Weinstein Wins Auction for Bestselling French Journal

By Matthew Thornton -- Publishers Weekly, 4/11/2008 10:07:00 AM

Weinstein Books may be in a period of transition, but it’s still buying books. The publisher just won a six-way auction for U.S. rights to French bestseller Journal, by Helene Berr, via UK publisher Quercus. Described as the French analog to Anne Frank, Berr was a young Parisian student who died in a Nazi concentration camp. Rob Weisbach, who announced his resignation as president and CEO of Weinstein last week, acquired the book with Weinstein associate publisher Kristin Powers.

Berr’s journal, which she was keeping for her fiancé, who was fighting with the Free French during World War II, chronicles her transformation from a 21-year-old Sorbonne scholar to a Bergen-Belsen prisoner. She died there in 1945 at age 23, one month after Frank died at the same camp, and just two weeks before Bergen-Belsen’s liberation. While Frank’s diary describes a life of hiding in Amsterdam, Berr’s journal reveals the everyday experiences of life in Paris under German occupation.

The journal was recently released for publication by the author’s family after attracting attention from visitors to France’s Holocaust museum, the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris, where it has been on display for the past five years.

Currently in its thirteenth week on the French bestseller list, the book has already sold in 14 other countries. The translator, David Bellos, is the first-ever winner of the Man Booker International Translator’s Prize. Weinstein Books will publish this fall.