REDISCOVERING ALBERT MALTZ
HIS WORKS HAVE BEEN BANNED DURING THE McCARTHYISM AND NOW MADE AVAILABLE AFTER SEVENTY YEARS
“Stubborn academics like Chura and small publishers like Alma Books are breaking those blacklists that have lasted for well over seventy years, refusing to let politically suppressed authors stay buried under the hay.” – Jacobin Magazine
“As a matter of principle, I cannot accept a racist judgment about any people.” – Albert Maltz
His first plays of the early 1930s were brave and controversial. One of them exposed corruption to the extent that local politicians tried to shut it down. Maltz’s 1933 drama Peace on Earth was probably the first American play to present modern war as the inevitable result of capitalism. He was only 24 when he wrote this.
During the Depression Maltz’s short stories were in the muckraking tradition—they drew attention to dangerous working conditions in mines and mills and factories. One of them, Man on a Road, resulted in a congressional investigation into the effects of silicosis, a deadly lung disease.
He won the O. Henry Award twice (1938 and 1941)
He moved to Hollywood in the early 1940s and adapted quickly to screenwriting work. He wrote the screenplay of The House I Live In, which starred Frank Sinatra. The purpose of this film was to strike a blow against antisemitism and to argue for religious tolerance and inclusion. For its pro-democracy messages, it won a special Academy Award.
In 1944 he published the novel The Cross and the Arrow about the German resistance to the Nazi Regime was distributed to 150,000 American soldiers during WWII.
For refusing to cooperate with the 1947 congressional investigation into alleged communist subversion, he was blacklisted, fined, sentenced to a year in prison, and thwarted as a writer for almost twenty years at the peak of his career. He became one of the Hollywood Ten
Set in a village in Nazi Germany, the novel explores the psychology of Willi Wegler. Decorated with a German service cross, he is inwardly sickened by both Hitler’s genocide and the complicity of his fellow citizens in Third Reich brutalities. Wracked with guilt, Wegler suddenly betrays his country in a stunning gesture of protest and self-sacrifice. Maltz is deeply interested in the motives of Wegler’s civil disobedience, its long foreground in factors personal and political. What is the breaking point of a conscience? Whence the willpower to turn against one’s country?
Maltz wanted the novel to send messages about the racist history of the United States. He hoped the emphasis given to Third Reich chattel slaves in Wegler’s awakening would prompt stateside readers to compare the Nazi system with America’s own apartheid. Progressives like Maltz were keenly aware, for example, that Hitler studied American lynching and admired the racial terrors of the Jim Crow South, and that in significant ways it was Birmingham that taught Berlin. Abjuring simple formulae to instead deal profoundly with central issues of humanity, Albert Maltz produced an absorbing, intensely dramatic philosophical novel about the soul of man—its ghastly corruption and its capacity for redemption. The “motor power” of the story, Maltz asserted, “is supplied by a moral quest.” – Patrick Chura
At the height of McCarthyism in 1953, the United States Information Service issued an internal directive stating that “all Communist authors,” were henceforth banned from public libraries and USIS information centers. Among the books that were removed from library shelves both overseas and stateside was The Cross and the Arrow.
In 1960, while Maltz was living in Mexico City to distance himself from FBI harassment, he met Dounia Wasserstrom, a Ukrainian Jew born in Zhytomyr. She had been a political prisoner in Auschwitz, where she worked as an interpreter for the S.S. In January of 1945, when the Russian armies were approaching Auschwitz, the prisoners remaining there were marched out under guard for an unknown destination. During the first day of the march Dounia and a close friend of hers escaped.
In Mexico, Wasserstrom came to know Maltz and trusted him well enough to share with him, in several interviews, a detailed account of her Holocaust ordeal. The notes from these interviews form the basis of A Tale of One January. And while Maltz accurately related an important Holocaust testimony, he also altered certain facts, transforming the story of “Dounia’s Escape” into literary art.
This novel was never published in United States.
Maltz’s own imprisonment led him to write A Long Day in a Short Life. At the height of the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War, he was one of ten screenwriters and motion picture directors who were blacklisted, declared guilty of the crime of contempt of the United States Congress and sentenced to a year in jail. Maltz was committed to the Federal jail in Washington, DC, in June 1950. Although he would serve the main part of his sentence at Mill Point Prison in West Virginia, he remained in the DC lockup for eighteen days. It was there that A Long Day in a Short Life was conceived. It is a moving representation of racial interdependence and a major novel of the early civil-rights era. Now made available since 1957, after being suppressed for decades.
The novel was purchased by 20th Century Fox for a movie but then it was cancelled due to the anti-communist hysteria. In late 1976 Henry Fonda was meant to play Simon Mckeever until he became seriously ill. In a letter to Maltz he wrote, “I can’t tell you how excited I am about Simon McKeever.” Simon McKeever is seventy-three and now suffers from crippling arthritis. He resolves to hitchhike from a shabby state-run home for the elderly to Los Angeles, in search of a doctor who can cure him. This novel is about old age and the beauty to be alive.
At once an indictment of oppression and an exploration of the role and responsibility of the individual in the face of tragic historical events – themes that preoccupied Maltz throughout his life and artistic career – The Eyewitness Report, left unpublished by its author at his death and presented here for the first time, will cement Maltz’s reputation as one of the finest storytellers and most perceptive thinkers of the last century.
MAN ON A ROAD AND OTHER STORIES
Maltz ranks among the best of American short-story writers, both in his versatility and in the sheer power of his prose. The stories selected for this volume are considered classics and have been translated into more than 20 languages. All display Maltz at his most provocative.
Completed shortly before the author’s death in 1985, and undiscovered for more than forty years, this moving, richly historical novel is Albert Maltz’s final testament, and consolidates his place as one of the finest American writers of the twentieth century.
Now available The Albert Maltz Collection at half price
