A Welcome Addition: Philadelphia becomes host to some great reads from a new publisher

by Robert Leiter, Jewish Forward

It's not every day that a new publishing house opens in Philadelphia, and that it then includes in its initial offering of four books two titles with strongly Jewish connections.

But such is the case with Paul Dry Books. Named for its founder, it is a small operation based on South 17th Street. As for the two Jewish-related books in their spring list, they are Silvano Arieti's The Parnas, subtitled A Scene From the Holocaust, and Hugh Nissenson's 1985 novel The Tree of Life. They are not only works of quality by writers of stature, they are also books deserving of readers' time and attention.

All four of the publishing houses' first titles are reprints. The other two works are His Monkey Wife by John Collier, a truly odd and intriguing novel, and the 1567 English translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, "the one Shakespeare would have read," Paul Dry explained.

"In the fall, we have five more coming — three reprints and two originals," he said. The titles include The Advancement of Learning by Francis Bacon, which the publisher describes as "the first major philosophical book written in English"; Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz by William Zinsser, the beloved author of "On Writing Well" and other works; To a Distant Island by James McConkey, about Chekhov's journey to the island of Sakhalin, a penal colony off the coast of Siberia; Cries in the New Wilderness by Mikhail Epstein, which deals with the mushrooming of fictitious spiritual groups in Russia as communism begins to crumble; and Who Loves You Like This by Edith Bruck, a memoir of life as the youngest daughter of a poor Jewish family in a small Hungarian village. The book also deals with the author's years as a prisoner in the Ausch-witz, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau concentration camps.

"Right now, we are a small operation," the publisher explained. "But if we're successful, we'll go larger." To the question why Philadelphia, Dry said that he has lived here for 30 years (he traded stocks for most of that time), and with the Internet and e-mail, there's no need to be physically situated in New York.

There are "special reasons," Dry said, for why two of his first four books are what they are.

As for Hugh Nissenson's Tree of Life, which is the Jewish writer's least Jewish book, Dry, who is himself Jewish, said he read it when it first came out 15 years ago.

"I remember I was with a friend — I was in my late 30s or early 40s then," he said. "And my friend suggested we start a book club, a reading club. I said that I'd just read a book and that I didn't get it. Could we use that one — it was the Nissenson — and he said sure. "Eight of us got together, and we all loved the book. And because it didn't have the armature of critical praise about it, like so many other books do, we seemed to learn more about it in our discussions. The group meant a tremendous amount to me. We're still reading, by the way. And the Nissenson is a great group book to read. So that's why we're reprinting it.

He 'doesn't give his hand away'

"What I also like is that Nissenson doesn't give his hand away," the publisher continued. "It's very hard to find the author in the work. And it certainly asks the question, 'How do we live without faith?' "

As for the Arieti, Dry said it's like fine port wine, aged to perfection.

"This story had been in Arieti's mind for 35 years," he noted. "And he felt compelled to do it right.

"The book may, in fact, have been an act of will on Arieti's part. He was in his 70s when he started writing it, and he wanted to bring this man back to life — the 'parnas' of the title. And he is alive on the page. He comes across as a truly noble figure.

"That's a book I read when it first came out, too, [in the late 1970s]. We did it at the book club. And I eventually lent the book to someone and never got it back. The fact that it meant so much to the reading group and that I lent it and never got it back — that's why I wanted to make it available again.

"The reading group also thought this book was thrilling," he added.

And so it is. As well as being an in-tensely moving piece of work.

As the subtitle states, the book deals with a scene from the Holocaust, the story of one man's encounter with Nazi bestiality and what it means for the greater understanding of human experience.

An Italian history lesson

The work is factual, and has deep connections to Arieti's life and work. Born in 1914 in Pisa, Italy, Arieti and his family belonged to the synagogue where Giuseppe Pardo was the "parnas," or lay leader.

After obtaining a medical degree, Arieti immigrated to New York in 1939 to avoid the Nazis, and he became a distinguished psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, as well as a writer of note, whose main professional interests were schizophrenia and depression. He wrote many works on mental illness and the workings of the human psyche, but also produced Abraham and the Contemporary Mind. He won the National Book Award in the science category for the book Interpretation of Schizophrenia. He died in 1981. Giuseppe Pardo, the parnas of the title, led the small Pisan Jewish community, which, according to Rabbi Harold S. Kushner's foreword to the book, has "produced more than its share of distinguished Jews."

Pardo "was a learned man, familiar with Bible, Talmud and secular subjects," Kushner notes. "He was a wealthy man, and charitable to Jew and non-Jew alike."

In addition, Arieti shows, Pardo was a deeply neurotic man, who suffered since his youth from an irrational fear of animals, especially dogs. Whenever he walked the street of his small city, he would swing a cane from side to side behind his back to keep the raging animals away.

As Arieti writes in the early pages of the work: "This is a story of suffering and fear, but it is also more. It is the account of a discovery I made by means of that suffering, one that has deeply affected my life and my work. I have been a psychiatrist for many years, and the discovery concerns the nobility and greatness that are at times hidden within mental illness. Yes, I have come to believe that mental illness may hide and express the spirituality of man. It is my wish here to acquaint readers with my discovery by introducing them to the man who was called 'the parnas.'

"Central to my story is another illness," the author continues, "the epidemic of evil that seized Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and was the most ferocious of its kind ever to appear on earth. Since this illness swept over the Western world in our lifetime, it is incumbent upon us to expose it in the most minute detail. Each of us has the obligation to reveal what he came to know. Sometimes one moment, fully understood, can shed light on the whole."

These few paragraphs sum up the method and the matter of Arieti's brief book. He focuses on several days in the summer of 1944, as the Nazis tightened their noose around the northern part of Pisa. The author does not spare us any of the horror of the great Pardo's torture and death, but it is all done so that some sense can be made of such abominable suffering.

Tracking down a copy of The Parnas in one of our local book shops — even special ordering it, if necessary — then reading it, and slowly savoring its sorrows and its riches, is the perfect way to welcome Paul Dry Books to the city. May the publishing house have all the success that is its due.