The lead title in a Rinehart & Co, ad run in the April 18 New York Times was the recently published The Son of the Lost Son, the first novel in a trilogy, The Sparks of the Abyss, by refugee writer Soma Morgenstern. he ad touted four books on Jewish themes appropriate for this Passover week.
Morgenstern was a well-regarded member of the sizable Viennese intellectual community that had taken refuge in the United States during the Second World War but his novels are all but forgotten today in the US. Not only are they out of print in English, but even hard to find in libraries. Ironically, he is better known today in Germany where his later works were not published until the 1990s.
The Jewish Publication Society published the novel simultaneously with Rinehart. The trilogy was about the son of a man who had converted to Christianity in Central Europe, Raised among assimilated intellectuals, the young man is drawn to the simple devout life he finds in the Jewish shtetls of rural Galicia. But he soon learns that life there is not as idyllic as he presumed when communal strife, political controversies and violent anti-Semitism rear their heads.
In a chapter devoted to Morgenstern in his book of essays Natural Selections, critic Gary Giddins wrote that the novels of the trilogy were written in an epic style reminiscent of 19th century novels and in the voice of a cosmopolitan European intellectual. In The Third Pillar, his subsequent novel chronicling the horrific events in a small Ukrainian village during the Holocaust, Morgenstern adopted a more folkloric style and Jewish point of view.
Morgenstern was born Salomo Morgenstern to a multi-lingual Hassidic family in Galicia. In his youth he became an atheist but soon returned to Judaism. He settled in Vienna where, as the local correspondent for the Franfurter Zeitung, he became associates of the writers Joseph Roth and Robert Musil and the composer Alban Berg, In 1938, he fled to Paris where, in the cruel irony of pre-occupation France, as an Austrian national he was repeatedly detained as an "enemy alien," a situation that mirrored the plight of the characters depicted in Erich Maria Remarque's Arch of Triumph, siting at top of the week's bestseller list. Morgenstern made it to New York in 1941 and drove across country to join the refugee colony that had settled in Beverly Hills. By 1946, he had returned to New York where his circle of friends included caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson, theater designer Boris Aaronson and socialite Alma Mahler, former wife of composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius and novelist Franz Werfel.
Despite having made the US his home, Morgenstern continued to write in German. Joseph Leftwich and Peter Gross translated The Son of the Lost Son into English.
Rinehart also advertised three books by prolific author and anthologist Leo W.Schwarz, The Jewish Caravan, A Golden Treasury of Jewish Literature and Memoirs of My People. In 1946, the New York-born and Harvard-educated Schwarz headed the Joint Distribution Committee's aid to Jews in the American Zone of occupied Germany. He had served in the Army during the war.
Rinehart & Co. was a New York publishing house formed in 1946 after the breakup of Farrar & Rinehart. The two Rinehart brothers were the sons of best-selling mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart. In 1960, Rinehart merged with two other publishers to become Holt, Rinehart,and Winston, now Holt McDougal, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Farrar went on to found Farrar, Straus which is now Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the last of the old school literary publishers.