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 This year, 2005, the second publishing house established by Jorge Zahar, Jorge Zahar Editor, completes its 20th anniversary. In all, there are over 2,500 titles and almost 50 years of "culture at the service of social progress," as he liked to put it.
His offspring, Ana Cristina and Jorge Júnior, are following the editorial style created by their father, who died in 1998: the editing of "classics".
"I do not publish books that have a short life [...], the idea is to make books of permanent interest," declared Jorge Zahar in an interview published in book Editando o Editor 5 (Editing the editor 5) by the University of São Paulo Press.
The son of a Lebanese father and a French mother, it was from the former that Jorge inherited his inclination towards business. From the latter came his love for books and literature.
This heritage was translated into professional activities of aristocratic character - Zahar gave great value to words used and to friendly relations - and into vigorous and daring editorial activity.
The meeting between his parents has the storyline of a fine romance. His mother came from a working class family from Lyon, his father from a rich Lebanese family.
The mother was catholic, the father orthodox. They met in Lebanon when her mother visiting a sister who had fled France with her husband, a deserter from the army as he was missing his wife.
Zahar's father converted to Catholicism so as to marry his mother. He was kicked out of his family and immigrated to Brazil just before the First World War, seeking a better life for his family.
Jorge was born in the city of Campos (in the southeastern Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro) in 1920, and it was in the city of Rio de Janeiro that he began his professional life working with books.
At the age of 20, Jorge started working for a company that imported technical books. It belonged to Mr. Herrera, his brother's father-in-law and partner.
When, in 1946, Herrera retired from his activities, the Zahar brothers established a company in the same line of business. In the 1950's, a policy of replacing imports started in Brazil.
It was at that moment that Zahar decided he wanted to have his own publishing house and that it would specialize in printing social science books, important for university training.
The first project was the production of a complete course of Political Economics using works by university professors from the states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (also in southeastern Brazil).
Curiously, Zahar published books by Marx (The German Ideology, Manifesto of the Communist Party, a summarized version of Capital) during a period in which Brazilian was being run by a military dictatorship (from 1964 to 1984), without restriction.
According to him, the publishing of Marxist books, more than political positioning, was a question of answering to the large demand during the period.
Despite censorship and repression, Brazilian professors resisted, recommending the books more and more.
"I think I was the editor who most published foreign Marxist books. I published Man's Worldly Goods, by Leo Huberman. [...] One day it will be discovered that this book was of utmost importance to the political forming of our youth."
Jorge was very proud of the book he published in 1962 - a best seller, with over 300,000 copies sold to date.
Brazilian university life in the past and in the present would not be the same without the existence of the two publishing houses established by Zahar.
Jorge Zahar, due to his work as an editor specialized in the area, is unanimously renowned as an essential character in the contemporary history of social science in Brazil.
In 1956, he and brothers Ernesto and Lucien established Zahar Editores, a pioneer in the selection, translation and publishing of books by foreign authors.
The house edited books by authors from the Frankfurt school, like Erich Fromm and Marcuse; references in sociological thinking, like Max Weber, as well as the creation of a careful and extensive bibliography of psychoanalysis, publishing Freud, Jung, Winnicott, Melanie Klein and others.
Exchange
In the 1970's, Jorge started investing on two fronts: texts by Brazilian social scientists: Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Maria da Conceição Tavares, Roberto Da Matta, Hélio Jaguaribe; and by heavyweight European and US thinkers.
It was Jorge Zahar, through his publications, who made it possible for Brazilian intellectuals to get in touch with great thinkers like Lacan, Bachelard, Piaget, and Chomsky.
Jorge Zahar Editor, established in 1985, currently run by Ana Cristina and Jorge Júnior, also has, in its diversified and precious catalogue, various books dealing with Arab social-cultural questions.
Islam Observed, by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and The Crisis of Islam, by professor Bernard Lewis, are some of the 2004 releases about the matter.
The involvement of the Zahar family in book publishing, from the founders to the heirs, seems to be translated in the declaration of love Jorge made for his professional activities:
"To me, a normal day at the publishing house is a day of passion made of routine."
ANBA – Brazil-Arab News Agency
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