ENDPAPERS

Former Sports Illustrated staffer Wolff turns inward with this deeply personal story about family and book publishing.

In 2017, the author moved to Berlin for a year to research and chronicle his German family’s roots going back to the early 19th century. He wryly reflects that the welcoming journeys his grandfather Kurt and father Nikolaus took to America years ago “stand as a rebuke to the anti-immigrant mood in much of the United States.” Book lovers will find Kurt’s story especially interesting. In 1912, he was working for a German publisher when he first met a young Franz Kafka and his friend Max Brod. A year later, he used family money and cash raised “by auctioning off parts of his book collection” to buy out the publisher and create Kurt Wolff Verlag, bringing Kafka and Brod along with him. He quickly added Franz Werfel and Rabindranath Tagore, serving as a steward for cutting-edge writing and what he described as the “absolute belief in the authentic word and worth of what you champion.” After fighting in World War I, Kurt went on to publish “Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, Maxim Gorky and Anton Chekhov, even Sinclair Lewis.” Niko was born in 1921. Wolff chronicles in detail how Hitler’s rise to power affected many family members, some incarcerated in concentration camps. The atmosphere greatly worried the Jewish publisher of “degenerate” literature. Kurt moved to the U.S. in 1941 while Niko, who served in the army, struggled in harsh postwar Germany before coming to America in 1948. This new phase in the Wolff family story included Kurt’s founding of a new press in their “grungy” New York City apartment: Pantheon. With the venture, Kurt hoped “to present to the American public works of lasting value,” including those by André Gide, Albert Camus, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Boris Pasternak, and Günter Grass. Wolff concludes with unsettling discoveries about his family’s relationships with the Merck pharmaceutical company and the Nazis.

An affecting, emotional, and sometimes harrowing saga.