The Merchant Bankers

Joseph Wechsberg

Jul. 2023 · Plunkett Lake Press

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“This is a collection of casual articles about the seemingly forbidding subject of merchant banking and about some of the world’s most outstanding and venerable merchant bankers — Hambros, Barings, Warburg, in London; Mattioli in Milan; Abs in Frankfurt; Lehman Brothers in New York; and the Rothschilds in Paris and London... Joseph Wechsberg gives the history of each of these institutions, most of which remain family controlled, and he presents profiles of the men who are or have been their guiding lights, whose very character serves to distinguish each of these mysterious citadels from the other and from lesser breeds in the more understandable area of commercial banking. The most remarkable feature of this truly fascinating book is the amount of knowledge the author brings to bear upon his subject in a most unobtrusive way. The articles are rich in information and a pleasure to read.” — Kirkus

“Mr. Wechsberg... has selected the names of seven merchant banks and bankers and written the story of each with a sparkling lucidity that is reminiscent of New Yorker Profiles... Mr. Wechsberg’s sketches of men and institutions make good reading.” — Saturday Review

“New Yorker Correspondent Joseph Wechsberg[’s]... stories have a richness of color and some details of remarkable deals that have turned money into factories, jobs and useful products for everybody’s compound interest.” — Time Magazine

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Joseph Wechsberg (1907-1983) was born to Jewish parents in Ostrava, Moravia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His grandfather had been a prosperous banker, but the family assets were lost in World War I. Wechsberg attended Prague University Law School, Vienna’s State Academy of Music, and the Sorbonne. A lawyer for a short while, he worked as a musician on ocean liners and played the violin in Paris nightclubs. In Prague, he became a reporter for the Prager Tagblatt. In 1938 he was a lieutenant in the Czechoslovak army commanding a machine gun company on the Polish frontier and was sent with his wife to the United States to discuss the Sudeten crisis. Both requested asylum after World War II broke out. In 1939, Wechsberg knew only a few hundred words in English, but decided he would someday write for The New Yorker. In 1943, he was drafted into the US Army and sent to Europe as a technical sergeant in psychological warfare. His account of getting back to Ostrava was the first of over one hundred pieces for The New Yorker over three decades — profiles of Artur Rubinstein, Isaac Stern, George Szell, of merchant bankers and of great French restaurateurs, and letters from Berlin, Karlsbad, Bonn, Vienna, Trieste, Budapest, Belgrade, Ankara, Bucharest, Warsaw, Athens, and Baghdad. He also contributed hundreds of articles to magazines such as Gourmet, Esquire, Playboy, The Atlantic and The Saturday Evening Post and wrote features on cuisine and travel throughout Europe.