Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [24]
But the age of the cottage industry was already coming to an end. The Wall Street wolf was already at the door, impressed by the growth of textbook and educational publishing and eager for a new industry to take public, while book publishers themselves were already trying to figure out how much they would be worth if they opened that door.
THE BUSINESS I had entered was more complex and divided than I could possibly have understood at the time. To begin with, there were still two separate worlds of book publishing, though the barrier between them was beginning to break down. The older, family-owned publishing houses of New York City and Boston were still dominated by Gentiles, while most of the newer houses that had been founded in the twenties were dominated largely by Jews. This distinction matters so little now that it is hard to believe how much it mattered in the 1950s, let alone how much it had mattered before World War Two.
At that point in my life, it was not a distinction that mattered to me at all. In fact, the subject was never mentioned in my family, so much so that my mother to this day refuses to believe that my father was Jewish. The truth is that the three Korda brothers, when they arrived in England in 1932, were so exotic, with their thick Hungarian accents and their extravagant behavior, that it never occurred to anybody to ask if they were Jewish or not, and since they themselves did not feel particularly Jewish, they simply never alluded to the subject. Their children, therefore, grew up unaware that they were half Jewish. (One of them stubbornly denies the fact to this day and had his father buried conspicuously as a Protestant.)
Having been born in England of an English mother and baptized and confirmed in the Anglican Church, I had no idea that I was half Jewish. Moreover, I had been educated in places where anti-Semitism was almost unknown. So far as I was concerned, Jews were people such as Sir Isaiah Berlin, Lord Rothschild, and the Warburg family, or Hollywood moguls such as David Selznick and Sam Spiegel, or artist friends of my father’s such as Marc Chagall and Jacob Epstein. It never occurred to me to feel anything other than admiration for them.
I was, however, not totally unaware of anti-Semitism in the United States, which was far more widespread and more socially acceptable in the 1940s and 1950s than people are able to imagine today. In the winter of 1942, my father had flown over from England to see me and took me down to Palm Beach. He had booked a suite at a most luxurious hotel, and the manager himself showed us around. “You’ll be very comfortable here,” he told my father with a wink. “I need hardly say that you’ll be among your own. The hotel is restricted, naturally.”
My father glared at him from beneath fiercely bushy eyebrows. In his inimitable Hungarian accent, he asked, “Vat means restricted?”
The manager give him a knowing smile. “Well, Mr. Korda,” the manager whispered, “I’m not supposed to say this, but we don’t take people of the Jewish faith.”
I had seldom seen my father angrier or move faster. Within an hour, we were in Miami, but the incident had soured him on Florida. After only one night there, we went back to New York, despite the sun and fresh food, both of which my father craved after two years in wartime England.
In retrospect, that would have been a good time for him to have told me that he was Jewish, or for me to have intuited it, but unfortunately, neither happened. Still, my father never left me in any doubt that anti-Semitism was wrong, and I was therefore constantly surprised to find evidence that there was so much of it