International bestselling author Noah Gordon is my father. His books have been published in 35 countries and in many of them his name is a household word.
He’s less widely known in the United States, though his first novel, The Rabbi, was on the New York Times list for more than six months in 1965, and his fourth novel, Shaman, won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize given by the Society of American Historians for being “the best historical novel published in either 1991 or 1992.”
To me, though, he was just “Pop,” until, when I was nine, I entered his other world, accompanying him to a publishing trade show in Washington D.C. sponsored by the ABA, and watching him sign The Death Committee, his second book.
Everyone in my family has worked with Pop. My sister Lise, who was an editor at Houghton Mifflin for 10 years, became his manuscript editor; my mother, Lorraine Gordon, was his copy editor; and my sister Jamie took most of his jacket photos. When Pop won the Cooper Award, he was in the hospital; Lise and I went to New York and accepted the prize for him.
I started joining him on book tours in 1992 when he became a bestselling author in Europe. Even better, I sometimes teamed with him to do research. Before turning to fiction, he was a newspaper reporter, and he knows how to dig out a story. Working on The Last Jew, in Toledo, Spain, he took one side of the street and I took the other, and we interviewed shopkeeper after shopkeeper, searching for descendants of the “secret Jews” of the Inquisition.
To research The Winemaker, we made many trips into Spanish wine country, tasting wonderful food and vintage after vintage. We left with an abiding love for Spanish wine.
It was my father’s fourth novel, The Physician, that made him a celebrated international author. It was released in 1986 in the U.S., but thanks to German publisher Karl Blessing, who brought it to Germany, it caught fire. At the same time, it became a national favorite in Spain and soon was a bestseller across Europe.
My father’s books have won literary prizes in Germany, Italy, and Spain, but it is The Physician that has driven all the titles. In 1999, booksellers at the Madrid Book Fair voted The Physician “one of the 10 most loved books of all time,” and it has stayed in print in many markets for 28 years.
According to Blanca Rosa Roca, my father’s Spanish publisher, “The Physician is not a bestseller. It is a steady seller.”
Now a movie based on the novel has been produced by the UFA studio of Germany, shot in English, and starring Ben Kingsley. The film thus far has been seen by more than five million viewers, had theatrical distribution in the United States in 2014, and was released in DVD/VOD on March 17 with a Netflix release due in July.
Five years ago, I became my father’s literary agent, a job that has been far more active than I could have imagined. Happily, new editions of his books continue to be published everywhere, and e-books are contributing to his rising popularity in the global English market.
Next, a stage musical based on The Physician will be produced in 2016 by Peter Scholz and Dennis Martin in Germany.
Pop is 88 years old, and he’s still writing. He is working on a novella and determined to finish the story. He finds himself exactly where he has chosen to be for most of his working life—still on the writer’s rack, still in the writing life.
If I had to bet, I’d bet he will finish the novella. Whether he does or not, I could not be prouder of my father, or love him more.
Michael Gordon is the owner of Gordon Publishing Services and cofounder of Barcelona Digital Editions, publisher of barcelonaebooks.com and ciudaddelibros.com.