Tom Maschler, Bold British Publisher and Booker Prize Founder, Dies at 87

The family fled to Vienna in 1938 after the Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews, but the Nazis soon followed. When Nazis arrived at the Maschlers’ home to arrest Kurt, a Jewish Socialist, he was away on business. They confiscated his valuables but allowed Tom one keepsake from his father’s study. He chose a blue crayon.

Treated for manic depression as an adult, Mr. Maschler found therapy unhelpful. “They invariably latched on to this business of Nazis coming to the house when I was 5,” he told The Guardian. “It really didn’t affect me, but therapists do love that sort of thing.” (After the war, though, he learned that three of his grandparents had been murdered in the Holocaust.)

Failing to gain passage to Sweden, where they had hoped to proceed to America, Tom and his mother moved to Britain. (His parents had separated by then.) His mother took a housekeeping job on a country estate while he attended a Quaker school.

When he was 12, he was sent to Brittany to learn French. Shortly after that he won a summer scholarship to a kibbutz in Israel, which he was able to reach only after he had audaciously written David Ben Gurion, the Israeli prime minister, asking him to intercede on his behalf.

Mr. Maschler was admitted to Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics (but not English). He rejected the offer after he learned that he had been accepted because of his prowess at tennis.

Instead he traveled to the United States, where he worked in a tuna cannery, was detained for hitchhiking and wrote travel articles for The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times (for which in 1952, at the age of 19, he chronicled a sojourn that had begun when he arrived in New York that year with $13).

He returned to Europe and, after succeeding as a tour guide in Britain and failing as a film director in Italy, entered publishing in 1955 as a production assistant at André Deutsch. He moved to MacGibbon Kee, to Penguin and finally to Cape, where he was chairman from 1970 until the company was bought by Random House in 1991.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/books/tom-maschler-booker-prize-dead.html