Fifty years ago, and a month before publication of The Odessa File, when Frederick Forsyth was still on the international publicity circuit for The Day of the Jackal, he burst into my office at Hutchinson to explain that he had to be in Germany the next day. “Why is that a problem, Freddie?”, I asked.
He replied that he had been too busy to notice that his passport would expire before he boarded the plane for his return flight home a few days later.
He asked if he could use my phone. I waved him to my seat. In fact, he took over my desk as well as my phone. I watched in awe as he gave a jaw-dropping masterclass in how to deal with Passport Office jobsworths.
He explained what he wanted — a passport by noon the next day — and was transferred to increasingly senior officials until he had exhausted them.
He never got angry. He never raised his voice. He told them who he was and advised them in forensic detail how their system worked and how they could do it — if they wanted.
Underlying the conversations he was having, but never openly stated, was the threat of publicity that would make them seem very, very foolish. At the end of the calls, he just said thank you to the last official.
I asked him to tell me the outcome. He said he was collecting his new passport later that afternoon. Such a shame that high fives hadn’t been invented then.
The Day of the Jackal remains one of the greatest thrillers ever written. Its success meant that we knew The Odessa File would also be a bestseller.
Any book that opened: “Everyone seems to remember with great clarity what they were doing on November 22nd, 1963, at the precise moment they heard President Kennedy was dead”, demanded your attention from the start.
Forsyth never set out to explore the human condition in this novel. His focus and his range were narrower. He wanted to fulfil his three book contract with us since we had agreed to publish Jackal after, amazingly, several publishers had rejected it.
The best way was to write another documentary thriller, informed by his meticulous research and underpinned by his knowledge and experience as a Reuters journalist.
In my view, he succeeded. But his novel also helped publicise the tragedy of the Holocaust in the early 1970s in a way that was more accessible than newspaper stories of factual events or non-fiction accounts by survivors that were beginning to emerge of what had happened to the Jewish people in the War.
For those of you who haven’t read The Odessa File, here’s a quick plot summary. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas coincides with the suicide in Hamburg of Salomon Tauber, a camp survivor. He explains why he will kill himself in his diary.
The novel’s hero, Peter Miller, a non-Jewish freelance journalist, as Forsyth had been, reads the diary, given to him by a friendly policeman.
It triggers Miller’s hunt for Eduard Roschmann, the notorious former commandant of the Riga concentration camp. But now he has a new name and he appears to be a successful German businessman.
Miller comes to the attention of Odessa, an acronym for a shadowy organisation protecting former SS men in post-war Germany. Roschmann is heavily involved in facilitating the manufacture in Egypt of rockets, armed with nuclear warheads and plague material.
Mossad recruits Miller to help them destroy this threat to Israel. Miller is hunting Roschmann for very personal reasons, whilst the Odessa is trying to find and kill him.
Simon Wiesenthal gave Forsyth invaluable help with details of senior Nazis still at large in 1963-4 when this book, like Jackal, is set.
Between 1945 and the late 1950s there were no major popular works of fiction in English about the Holocaust. The dam was breached spectacularly by Leon Uris in 1958 with Exodus, which he followed with Mila 18.
His highly charged novels took as major themes the wartime atrocities of Nazi Germany. Robert Shaw’s 1967 thriller, The Man in the Glass Booth, alluded to the Eichmann trial and Lionel Davidson’s Making Good Again (a German dictionary definition of Reparations) published the next year dealt with the topic as well but there were still no novels which combined the atrocities of the Holocaust with the contemporary threat to Israel from its enemies, nor any accounts of how former prominent Nazis had slipped away and were conspiring with those enemies. These issues were integral to Forsyth’s story.
He hammered out his 300 page typescript in Eilat in 30 days in January 1972 when Israel continued to enjoy the success of the Six Day War. The shock of the Yom Kippur assault in 1973 was still 20 months away.
The massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics more or less coincided with publication of The Odessa File. Suddenly, and for the first time in a generation, despite widespread revulsion at the massacre itself, public opinion in this country was no longer firmly on the side of the Israelis.
The Palestinians, it was being suggested, must have had some reason to take such desperate measures. Maybe they were the underdogs now.
This shift in support became more noticeable a year later when Egyptian tanks launched their surprise attack and UK fuel prices rose dramatically soon after.
One welcome consequence of publication of The Odessa File was to remind an increasingly forgetful world that the suffering of the Jewish people less than 30 years previously was unique.
Another was to make public the knowledge that many of those who caused that suffering were still alive and had never faced justice.
A third was to alert readers to the permanent covert threats to Israel’s existence.
Fittingly, at the end of the book, an IDF major says the mourner’s kaddish for Salomon Tauber in Yad Vashem.
If you haven’t read The Odessa File, I believe it will still resonate with you. Even if, ultimately, it is not a great Jewish book, it was a great book for the Jewish people.
You’ll even learn how to make a serviceable car bomb, should you be interested. Good as the film was, the source material, the novel, has more depth. It still makes you think.
And it still has that great opening line.
Ian Bloom was a publisher and regular book reviewer and feature writer for the JC throughout the 1970s. He later became a media lawyer
