Ivan Kats papers

Born in the Netherlands, Ivan Kats spent the majority of his adult life in France and the United States, where he worked as a translator, editor, teacher, journalist and publisher. While living in France during the 1960s, Kats worked for the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) – an anti-communist advocacy group founded in Paris – that established magazines, held conferences and art shows, and supported a number of poets, authors, and artists across 35 countries worldwide. Until his departure from the CCF in 1966, Kats was primarily engaged in a program for sending books and other publications to anti-communist, opposition leaders in Indonesia. After the 30 September Movement, and the ouster of the Indonesian President Sukarno in 1967, Kats left France and moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where he became affiliated with the Council on South East Asian Studies at Yale University. Between 1970 and his retirement in 1996, Kats functioned as director of Buku Obor (Yayasan Obor Indonesia), or the Obor Foundation, an organization he founded, dedicated to the publication and dissemination of books to book-poor countries. Initially focused on Indonesia, Obor spread to several other countries including Pakistan and Morocco, where they translated and published books in Urdu and Arabic.