Felix Kessler, a veteran writer and editor whose career threaded through five decades and four continents in both print and electronic journalism, has died at 92. He covered Europe, the Middle East and Africa as a London- and Paris-based correspondent for the Wall Street Journal before bringing his unwavering eye for a great story to a nascent Bloomberg News where he mentored young reporters some of whom went on to win major journalism awards and was a crucial figure in establishing the company as a global leader in journalism. He died on Nov. 16 at Port Orange Nursing and Rehab Center near his home in Ponce Inlet, Florida, after falling ill earlier this year, according to his wife, Jair Kessler. “Felix felt blessed in life,” she said. “He had the career he wanted, and he loved his family.” Kessler was a journalist’s journalist a careful craftsman who believed in the balanced beauty of words and accuracy. For him, precision and prose carried equal weight. Not surprisingly, he did not suffer fools gladly whether in politics, business, the arts or the newsroom. Pity the young writer who delivered a seven-page draft with the assurance, “We can publish this quickly; nothing much needs to be changed.” Ungrudgingly, Kessler would polish that unvarnished screed and with the perfect eye of a master. The subjects Kessler covered in the field varied wildly: a tense ski resort in the Golan Heights, Western indifference to the civil war in Nigeria, an award-winning article on justice and judges in New York City, and truffle cultivators in Bordeaux, France. He wrote about anything that caught his fancy and might widen readers’ eyes. A 1960s Wall Street Journal profile of Moscow then still a blurry silhouette behind the Iron Curtain captured the Russian capital perfectly as a “contradictory blend of official planning, official meddling and sheer unofficial accident.” Kessler also relished stories he could playfully paw at, letting his sly giggle show through the words. One WSJ piece examined a Paris street-advertising campaign featuring a topless woman that caused quel scandale and was promptly banned by French authorities thereby achieving exactly the notoriety its sponsor wanted. After touring for this article several of the nude beaches then proliferating across France, Kessler offered this dry observation: “After days and days of watching a mind-boggling number of topless women go swimming, jogging, sailboarding and simply parading on the beach, I must confess with some authority that it’s possible to get used to anything.” His WSJ piece on cockroaches in New York was equally amusing and amusedly exasperated, noting that “despite the best efforts of exterminators, the cockroach shows no sign of lying down and rolling over.” In fact, he wrote, “there is reason to believe that exterminators kill only the clumsy roaches and simply drive the others to neighboring buildings.” Kessler’s first journalism job was as a newspaper reporter in Syracuse, New York. He later moved to the New York World-Telegram and, after it folded in 1966, to the Wall Street Journal. By then, Kessler’s name had already appeared enough times in bylines that Neil Simon noticed it and chose it for one of his characters in his 1966 film “After the Fox,” directed by Vittorio De Sica. Following a brief reporting stint in New York, the Journal assigned Kessler to its London bureau in 1968 and in 1980, the Journal moved Kessler to Paris to open a bureau there. When the newspaper launched The Wall Street Journal Europe in 1983, Kessler joined its Brussels headquarters as an editor, where he shaped feature stories and organized a network of contributing correspondents. Kessler left the Journal in 1985 and returned to New York for a position at Fortune magazine. Two years later, he joined the journalism faculty at New York University. In 1992, Matthew Winkler, editor in chief of then two-years-old Bloomberg Business News, hired Kessler -with whom he had earlier shared several Journal bylines to lead feature-story development across the company’s rapidly expanding global network of reporters. After retiring from Bloomberg in 2013, Kessler continued to contribute to the news service, writing “advance obits” for future publication primarily about notable figures from jazz, theater and film. He savored the work, delighted to be the final word on the artists he most admired. He wrote with economy and insight, often beginning obituaries with a single sentence that landed like a full portrait. Kessler described Tony Bennett as “the New York singer who made ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ his signature number in a career that spanned seven decades.” Ornette Coleman, he observed, was “the self-taught saxophone player who aroused cheers and jeers in the 1950s before being acclaimed the era’s most influential avant-garde jazz musician.” In the end, the qualities he brought to these stories of others intelligence, empathy, and grace are an apt description of Kessler himself. Kessler was born on May 16, 1933, in Vienna, the first of two children of Joseph and Gertrude Kessler. His father was a bookbinder. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Nazi soldiers marched into the courtyard of the family’s apartment block an episode Kessler later recounted to his son, Ted, who wrote about it in “My Old Man,” a book of essays about people’s fathers to which Felix also contributed a piece about Joseph. Soon afterward, the authorities issued yellow stars for the family to wear to identify themselves as Jews. Joseph Kessler decided then they would pack their suitcases and flee the country. The Kesslers traveled by train to Switzerland and eventually made their way to New York, arriving in February 1939. They settled in Jersey City, New Jersey, where Joseph resumed his work as a bookbinder. Kessler graduated from Columbia University in 1954 and, in 1955, returned to Germany for a tour of duty with the U. S. Army. “My dad still has his yellow star in a shoebox somewhere,” Ted Kessler wrote. In addition to a career that filled him with joy, Kessler was also a proud father of four children and six grandchildren. His first marriage to Ann Meyer ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Jair Kessler, and their daughter, Gabriella Kessler of Paris; three sons from his first marriage: Ted Kessler of London, Mark Kessler of Paris, and Daniel Kessler of New York; and a sister, Eva Bacal, of Tucson, Arizona. Jeffrey Rothfeder, Charles W. Stevens.
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