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His works have been banned during the McCarthyism and now made available after seventy years. 

Find out more about Albert Maltz

This unique collection includes

A TALE OF ONE JANUARY

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.

A LONG DAY IN A SHORT LIFE

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 CROSS AND THE ARROW

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?

THE EYEWITNESS REPORT

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.

THE JOURNEY OF SIMON McKEEVER

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.

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.