Salman Schocken

Salman Schocken ( _he. שלמה זלמן שוקן) (October 30, 1877, Margonin, Poland - August 6, 1959, Pontresina, Switzerland) was a German Jewish publisher and businessman.Salman Schocken was the son of Jewish shopkeeper in Posen. [ [http://www.forward.com/articles/7288/ "Man of the Book: Reading a Life of Salman Schocken - Forward.com" ] ] In 1901, he went to Zwickau, a german town in southwest Saxony, to help run a department store owned by his brother, Simon. Together they built up the business and established a chain of stores all over Germany. In Stuttgart, Schocken commissioned the German Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn to build the "Kaufhaus Schocken". In 1915 Schocken was co-founder of the Zionist journal "Der Jude" (with Martin Buber). After Simon's death in 1929 Salman Schocken became sole owner of the firm. The same year, in which Schocken's friend Franz Rosenzweig also died, 1929 he established the "Schocken Institute for Research on Jewish Poetry". In 1931, he founded the publishing company "Schocken Verlag", which reprinted the recently completed Buber-Rosenzweig translation of the Bible.

In 1934, after the rise of Nazism, Schocken left Germany for Palestine. In 1940, he settled in the United States. In Jerusalem, he built the Schocken Library, also designed by Erich Mendelsohn. He was a board member of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and bought the newspaper Haaretz. He also founded "Schocken Publishing House Ltd." and opened another branch in New York (Schocken Books). The Nazis forced him to sell his German enterprises to Merkur AG but he managed to recover some of his property after the war.

Schocken became the patron of Shmuel Yosef Agnon when he was a struggling writer in Palestine. Recognizing Agnon's literary talent, Schocken paid him a stipend that relieved him of financial worries and allowed him to devote himself to writing (Agnon went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature). [ [http://bikher.org/story.php?n=10077 National Yiddish Book Center - A Simple Story by S.Y. Agnon ] ] Schocken was married to Lily and had five children. He died in 1959 on a journey to Switzerland.

References

"A Conversation about Schocken Books" [http://www.archipelago.org/vol5-2/karper.htm]

Bibliography

*Anthony David, "The Patron. A Life of S. Schocken, 1877 - 1959", New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003.