David Hoffman answers Freedom

It might make sense to read the previous blog posting, concerning David Hoffman and Freedom! I was concerned that while Freedom had put their case in the public domain, a story repeated across the blogosphere, the only place I could find giving Hoffman's point of view was some extracts from emails reprinted in another anarchist paper. I decided to ask David Hoffman for his side of the story, which is printed below. For most readers, even of this blog, this disagreement might be a little arcane. My own view has changed since my first posting, on reading David Hoffman's side of the story. This does not mean I agree with everything he has said and done (he knows that), but at least his side of the story is now in a small part of the public domain. People can read Freedom's article (via the link in the previous posting) and David Hoffman's response below and can make up their own mind. Being a supporter both of the NUJ and of Freedom, and hoping to continue working with David Hoffman and Freedom in the future, I'm not in the business of making enemies. My view is that this should have been settled by either negotiation or by arbitration. Our world is a small one and we need better ways of handling disputes.
The text below is from David Hoffman, with the sections in italics from Freedom's original article.
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People who screw up often look for someone else to blame. Freedom screwed up and blamed me. That’s not important but misleading their supporters and the left in general is. Freedom won’t let me respond on their site so I’m grateful to Ross for space here.

Let’s start with their statement. I’ll put my comments alongside what they wrote (theirs in italics).

Unbeknown to us, these included pictures taken by David Hoffman which were still under copyright.

Several of the photos were marked clearly “Copyright David Hoffman”.

We have ended up paying him £4,000 for the use of these pictures rather than face legal action.

I spent months trying to get a friendly, cheap settlement. This was blocked by Freedom’s refusing to return the photos.

While this was a stupid mistake by us

It wasn’t a mistake, the collective meeting that decided to publish simply brushed aside the question of copyright. They still marked the book as THEIR copyright though.

it’s very disappointing that someone who claims to support anti-fascist politics and made money from their photographs

I support anti-racist and anti-fascist activism. I make no money from that. I make my money from photos of the far right and the police.

while enjoying protection from the far right on demonstrations

The left have never offered or given me protection on demos. I’ve never asked for it, wouldn’t want it.

should chose to extract money from a radical publisher for a genuine mistake

It wasn’t a mistake, it was a decision.

Freelance photographers covering protest have a hard time. Apart from the very long hours and physical dangers the rates we are paid have been dropping for years. It’s very hard to survive. Newspapers, mags and books now frequently use our work without payment or telling us. Between us, we’re losing hundreds of thousands. I work hard with my union and other groups to organise and support my colleagues in trying to recover some of that money. When we find infringements (we miss most) we take whatever action is needed to get paid.

When I stumbled on Freedom’s Beating The Fascists book my first feeling was disappointment. These are people I had thought to be on our side. They’d pillaged my life’s (36 years so far) work without even asking. They’d not credited me, they’d not even offered me a copy. But it was Freedom and so I didn’t just send in the dogs as I normally would. I went round to the shop to try to sort it out amicably.

When I saw the book (2/10/11) I was puzzled about where the pics had come from. Long story short, Anti-Fascist Action/Red Action had stolen them from another mag using a vulnerable worker there to assist them. Shameful, but not my business except for the prints which belonged to me, not the mag.

When I spoke to Andy Meinke at the shop I offered to settle for union rates and the return of my stolen prints. The prints were important, I didn’t want a repeat. As to the fee, I might well have given a bit of a discount too. We never got as far as discussing that because my attempts to have my stolen prints returned was blocked at every turn. Freedom spun that as me trying to get the “names of sources”. I’d had all the names within a couple of days, I was trying to get my prints is all.

This went on with me pestering Freedom and nothing happening. I asked one well known and trusted friend of Freedom’s to try and broker a settlement. He couldn’t and dropped out. Another mutual friend, well known and respected by Freedom, also tried without getting anywhere.

Still looking for a solution that didn’t involve the courts I brought in Trading Standards. They set up a meeting in May this year. Freedom finally produced what they promised was the complete file containing my prints. When I looked I saw that many prints had been removed, even prints that Freedom had previously scanned (so they must have had them) were not there. They had broken their word, still had my property and trying to get a cheap and fair deal for them had got me nowhere.

They had no interest in settling and I had wasted 8 months. There was nothing else to do. Freedom’s attitude was pretty much “We don’t care. What you gonna do about it?” Either I took the heavy legal route or I walked away. I’ve spent decades fighting for my rights and those of my fellow photographers. Walking away would be a betrayal. I prefer to avoid fights but if I must then I fight hard. It cost Freedom £4k, it didn’t have to.

I wish it had worked out better, it wasn’t down to a lack of effort on my part that it didn’t. Some of that cash has gone to good causes, more will follow. That’s really the best I can do.

There’s a lot more but I want to keep this short. Feel free to email me with questions.

David Hoffman
david@hoffmanphotos.com

David Hoffman versus Freedom Press

Many years ago Five Leaves predecessor, Old Hammond Press, published a pamphlet by Colin Ward called Housing is Freedom, Housing is Theft. It sold 1,000 copies, mainly through the network of radical bookshops and to people in the housing sector, by which I don't mean Bovis Homes. The pamphlet was reviewed in a major architectural journal which, unfortunately for Old Hammond Press, reprinted a cartoon from the pamphlet. The cartoon had been found, literally, in the bottom of a drawer, having been clipped, put away, rediscovered years later and stuck down (this was the era of paste and letraset) to brighten up the text. There was no identifiable artist signature and the 'toon could have come from anywhere. But the cartoonist was a reader of that architectural journal and sent OHP a large bill for the illicit use of his work. He was not mollified by the story of how the 'toon ended up in the pamphlet, nor that it was impossible for us to have known who the artist had been to try to ask for permission. Eventually we settled for a fraction of what he wanted but much more than a small pamphlet publisher could afford.
I was reminded of this because of the current dispute between David Hoffman and Freedom Press. Freedom published a book called Beating the Fascists which included photographs provided by the author. Unfortunately some of these were recent photographs taken not by the author but by David Hoffman - in copyright and printed without credit or permission. Freedom had assumed that the photos were by the author or one of his colleagues in the organisation Anti-Fascist Action, the subject of the book. Legally they were in the wrong, even if in ignorance and David Hoffman asked for payment for his work. I am not party to the discussions between the two parties, nor do I want to be. I've read Freedom off and on for almost forty years and have written for it occasionally. I have many books published by the anarchist Freedom Press. I've seen many David Hoffman photographs over the years and have included some in a recent book, with permission and giving credit. I respect the work of both parties. Freedom's view is presented here: http://www.freedompress.org.uk/news/2012/07/19/the-future-of-freedom/, David Hoffman's published view has not, has been limited only to partial quotes from emails by those attacking him. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the outcome is that Freedom has paid David Hoffman £4000, which they say is putting their paper at risk.
David Osler, a fellow NUJ member, has publicly called for David to refund the money. A few seconds on-line will show that both Freedom and David Hoffman share an interest in combating the far right and police excesses, are in favour of trade unions and in support of press freedom. Indeed, David Hoffman was once arrested for having an anarchist poster in his window.
Surely this could have been resolved differently.
But it is also a reminder to ourselves and other small presses to check copyright on anything in our books.

Three weeks in a library

A library is not the place you might expect to find a Siberian singer singing Edith Piaf songs in Yiddish, but the last night of the Yiddish summer course at the Medem Bibliotek in Paris included exactly that. At one time there were seven Yiddish libraries in Paris, mostly attached to particular political movements. Now only the Medem remains, the biggest Yiddish library in Europe with many of the other library holdings included in its collection. That the library has survived at all is astonishing, given that it was founded in 1929 and had to be dismembered and its stock hidden during the Nazi occupation. Many of its members did not survive, following the deportations, and the language itself struggled in the new era as Yiddish was spoken less and less by Parisian Jews.
Yet the library is flourishing more than ever, hosting a Yiddish kinderschule, cooking classes, language classes, concerts, regular day and weekend literature events and, every third year, a major language and literature summer course attended by people from all over the world.
The Medem is also a publisher, with a regular journal for learners, Tam tam. Its books include dictionaries and other learning materials and, recently, a French language book on "Jewish Utopias" which were largely Yiddish speaking, everywhere from Argentina to the Crimea.
The library holdings are inevitably specialist, with most being in Yiddish, but the stock includes fiction, poetry, educational books, memoirs and many runs of periodicals. The material includes surviving material from the ghetto libraries and the libraries in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, complete with library stamps. The library is particularly strong in material related to the socialist Bund movement, which founded the Medem, but it holds copies of the post war London literary journal Loshn un Leben and the pre-WW1 London anarchist literary journal Germinal, which I discovered was there only minutes before having to leave. You can find out more about the library on www.yiddishweb.com.
Followers of Five Leaves will know we have an interest in Jewish and Yiddish culture, but also that we love libraries - public, academic, specialist. The Medem has survived because Yiddish readers were lovers of libraries - at one time there were 900 libraries in Poland run by the Bund. It is great to see the Medem flourishing in new premises, with most of those around the library, at least over the summer school, being young people, and a number of people working on translation, bringing Yiddish writers a new audience.

The best things in life were free

By the time you read this, you are just too late to download a free ebook copy of our Scottish noir book Blood Tears by Michael Malone. For a short period the book will now be at 99p at Kindle before reverting to its normal price. There is a lot of debate in the booktrade, among writers and publishers, about the value of such offers with titles like the latest Alan Hollinghurst novel available for 20p. The critics say this devalues the book, and of course you can't make money on free. By and large I'd agree with that, not least as Amazon here (and even more in the USA) is awash with self publishing people who are desperate for any readership and offering their titles for free. How does the common reader wade through the acres of free books to know what is worth reading?
It's not good. But we thought we'd try offering a book for nowt to see if the Amazon algorithms lead to the book being promoted. We wanted to do this with a book that was within a genre where ebooks are popular (crime) and which was good. There are currently 22 five star reviews on Amazon and Michael Malone assures me that he is not related to them all! It will be interesting to now see if the buzz around the free ebook translates into a longer term interest in the book and the author. Michael is in this for the long haul, and his next crime novel with Five Leaves is completed. Our hope at Five Leaves Towers is that this promotion will mean that those who downloaded his first book for free might buy into his five book series, attend his events and generally think this is an author worth getting to know. 18,000 people downloaded Blood Tears during the five day free period, which put the book at number one in the Kindle free charts. Our first chart topper and we make not a penny... but the ebook market is "immature" (to use an industry term). We know from elsewhere that even books that top the Kindle paid-for charts don't necessarily do well in bookshops, but we thought this was worth a try as an experiment. It does not mean that all or any other Five Leaves titles will be free in the future. We'll see.

New from Five Leaves: From Revolution to Repression, Soviet Yiddish writing

It is painful that Joseph Sherman is not around to see this book. He fell ill in 2008, just after delivering the first draft of the book, and never recovered, dying in 2009. We postponed the book, fully expecting to work with him when he recovered. His untimely death meant we did not have the heart to continue and the project was shelved. Eventually we realised that the 60th anniversary of the death of the writers included here was due, prompting us to return to the book. The story of August 12 1952 has already been covered in this blog, an entry or two back, so I won't repeat the story, but can now announce that the book is available now from the website below post free in the UK. Overseas buyers might prefer to use http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ which is post free for other countries.
This book has for once merited the booktrade saw of "long awaited", by friends and colleagues of Joseph in this country, in America and his native South Africa, as well as his family.
We hope in publishing the book to commemorate the Yiddish writers but also Joseph Sherman who saw this book as important in memorialising them.
Here's the order link: http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/from-revolution-to-repression-soviet-yiddish-writing-1917-1952/

August 12 1952

Two cameos. A few years ago I attended a Communist Party seder in London. The guest speaker was Dennis Goldberg, one of six Jews arrested with Nelson Mandela in the “Rivonia Trial”, which led to Goldberg serving 22 years in prison. The food at the event was kosher, there was a klezmer band and the collection was organised by Monty Goldman, whose last electoral campaign netted over 2,000 votes for the Communist Party in Hackney in 2010. There were about 150 people present – this number out of the relict Communist Party of Britain, with a membership of below 1,000. The second cameo was in in France, at the Medem Bibliotek – Paris's Yiddish library – when, at the party at the end of a Yiddish summer school, many of the faculty and older students started singing the Internationale in Yiddish, when they realised how many of them, from different parts of the world, had been youthful members of Yiddish speaking Communist organisations. Not that the Jewish Communist story is over - the Maki (Israeli Communist Party) member Dov Khenin won a third of the votes cast for mayor of Tel Aviv in 2008.

But for many Jews of an earlier generation, 12th August 1952 marked a decisive break, when thirteen leading members of the Soviet Union's Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC) were murdered by Stalin. Their number included the cream of Soviet Yiddish writers including the novelist David Bergelson, the poets David Hofshteyn (who was also a Hebraist), Leyb Kvitko, Peretz Markish and Itzik Feffer. These deaths followed the earlier state murder of the poet Izi Kharik and the death in prison of Pinkhes Kahanovitsh (“Der Nister”). Shloyme Mikhoels, the actor and later artistic director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre was also killed, though the murder was disguised as a traffic accident. Mikhoels had been the leading light in the JAFC.
The JAFC had been set up during World War II, one of five committees – the others being scientists, Slavs, youth and women – to promote the political and military aims of the Soviet Union. Mikhoels and Feffer toured America and other countries to propagandise and to raise money, meeting Jewish and other leaders. These official visits were to rebound against the JAFC later due to Stalin's paranoia about any Soviet citizen who'd been in contact with people living in the West. After the war the JAFC continued, increasingly becoming a pole of attraction for Jews turning to the only officially recognised organisation of Jews which seemed to have power and contacts. The JAFC newspaper, Eynikeyt (Unity) was widely read. The establishment of the state of Israel, and its early recognition by Stalin, gave people confidence to celebrate the new State publicly – with this too rebounding against JAFC members thought to be “bourgeois nationalists”. Not all JAFC supporters were arrested. One of those to escape the round-up was that eternal survivor Ilya Ehrenburg, a controversial figure who would later write a novel, The Thaw, which provided the name for the post-Stalin era in Russia.
The JAFC was closed down in 1948. Most of those arrested were tortured to extract “confessions”, most of which were withdrawn at their staged trial to no avail. The closure of the JAFC drew to an end another period of Jewish life in the Soviet Union. For Yiddish, this was a severe blow – with the political and cultural leadership wiped out.
It had all started so well. The Revolution of 1917 lead to a flowering of Yiddish culture, publishing, libraries, schools and theatre. After Czarist repression Jews were finally able to live in a country that appeared to respect their language and autonomy and which aimed to abolish anti-Semitism. But what became obvious was that the Communist Party needed to use Yiddish – the language of most Jews at the time – to propagandise and to move Jews away from religion and the old ways.
In the early years there was intense debate about the nature of Yiddish writing, with modernist experiments in literature, art and typography. For Yiddish writers there was the struggle to write creatively and naturally, and to make their living, while under political pressure to conform. Within the tragedy that was played out on 12th August 1952 there were smaller tragedies, of writers who had struggled with their art. In David Bergelson's case the successful Russian Revolution took away the sources of his earlier writing, which often described the world of the Jewish well-off. His work was read internationally, in the New York daily Forverts, the Warsaw Moment and the Moscow Shtrom. His Gezamlte verk (Collected Works) was published in Weimar Berlin. In 1934 he returned to Russia for good, by choice – choosing Communism, as so many Jews had done internationally in the wake of 1917. He was shot on his sixty-eighth birthday.
To mark the 60th anniversary of the death of the writers and others from the JAFC, Five Leaves Publications is bringing out a collection of translations of some of the work of the JAFC writers, and other Soviet Yiddish writers who Stalin had murdered previously. The book will be launched in London on 12th August 2012, the 60th anniversary (the last day of the Olympics!) at an international event at the Russell Square campus of the School of Oriental and African Studies, in association with the Jewish Music Institute. The event is free and runs from 2.00pm-5.00pm (further information from myra@fiveleaves.co.uk). The speakers include Gennady Estraikh, Associate Professor of Yiddish at New York University and Robert Chandler, translator of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. Polina Shepherd, who was born in Siberia, and her husband Merlin will play music of the Soviet Jewish era.
For me, the high points in the book are when – as in so much of Yiddish literature and film – tradition meets modernity. In Markish's “The Workers' Club”, for example, the new Soviet regime wants to turn an old synagogue into a cultural centre. In Der Nister's “Grandfather and Grandson” an elderly rabbi and his Communist grandson are both arrested by the Nazis and are taken to their fate together, with both finding, in extremis, a way of respecting each other's views.
Given the period the material was written, the Holocaust loomed large, as members of the JAFC tried to find ways of commemorating the Jewish victims and Jewish resistance, In David Bergelson's “The Sculptor” he wrote “One of the quiet middle-sized towns on the border between Podolia and Volin” - Berdichev in fact – the sculptor, a partisan, returns after the town was retaken from the Germans to find what was left and who had survived as others also gradually drift home. He eventually leaves with no exact address “but he had sculptures that could tell over again about his father, about his town, and about his people.” His “metal figures, marble busts and bas-reliefs... joined with... holy books to recite Kaddish in [the town's] memory.”
There are also some early illustrations by Chagall, which accompany the long poem “Troyer” (Grief) by David Hofshteyn, first published, with the same graphics, in 1922 by the Kultur-lig as a fund-raising pamphlet for local Jewish orphans, translated by Seth Wolitz; other poems included are by Leyb Kvitko and Izi Kharik, the majority translated by Heather Valencia. Most of the book has been, however, translated and edited by the late Joseph Sherman, who died in 2009 when we originally planned to publish. After Sherman's untimely death – with the book as yet unfinished – I did not have the heart to go back to it for some time. I am sure he would have been pleased that we are now bringing the book out for the 60th anniversary. We include a long essay by him on the JAFC and detailed biographies of the writers which comprises a good summary of Soviet Yiddish writing from the Revolution up to the arrests of 1948.
The closure of the JAFC was not the last anti-Semitic act of Stalin. There were direct family connections with some of those arrested in the “doctors' plot” though fortunately Stalin died before those arrested were killed, and they were released. Khrushchev's “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ended the worst excesses of the Stalin era though it was not until 1989 that the JAFC members were “rehabilitated”.

A version of this article will also appear in Jewish Renaissance, published this month.

Lowdham Book Festival, that's it for another year

The last chair has been stacked, the last wine glass dried and the last cake eaten. The last speaker will be on his way soon. Lowdham Book Festival is over for another year - except that we have a year round programme so it's back to the Methodist Chapel on Friday for a "First Friday" lecture. But nevertheless, what stands out? Firstly, I realise I'm getting a bit old to put out 500 chairs on my own. Does Peter Florence do this at Hay? Secondly we must bring back our "last Saturday" book fair and all round jamboree. This year, because of family problems, I wasn't able to organise this, and the Festival missed it. I missed it. Thirdly, we might be on to a winner with a new funding stream. At our Dickens Day at the St. Mary's Church venue, someone turned up late for a session, but that happens, so he was duly charged £3 to come in. After praying for a while he left. Goodness me. Right, since we now do pay-to-pray, next year we could have a scale for charges - absolutions, confessions, holy relics.
What stood out from the programme? I couldn't attend everything this year, but the highlight for me was The Bookshop Band - one of the few events where ticket sales were lower than we expected. The Band write songs about books, it's as simple as that, but well crafted songs played on all sorts of instruments including an eighteenth century cello. More about them on http://www.thebookshopband.co.uk/. Ticket sales were really pretty low for the Band, and we're not having that so next year they are coming back as a support act for a must-see author. The band is currently on tour round small indie bookshops and book festivals - do see them if you can, or book up when you see them at Lowdham next year.
Regulars will know that though Lowdham is a Five Leaves project (run jointly with The Bookcse in Lowdham) it is not a festival of Five Leaves writers. This year our Pippa Hennessy designed and layout out the programme and publicity material. Our sole featured book was Made in Nottingham by Peter Mortimer, though some Five Leaves regulars and irregulars appeared on other platforms including John Lucas (a Lowdham fixture), Chris Arnot, Jon McGregor, John Harvey, Stephen Booth and Heather Reyes. Attendances were around 2,500 and ticket sales in total were among our best ever. In these times that is good going.
My fellow organiser Jane Streeter had to do most of the work this year, and she must be exhausted. But the Festival would be impossible without the staff of The Bookcase, our technician Mark Gittins and our regular front of house team of Julia Pirie, Richard and Liz Kaczor and Helen Pallett.
You can join our mailing list via janestreeter(a)thebookcase.co.uk.