Plunkett Press: 164 books

Fredric Warburg, partner in the London firm of Secker & Warburg from 1936 until 1971, considered publishing an attractive occupation and a way of life. In this personal, often humorous memoir of his life until his retirement, Warburg picks up where he left off in 1939 in *An Occupation for Gentlemen*....

The Vienna I Knew: Memories of a European Childhood by Joseph Wechsberg (80,000 words, 18 illustrations) Wechsberg’s memoir of pre-World War II mittel-Europa recounts with charm and irony life in the dying Habsburg Empire, family stories of wealth gained and lost, the subtleties of coffeehouse...

This first biography of Dr. Albert C. Barnes was serialized on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer when it appeared in 1960. In it, arts journalist William Schack interviewed dozens of people who knew the famously pugnacious art collector as he assembled his world-famous collection outside...

Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook by Susan Rubin Suleiman (71,000 words and 2 photographs) Can you forget the place you once called home? What does it take to make you recapture it? In this moving memoir, Susan Rubin Suleiman describes her returns to the city of her birth — where...

Acting in Terezín by Vlastá Schönová, translated from the Czech and introduced by Helen Epstein; with an Afterword by Marsha L. Rozenblit (17,000 words) An unusual memoir by a professional actress in Ghetto Theresienstadt. Vlasta Schönová, or Vava as she was known, began her theater career...

Abraham Flexner (1866-1959), raised in Louisville, Kentucky in a family of poor Jewish immigrants from Germany, attended the Johns Hopkins University in the first decade of its existence. After graduating in 1886, he founded, four years before John Dewey’s Chicago “laboratory school,” a progressive...

Miss DeLay: portrait of beloved violin teacher Dorothy DeLay by Helen Epstein (12,200 words) Dorothy DeLay (1917-2002) was the first woman to become an internationally-acclaimed master teacher of the violin. Her thousands of students (at the Juilliard School in New York, the Aspen Music Festival,...

Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987) was one of the world’s great cellists. At age 11, she won the most prestigious cello award in Britain and was an established artist at twenty. At twenty-one, she married young conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. Six years later, her career was over. She had developed...

Bernard-Lazare (1865-1903) was a French Jewish writer and a prime mover in the Dreyfus Affair. After being involved in the Symbolist and anarchist movements, he took up the cause of Dreyfus in his brochure “Une erreur judiciaire” which anticipated Zola’s “J’accuse” by three years. He was...

John von Neumann was a Jewish refugee from Hungary considered a “genius” like fellow Hungarians Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, who played key roles developing the A-bomb at Los Alamos during World War II. As a mathematician at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (where Einstein...

The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist by Victor Weisskopf (126,000 words, 57 illustrations) In the 1930s, Victor Weisskopf worked with leading European physicists such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli. His memoir recounts in simple language how quantum mechanics...

In 1933, when she is ten, Berliner Inge Deutschkron learns that she is a Jew. At first her family is at greater risk for their leftist politics than because they are Jews. Her father flees to England; Inge and her mother hide in plain sight as non-Jews, dependent on the underground network for their...

“Manya Shochat was a truly unusual woman, a figure of extreme complexity who might have come out of a nineteenth-century Russian novel. In her life’s story we find a full enactment — rare in one person — of the main qualities, some of them contradictory, which played such a prominent role...

Varian Fry, a young editor from New York, traveled to Marseilles after Germany defeated France in the summer of 1940. As the representative of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization, he offered aid and advice to refugees who found themselves threatened with extradition...