Works discussed:

The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe (Penguin Books, 2011, originally published 1958)

A Big Storm Knocked It Over, Laurie Colwin (Harper Perennial, 2021, originally published 1993)

The Vixen, Francine Prose (Harper Perennial, 2021)

Three-Martini Lunch, Suzanne Rindell (Putnam, 2016)

As a dreamy, bookish child who felt closer to the characters in the novels I read than to my actual, real-life friends, I would while away afternoons perusing the spines of the books on the tall teak shelves that lined our family room, attempting to decode the names and symbols at their base. What did the greyhound-like dog below Philip Roth’s name signify? Who or what were Harper & Row, Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf? The last name particularly intrigued me because it could have belonged to one of my father’s friends from Seward Park High School or City College. Because, of course, it sounded Jewish.

One of those friends, Irving Greenfield, published novels at a mind-boggling rate – nearly a book a year, mysteries and westerns and romances, some under pseudonyms – yet I somehow made it through dozens of dinners at his Staten Island row house with no understanding of how books came into the world. The terms “publisher” and “agent” often arose in conversation – I distinctly remember Irving laughing about being his agent’s least famous client – but I was, most likely, too absorbed in a Judy Blume book to glean their meaning.

All that changed in 1996, when I took a job as assistant to the head of Harold Ober Associates, New York’s oldest (or second-oldest, depending on whom you asked) and most storied literary agency, whose earliest clients included Dylan Thomas, Agatha Christie, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

My boss, a commanding lady of a certain age, bore the name Phyllis Westberg. “My mom’s name is Phyllis, too,” I told her, a day or two into the job.

“She’s Jewish, right?” she said, with a dry little laugh. Shocked, I nodded. My family didn’t utter the word “Jewish” outside the confines of our house, the spectre of both the Holocaust and McCarthyism still vivid.

“It’s a common name for Jewish girls of our generation,” she told me, lighting up a cigarette. “Everyone always thinks I’m Jewish. Phyllis Westberg. It sounds Jewish, but it’s not.” She laughed again. “It’s not a bad thing, in publishing, passing as Jewish. It probably helped me.”

I was soon to discover that I was part of another tradition: that of the young, female assistant. A subject of such fascination that it has spawned its own micro-genre, which I think of as Assistant Lit. I’ve spent my whole adult life fielding questions about my brief time at Ober, and eventually wrote a memoir about it, My Salinger Year.

The genre originates with Rona Jaffe’s 1958 bestseller The Best of Everything, newly republished by Penguin, in celebration of its sixty-fifth anniversary, with an introduction by New Yorker writer Rachel Syme. I first discovered Jaffe’s epic page-turner a few months into my own assistantship, devouring it in two frenzied days, nodding my head furiously in recognition. The novel centres on Westchester-raised, Radcliffe-educated Caroline Bender, who takes a job in the typing pool at the fictional Fabian Publications after her fiancé jilts her for a Texan heiress. Though Jaffe never explicitly describes Caroline as Jewish – as she would the heroines of her fifteen subsequent bestsellers – her identity was instantly clear to me, even before she and a friend nickname a dull, affluent suitor “Bermuda Schwartz”, and the ins and outs of her days shocked me with their similarity to my own, forty years later.

As Jaffe explains in her own introduction to the 2005 edition, she wrote the novel shortly after leaving Fawcett Publications, where she had worked her way up to associate editor. She aimed not simply to fictionalise her own story, but to lay bare the realities of an assistantship in the so-called glamour industry of publishing. These realities include near-constant sexual harassment and pay so low that Caroline can’t even afford a ticket home to the suburbs, and her friend April can only buy food thanks to her grocer’s largesse. The trade-off for Caroline, specific to the industry, is upward mobility. Caroline’s instincts for fiction allow her to rise through the ranks quickly, a rarity for women in post-war America. And though she arrives at Fabian hoping her duties will take her mind off her failed romance, within a few days she finds work more satisfying than anything she’s experienced in her life. “Manuscripts were piled on her dresser among the perfume bottles … There was always work to do, not because Fabian made their editors take work home but because she wanted to … For her the thrill was in the competition and the achievement.”

And while contemporary audiences thrilled to Jaffe’s frank portrayal of young women’s lives – including abortions, seductions by married men and many other then-taboo subjects – I found myself astonished by Jaffe’s groundbreaking depiction of the actual labour involved in the publishing industry. Caroline barely breaks for lunch and feels nothing but pity for her married friends, at home cleaning and tending to babies. And when Bermuda Schwartz proposes, she turns him down.

Jaffe intended her debut to serve as a cautionary tale and was perpetually surprised by the hordes of young women who read it more as an instruction manual: how to get ahead in publishing. One part of those instructions rang particularly true for me: dress the part. While Caroline’s less ambitious colleagues show up in shiny baby blue suits with peter pan collars, Caroline wears simple, chic outfits in black and grey wool. Her dress signals maturity, yes, but it also functions as a kind of high WASP cosplay. With my own uniform at Ober, which involved kilts and twinsets, loafers and Oxfords, I was trying to portray myself in the same way – as a very specific sort of assistant, one who understood the mores and aesthetic and history of the literary realm. A very specific sort of Jewish assistant. In other words: a Laurie Colwin character.

If you’re not familiar with Laurie Colwin, you will be soon. In the decades since her untimely death at forty-eight, in 1992, love has grown steadily for Colwin’s slim, elegant fictions, culminating in her two publishers’ collaborative 2021 reissue of her ten books. Earlier this year, when The New Yorker ran a newly discovered Colwin story, “Evensong” – in which a Jewish book designer has an affair with her Episcopalian neighbour – a furore, of sorts, ensued, as fans who’d thought her body of work complete kvelled over not just the story itself but also the possibility that Colwin might have left behind other unpublished work. Colwin’s five novels and many short stories – the first of which was published in The New Yorker when she was just twenty-five and an editorial assistant herself – have a wry, comedic tone that masks their subversive ideas about love and marriage, friendship and community. Set largely in 1980s New York, Colwin’s deceptively light tales often centre on fictional versions of the female scions of New York’s original Jewish families, whose ancestors made fortunes in banking a century or two ago, and who now dwell in spacious Upper East Side apartments, eating lox on toast points and working in publishing. Part of Colwin’s enduring appeal lies in the very contemporary enmeshing of her heroines’ work lives with their inner struggles, their romantic quandaries and their maternal reckonings. Colwin’s novels collapse the personal and the professional. In her entire oeuvre, the office serves not as set dressing but as a function of both plot and character.

I read Colwin’s last novel, A Big Storm Knocked It Over, published posthumously in 1993, in 1996, when I began at Ober, not knowing that Colwin had died so recently, nor that she had worked in publishing for years, starting out as an assistant and writing at night, like me. Hamish Levey, the genteel house where her heroine works, with its library-like chambers and eccentric characters, greatly resembled my own first place of employment. I felt a shy kinship with Colwin’s heroine, Jane Louise Parker, a book designer who adores her job and has worked her way up from an assistantship under the mentorship of her boss, Sven Michaelson, despite spending an inordinate amount of her workday deflecting the advances of Sven, who can’t go five minutes without commenting on her body or asking when she’s going to sleep with him.

Jane Louise has just married a kind, even-keeled New Englander named Teddy. Though she loves him, she also harbours deep, unsettling fears that he’s made a mistake in marrying a “Jewess”. Surrounded by Teddy’s family, “her Jewishness presse[s] in on her” in a way it never does at work, nor, troublingly, with the married, lecherous Sven, who has “some weird hold over her”. Partly because he’s devastatingly handsome, and partly because he, too, is Jewish. She feels a kinship with him that she can’t replicate with Teddy, despite Sven’s lewdness and reduction of her to a mere sexual object.

Back in 1996, Sven’s behaviour struck me as perfectly normal. It still did in 2014, when I read it a second time. This winter, however, I found myself putting the book down and taking deep breaths to quell my horror – at Sven, yes, but also at my former self. And I found myself wondering why so many works of Assistant Lit, with their quiet exposés of psychological abuse and sexual harassment, have been penned by Jewish writers, including, most recently, the venerable Francine Prose, whose clever comedic novels often explore issues of race, identity, class and power. Her latest, The Vixen, is set in 1953 – the same year as The Best of Everything, surely not a coincidence – and charmingly narrated by Simon Putnam, a rare male assistant at the fictional Landry, Landry & Bartlett, where “even the lowliest job carried a certain cachet”. Simon arrives at his midtown office to find a beautiful, angry – and very pregnant – girl sitting at his desk; an exemplary assistant, now that she’s showing she’s been fired by – according to the office rumour mill – Simon’s magnetic new boss, Warren Landry, “a publishing legend” with a corona of white hair, a bespoke suit and a wife he mentions only to denigrate.

A newly minted Harvard grad, Simon is completely qualified for the job, except for one thing: he’s Jewish, his name “the prank of an immigration official who, on Thanksgiving Day … gave each new arrival … the surname of a Mayflower pilgrim”. Though Simon is “content to let people believe what they wanted about who I was and where I came from”, much like Colwin’s Jane Louise, he can’t slough off his discomfort about passing as a gentile. “I felt disloyal to my parents, ungrateful for their love and care.” All the more so when he’s asked to edit a propagandistic novel with a right-wing agenda and a hint of antisemitism.

Ultimately, Simon leaves not just Landry, Landry & Bartlett but publishing itself, partly because he realises he prefers writing to editing – this is not, like the Colwin and Jaffe, a novel about the joys of work – but more because he believes the industry unfriendly to Jews, incompatible with Jewishness. It’s a move that reminded me of Suzanne Rindell’s searing, underappreciated Three-Martini Lunch, a 2016 novel set in the publishing industry in 1958, five years after The Best of Everything came out. (Also, not a coincidence.) Rindell’s heroine, Eden Katz, an ambitious would-be editor, arrives in New York from Fort Wayne, Indiana, with a letter of introduction to the fictional publisher Torchon & Lyle. Or actually two letters. “I took the liberty of writing one in the name of Katz, and one in the name of Collins,” says her college mentor, a former editor. “Publishing is a pretty friendly business to … all types … some circles are friendlier than others … and you’ll want to play your cards right.” Not quite understanding – or not quite wanting to understand – Eden arrives at Torchon & Lyle with the letter bearing her real name. “Eden Katz,” drawls the editor with whom she meets. “How exotic.”

Still, she’s hired and, like Jaffe’s Caroline Bender, finds quick success and happiness as a reader. Though she becomes her boss’s greatest asset he unendingly treats her with suspicion and coldness. A fellow assistant reveals why: “[E]verybody knows Mr. Turner is funny about Jews.” Eventually, Eden meets a high-level editor, Mabel Singer, who explains that the publishing industry is firmly segregated: Jewish publishers – the Knopfs and Simon & Schusters and Pocket Books – hire Jews. Gentile firms hire gentiles. Eden crossed this divide purely due to her letter of introduction. Without it, a Katz – or a Goldstein or a Klein – wouldn’t have even been called in for an interview.

That letter got her in the door, but it can’t shield her from the antisemitism threaded through the office. Nor from the lecherous editor who stays late at the office, preying on whichever poor assistant has been made to work late. One night, it’s Eden. When her boss returns to the office after hours and finds her pinned to a desk, screaming, it is she who’s fired for sexual misconduct.

By the novel’s end, Eden has found her way to a Jewish publisher, risen through the ranks and used her position to publish books of literary and political importance, books that have the potential to change the world, including a memoir modelled somewhat on James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. It’s an outcome I couldn’t help but think of as distinctly Jewish, a literary iteration of tikkun olam, and one shared by the founders of real-life Jewish publishers like Alfred A. Knopf, whose goal, from the start, was to publish books of literary and social importance, or Kurt Wolff, founder of Pantheon, and the subject of Alexander Wolff’s recent biography, Endpapers, who aimed “to present to the American public works of lasting value, produced with the greatest care and stress on quality … to help spread knowledge and understanding of the essential questions of human life and culture”.

By the time I walked through the doors of Harold Ober Associates – still, deep down, the same dreamy, bookish child – Knopf and Pantheon had become part of the Random House empire, as had many other publishers, Jewish and not. The era of passionate, entrepreneurial publishers, determined to have a hand in shaping American culture, had ended, and that of corporate publishing begun. But at my desk in the firm’s library-style offices, the fire and passion of those original Jewish publishers, and magazines, and critics, somehow, still, instilled itself in me, vibrating through every letter I typed, every contract I filed, every manuscript I read, ultimately investing me with the knowledge and confidence to have my own hand in shaping American culture in the way I’d always imagined: as a writer. ▤

 

Joanna Rakoff is the author of the international bestselling memoir My Salinger Year and the bestselling novel A Fortunate Age, winner of the Goldberg Prize for Fiction and the Elle Readers’ Prize. Rakoff’s books have been translated into twenty languages, and the film adaptation of My Salinger Year opened in theaters worldwide in 2021 and is now streaming. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Sewanee, Bread Loaf, Jerome Foundation, Authors’ Guild, PEN, Ragdale Foundation, Art OMI/Ledig House, and Saltonstall; and has taught at Columbia University, Brooklyn College, and Aspen Words. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, O: The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Elle, Porter, and elsewhere, and her new memoir, The Fifth Passenger, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2024.

The film adaptation of My Salinger Year stars Margaret Qualley as Joanna and Sigourney Weaver as her boss. Directed by Oscar-nominee Philippe Falardeau, the film opened in sixty-five countries in 2021, and is available for streaming wherever you rent movies.

http://www.joannarakoff.com/