Books: Polish Publishers

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The creation of Marian and Hanna Kister, the Roj (Beehive) Publishers was the biggest fiction publishing house in pre-Nazi Poland. Started after World War I with a cheap edition of Jack London, it grew by virtue of its translations (Proust, Sigrid Undset, Pearl Buck, Galsworthy) to 1 80 volumes a year. In Manhattan last week the Beehive Publishers (transliterated to Roy for the U.S. trade) were again as busy as bees. In between was a story of terror and struggle.

When Poland was invaded, Hanna Kister was alone at the office. She discovered that World War II had begun when she tried to cash a check, found the bank closed. Then the telephone stopped working. The lights went out. Police and firemen disappeared. A few intellectuals appeared at the office, quickly left. "Writers are always nervous," says Mrs. Kister.

At first the Gestapo paid no attention to publishing; it was too busy with the banks. Then the House of Roy, along with other Polish publishers, received an order to turn in all their anti-Nazi books. (They published anti-Nazi Hermann Rauschning.) Through the winter Mrs. Kister carted 70,000 volumes to the Gestapo headquarters.

Reading as Usual. Huddled in their apartments in the face of atrocities so terrible the mind simply went blank under them, with subtle tortures added to their desperation, their ignorance of what was happening, and their fear, the Poles kept alive. They even continued to read books. Their favorite reading: Polish history, historical novels (e.g., Gone With the Wind).

Early in the winter of 1939 — Mrs. Kister cannot remember the date exactly, but it had already snowed — a Pole took a pushcart loaded with unbanned Roy books out on the streets of Warsaw to see if the Germans would permit them to be sold. They were sold. At the end of the eight months that Mrs. Kister and her daughter were in occupied Warsaw, 200 pushcart book peddlers, most of them women, sold Roy books on the streets of Warsaw. Bestsellers: history, dictionaries.

Later the Kisters got to New York City. At first Hanna Kister got a job teaching school in Brooklyn. Her husband could find nothing to do. They began publishing shamefacedly, thinking they should find work in defense factories. They printed two books of poetry by modern Polish poets, in editions of 1,000 each, sold them to Polish-Americans, including Polish speaking steelworkers in Pittsburgh. The Roy Publishers' first book was The Mermaid and the Mcsserschmitt (TIME, Dec. 28, 1942). It sold a respectable 5,000 copies, with Mrs. Kister traveling through the Middle West to persuade bookstores to stock it. At 6 o'clock one winter morning Mrs. Kister was in Indianapolis when her husband called her from Manhattan. The Book-of-the-Month Club had taken Zofia Kossak's Blessed Are the Meek.

Business as Usual. Last month Roy Publishers brought out two new volumes. They signified that less than 18 months after it was launched the new firm was solidly established.