That didn’t seem too difficult since I didn’t have any money.
“And,” she continued, “never have children.”
Even though my parents left me pretty much alone, choosing to focus their futile energy on arguing over how to handle André, I quickly got sick of our family dynamic. By the time I turned twelve, I had missed most of the fourth grade, preferring to devote my energies to the agency during the day and billiards at night. Still, the tumult of our neighborhood pool halls was no match for the Sturm und Drang among the members of my family.
I was lying in bed one night when I made a decision to give up trying to be an emotional part of our family. Nothing special happened, no apocalyptic fight, just the inevitably ordinary moment that always precipitates a big change. I’m not going to do this anymore, I vowed to myself. These people are nuts, and if they want to drive themselves even crazier, they’re doing it without me.
I divorced myself from my family emotionally but not financially.
My father was terrible with money. His knack for mismanaging it, losing it, or not making it in the first place was an incredible source of stress within our family. He never gave my mother enough allowance to run the household, so after André, money was their second biggest source of argument. My mother would always go up to my father and say, “I need another twenty dollars.” And he’d either have it or not. She never knew where she stood.
I had already taken charge of the bookkeeping at the agency, so organizing the family finances was a natural outgrowth. Setting my mother up with a fixed amount of money every week was the easiest thing in the world for me to do. I had always been phenomenal at arithmetic, not really higher math with its abstractions, but real numbers. They appeared in my head as clearly as objects in a room, making up a coherent interior. Because I created a picture in my mind, I could see the relationship between the basic data and the conclusion, and I knew when the conclusion was wrong.
“Look. I can manage the money,” I proclaimed to my parents, whether they were listening or not, about my new role. “The rest, you guys have to take care of on your own.”
No more Francis the peacekeeper or Francis the child. Francis the worker was the role I much preferred. The only time I was really truly happy in school was during sixth grade because my teacher, Mr. White, in charge of a lot of the school programs and also a bit of a drunk, was more than willing to hand over his responsibilities to me. I ran the audio-visual department, setting up the projector anytime a class showed a movie. As Mr. White’s boy, I was the lunchroom monitor and ran the milk crew, organizing the deliveries of milk to the lower classes. I didn’t get paid. Being in charge was enough for me.
What I decidedly wasn’t interested in was homework. By 1963, when I was an eighth grader at Halsey Junior High School, my schoolwork was something I relegated to the daily ride on the F train after school from Forest Hills to 57th and Madison, the offices of Sanford J. Greenburger, where I arrived at four o’clock and remained until six thirty when my father, mother, and I would go home to eat dinner.
I loved the agency and literally grew up there. Even when I was a little kid, I would hang out for hours in the incredibly shabby office on 42nd Street my father had before moving to his spiffier digs fifteen blocks north at 595 Madison. During the thirty years my father spent on 42nd Street, the place never had a paint job. He used to sit in his leather tilt chair, cracked to the point where stuffing protruded, but when he tilted it back it would eat away at the plaster on the wall behind him. So by the time we left, there was a big hole in the wall.
The décor suited the agency’s revolving door of characters, who were always scheming, breaking rules, and dreaming about the big payday. My father had one client, Max Werner (real name: Aleksandr Mihailovich Schifrin), who was famous for his prescience when it came to military matters. Exiled from his native Ukraine after the Bolshevik revolution, the self-taught military analyst landed in Germany, where he became widely known as the political editor of a socialist paper and author of more than a thousand articles.
Working at my father’s literary agency in the midseventies
When the Nazis came to power, he fled to France where, shocked to discover how ignorant the French military authorities were of Germany’s plans for war, he wrote The Military Strength of the Powers. After sending a copy to Winston Churchill, he received a personal letter in return during the spring of 1939 that was uncharacteristic of the British leader known for his astute understanding of the dangers the Nazis posed. “I have looked into [your book] with some attention,” Churchill wrote. “I think you greatly exaggerate the military strength of both Russia and Germany.”
A year later, Max was on the run again after the Nazis invaded France. He came to the United States, where he wrote a column that ran in ninety American papers and signed with my father’s agency. Max published a big best seller in ’43 called Attack Can Win. In the September 4, 1943, issue of the New Yorker, Harold Ross wrote, “He has been pretty right from first to last.”
My dad, with assistance from Leo, set out to help Max profit from his predictions. The three of them would sit around the office and cook up scoops based on whatever was hot in the news and sell the stories to the newspaper. “Hey, I’ve got a tip from one of my sources,” Max told an editor from my father’s phone, completely winging it. They were kind of soft things, but not that soft. And they were right more than they were wrong, so they got away with it. (I was only a toddler when Max died of a heart attack, so I have no way of verifying if the story is true, but from what I witnessed in that office, it sounds right.)
My father’s agency was as far from a sleepy, quiet place of literary commerce as one could imagine. Through Ledig, who had formed a small international group of like-minded publishers that were all close friends, the Feltrinelli publishing house became a client. Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, son of one of the richest families in Italy, had four interests: publishing, bookstores, communism, and radical politics (which juxtaposed ironically with his father’s passion for banking and real estate, including collecting villas, many fully staffed and filled with fresh flowers despite the fact that they might not be visited for years).
Giangiacomo published endless amounts of communist stuff, but he solidified the reputation of Feltrinelli Editore with Doctor Zhivago. More than a dozen Soviet editors, who condemned Boris Pasternak’s epic that sweeps through the Russian Revolution and the rise of communism as “counter-revolutionary, shoddy work,” banned its publication. In the summer of 1956, it was smuggled out of Russia to thirty-three-year-old Giangiacomo, who published it to epic success. Two years later, Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for his book that had been published all over the world in dozens of languages. It still, however, was not appreciated in the Soviet Union, where it wasn’t published until 1987—the Soviet authorities forced the writer to decline the prestigious award.
Staff at the Sanford Greenburger agency
In the late fifties and early sixties, Giangiacomo was one of the regulars hanging around Dad’s agency, usually accompanied by his girlfriend, Inge Schoenthal. If Giangiacomo was a prince masking as the common man with his Groucho Marx-esque glasses and mustache (the first time I met him, at dinner at our house in Queens, he picked up a piece of lettuce that dropped on the floor and ate it, deceiving the housekeeper into thinking he was very poor), Inge was his opposite: a German Jew from ordinary means turned glamorous photographer who seemed to be everywhere
