Schocken Books

Schocken Books began in Berlin in 1931 as Schocken Verlag, the creation of Salman Schocken, a department-store owner who put his money into Jewish letters. He left for Palestine, bought the daily Haaretz and started a second publishing house in Tel Aviv. According to the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Berlin firm was closed in 1938, but he managed to ship much of its stock out first. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and in 1945 he founded Schocken Books Ltd. there. Random House acquired the list in 1987.

Today Schocken is an imprint inside the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, part of Penguin Random House. Its own description is a commitment to Jewish authors and to writers who take up Jewish culture, religion and history. The backlist is wide. It includes S. Y. Agnon, Sholem Aleichem, Aharon Appelfeld, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Elie Wiesel, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, the novelist Meir Shalev, the historian Deborah Lipstadt and the cookbook author Joan Nathan.

Kafka is the name that ties the imprint's past to its present. Salman Schocken's Berlin house helped make Kafka's work widely available in German, and the American imprint still publishes him in English. The Trial on WebToTell is the edition built on the classic Willa and Edwin Muir translation, revised and supplemented by E. M. Butler, with an introduction by George Steiner. It also carries Kafka's own drawings and diary entries from the months he was writing the novel. Schocken has since added a second route into the book. Breon Mitchell's translation, based on the restored text, belongs to the Schocken Kafka Library.

A reader who arrives from The Trial can expect books that come with context: an introduction, a named translator, sometimes extra documents. Beyond Kafka, the natural next steps from the author list above are Agnon's fiction, Buber's writing on Jewish thought, Arendt's political thought, or Appelfeld and Shalev for novels from Israeli literature.