Victor Gollancz

Origins and early life

Victor Gollancz was born in London on 9 April 1893 into a German-Polish Jewish family: his father Alexander Gollancz was a wholesale jeweller, his grandfather Samuel Marcus Gollancz was cantor and rabbi of the Hambro synagogue in London, and two of his uncles, Hermann and Israel Gollancz, were rabbis and professors.

Work and career

He broke with the orthodoxy of that upbringing and called himself a Christian socialist, though no formal conversion is documented and this fiche says so rather than asserting more than the record shows. He founded the publishing house Victor Gollancz Limited in 1927, and it published George Orwell, whose Road to Wigan Pier he commissioned, along with Ford Madox Ford, Daphne du Maurier and Kingsley Amis, in the yellow jackets that became a trademark of British publishing.

In 1936 he created the Left Book Club, which at its height sent a chosen political book each month to fifty thousand subscribers and organised hundreds of local discussion groups, shaping a generation of the British left. He campaigned publicly for the rescue of European Jews, and after 1945 he founded Save Europe Now to press for food to be sent to defeated Germany and Austria, arguing that starving German civilians was an answer to Nazism that decent people could not give; he was attacked from every side for it, and this fiche records the position plainly.

He supported the founding of Israel, opposed the death penalty, and was knighted in 1965. He died in London on 8 February 1967.