Arthur Frommer, ‘wandering Jew’ who launched a travel guide empire, dies at 95

Arthur Frommer, whose empire of travel guidebooks led one interviewer to call him the “quintessential wandering Jew,” died Nov. 18 at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 95.

Starting in 1957 with the bestselling “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day,” Frommer rode a wave of postwar wanderlust among an expanding middle class that had the means and leisure to explore the world in ways once reserved for the very rich. (Frommer later updated the book’s title due to inflation.)

Six decades later his books, covering 350 destinations, had sold more than 75 million copies. Before his death, he and his daughter Pauline Frommer, the co-president of FrommerMedia and editorial director of Frommer’s Guidebooks, published more than 130 active titles and co-hosted “The Travel Show,” a syndicated radio show; wrote regular syndicated columns, and contributed to the blog for the company’s eponymous online consumer travel website.

“I’ve always regarded travel as a superb learning experience,” he told Hadassah magazine in 2016. “It opens your imagination, expands your consciousness and brings you to understand other lifestyles, cultures, philosophies and theologies.”

Arthur Frommer was born on July 17, 1929, in Lynchburg, Virginia; his parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland and Austria. They lived for a time in Jefferson City, Missouri, before moving to New York City when he was 14. He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and worked as an office boy at Newsweek. He earned a political science degree from New York University. At Yale Law School, from which he graduated in 1953, he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

He wrote his first manual, 1955’s “The G.I.’s Guide to Travelling in Europe,” while serving in Berlin in a U.S. Army intelligence unit. After returning to New York, he joined the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the first “white-shoe” firms to hire both Jews and gentiles.

On his first of many return vacations to Europe, he was inspired to write “Europe on $5 a Day.” Later he enlisted local authors to write an ever-expanding series of guidebooks to Europe and beyond. For many years, according to Frommer, the company’s books made up close to 25% of all travel guides sold in the United States.

In 1977 he sold the brand to Simon & Schuster; in 2013,  he bought it back from Google, which had acquired it the year before.  

In the 2004 raunchy teen comedy “EuroTrip,” an actor playing Frommer meets a group of young travelers who had been using a Frommer guide throughout the movie, and offers a job to the book’s fiercest devotee. For years moviegoers thought the very British character was Frommer himself. Frommer was offered the cameo but turned it down because of scheduling demands.

In the Hadassah interview, he credited his parents, Nathan and Pauline, with inspiring his intellectual curiosity. “My sister, Jeanne, and I both had books no matter how little else we had,” he said. “Respect for education was a part of our Jewish heritage.”

He also described a trip he took in 2011 to his mother’s birthplace of Lomza, Poland, where he located his grandfather’s tombstone and learned more about the vibrant Jewish life there before the Holocaust.

“My whole life, I had heard stories about how horrific Poland was and how happy my relatives were to leave it,” he said. “Being there you saw the other side. They had vibrant communities, gorgeous temples and fertile countryside. For the first time, I realized they had lost something by leaving.”

Frommer’s first marriage, to Hope Arthur, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Roberta Brodfeld; his daughter   Pauline; stepdaughters Tracie Holder and Jill Holder, and four grandchildren.