, too. I'm not going to say you'll like it; that wouldn't be the point. But if you are interested in what poetry can do in the face of the world, then Holocaust is a must.

This article appeared first in the Guardian book blog and is republished with permission

In praise of Menard Press (again)

Here we are in 2011 and the Menard Press anniversary catalogue/keepsake published in 2010 to cover the 40 years ending in 2009 has just arrived. Anthony Rudolf, the publisher, has, perhaps, a problem with timing exampled by the catalogue including The Notebooks of Pierre Menard number one, published in 1969, numbers 2-7 not published but "don't ask" and the last and eighth appearing in 1970. Series too are not the Press's strongpoint with the Menard Essays in Art Criticism series running to one issue, a similar number reached by the Menard/Mesdames erotica series. Compared to Menard, Five Leaves is an oasis of order. Yet despite this Menard has produced 160 books, with sales of between 50 and 14,000 and a stream of poetry postcards. As the Press limps towards the finishing line (Rudolf's words) I'm pleased to again honour the little press that published Primo Levi's poetry for the first time outside of Italy, published Paul Auster for the first time in the UK and whose roster of poets includes Octavio Paz and memoirists Nadezha Mandelshtam. The press also, famously, turned exclusively from literature to publishing against the nuclear threat for a period, with writers including Sir Martin Ryle and Oliver Postgate and the seminal 1982 essay Four Minutes to Midnight by Nicholas Humphrey.

Anyone who collects material related to small presses should immediately order the keepsake from http://www.menardpress.co.uk/ and dig in to fine some some treasures still listed as being available. Presses like Menard are unlikely ever to appear again.

And the origins of the name Menard? Rudolf was and is a fan of the Argentinian writer Borges (pictured), Pierre Menard being one of Borges' short stories.

Penguin at 75

Allan Lane invented the paperback in 1935, as he saw the need for good books, published in paperback to reach a wide audience. Ere long you could buy Penguins for 6d in Woollies. Except the paperback book started the previous century. Nor was Penguin the first to sell serious paperbacks to a mass audience. I have a 1902 paperback of Britain for the British (which then meant something different from the current meaning) by Robert Blatchford. I don’t know how many copies that book sold but his Merrie England sold two million. The publisher was Clarion, a socialist movement which sold books off vans and at propaganda visits to small towns (the Flashmobs of a century ago). Among the paperbacks listed inside are The Art of Happiness by Robert’s brother Montague (under the attractive pen name Mont Blong) and the essential Does Municipal Management Pay? I suspect that hundreds of copies of the latter are still under someone's bed. But Penguin did bring serious paperbacks to a mass audience - colour coded books for different audiences. Many’s the home that still has a shelf of orange (fiction) and green (crime). Other related imprints developed - Puffin, Penguin Classics, Pelican.

Penguin took part in one of the most important trials of the last century related to censorship. DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the focus of the trial that heralded the changes of the 1960s, the prosecutors being shown to be out of date by asking if this was a book “you would want your want your wife or servants to read”. When I became a grown-up book buyer around 1970, Penguin had a reputation as being radical (ironically at around the same time it lost its independence) and what would now be called cool though my Penguin copy of The Kon-Tiki Expedition is only a few inches away from my Penguin Obsolete Communism: the left wing alternative by Danny Cohn-Bendit. Around that time Penguin, always good on design, was famed for the “Marber Grid”, the cover design thought up by Romek Marber. Five Leaves recently published Marber’s Holocaust memoir, No Return, under our Richard Hollis imprint. Hollis himself was a designer at Penguin, his books including Ways of Seeing by John Berger. The Cohn-Bendit book mentioned before was a Penguin Special as was Protest and Survive by EP Thompson (1980), perhaps the last book to have a symbiotic relationship with a mass movement.

In 1983 Penguin shocked the book trade by paying a million pounds for the sleepy old family firm of Frederick Warne, publishers of a lovely series of hardback Beatrix Potter books. But by then the Penguin Group was part of a conglomerate which owned Royal Doulton China as well as the Financial Times and it was the merchandising that interested them. Meantime there were other publishers moving into Penguin territory. Picador had Ian McEwan and a host of high quality fiction for the literati, with King Penguin struggling to keep up. On the other hand, Penguin published Satanic Verses, which brought the firm many problems, including an attempt to set fire to the then Penguin bookshop in Nottingham.

The bookshop chain has gone, but Penguin is still with us, with a good list and a better backlist, though without its former cachet. There are times when a publisher catches the moment - Victor Gollancz did with his Left Book Club in the 30s and the 40s; City Lights with the Beat Poets and Virago with its feminist writers. All, interestingly, had immediately identifiable livery. But moments, like movements, pass and Penguin’s current best selling books include yet more Fry and Oliver. Whatever my current concerns, I’m grateful to Penguin editors for publishing so many of the books on my shelves. AS Neill’s Summerhill, Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, Lawrence’s The Rainbow, those old green Dashiell Hammetts…