[ When Communist writer Albert Maltz was blacklisted in the
McCarthyist era, no commercial publisher in the U. S. would touch his
novel A Tale of One January. A new edition slated for US distribution
means his 70-year blacklist will finally end.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BLACKLISTED COMMUNIST WRITER ALBERT MALTZ’S LAST NOVEL WILL FINALLY
BE PUBLISHED IN THE US  
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Taylor Dorrell
November 30, 2023
Jacobin
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_ When Communist writer Albert Maltz was blacklisted in the
McCarthyist era, no commercial publisher in the U. S. would touch his
novel A Tale of One January. A new edition slated for US distribution
means his 70-year blacklist will finally end. _

Seven Hollywood writers and directors arrive for trial at District
Court in Washington, DC, June 20, 1950. Albert Maltz is third from
left., (Bettmann // Jacobin)

 

There are many paths to the literary grave — bad timing, shifting
taste, a lazy publicist. But the surest is the intentional,
politically motivated burial of a writer who might otherwise be
integrated into the mainstream canon. Politically persecuted writers
are often remembered not for their books, but for their imprisonment;
not for their works, but for their suppression. Sometimes the
sympathetic resurrection of an author is actually a second burial, as
the fame of the blacklisted individual can overshadow their artistic
contributions. Many are familiar with the Hollywood Ten, but how many
have read Dalton Trumbo’s novel _Johnny Got His Gun_?

While Trumbo has resurfaced in recent years, his fellow Communist
writer Albert Maltz remains hidden. Thanks to the long shadow cast by
the blacklists, Maltz’s novel _A Tale of One January_ was not
distributed in the United States until this year. Maltz was once a
best-selling author, but while his name sometimes appears in political
histories, his _works_ hardly ever appear in literary histories or
critics’ accounts of twentieth century literature. If he is known at
all, it’s usually as a blacklistee, not a novelist. Save for the
Oscar-winning short film starring Frank Sinatra titled _The House I
Live In [[link removed]] _(1945), his
screenplays are also largely lost to history.

Occasionally Maltz makes an appearance in the work of anti-communist
historians who weaponize the “Albert Maltz Affair,” in which an
article Maltz wrote for _New Masses _calling for artists to strive
for aesthetic quality over political content was denounced by the
party. They use the controversy to drive home broader, often
heavy-handed points about American Communists’ authoritarianism. To
these historians, Maltz and other Communist writers are only as
important as their criticisms of Communism itself. Their long lives of
pro-worker, anti-fascist, and anti-racist activism in the Communist
Party go ignored. Only their disagreements with the Soviet Union and
the domestic Communist Party are preserved — polished and cherished
like precious pearls plucked from history’s vast ocean of
complexity.

Maltz wrote _A Tale of One January _in 1962. The publisher Calder
and Boyars published it in the UK in 1967 to a warm reception. The
novel’s plot centers on Auschwitz prisoners who, having escaped a
death march into an abandoned brick factory, await rescue by Russian
soldiers. This year, Alma Books has printed a new edition
[[link removed]], and Bloomsbury
is distributing it in the United States for the first time. The story
deserves a new life as fascist movements and struggles against them
are on the rise across the globe.

More Naked as Human Beings

When the war begins, Claire and Pierre are married. She is romantic,
honest, pragmatic, and is studying to be a translator. He is brave and
charming and a scientist. Later the fascist interrogator presses
Pierre on why he neglected to ask his wife about his refusal to work
with Nazis. He responds, “If you respect your wife, you don’t ask
her silly questions.”

In the first pages of _A Tale of One January_, Claire is in Auschwitz
remembering an admiring letter from Pierre written before their
marriage. The letter describes Claire’s blonde hair, admirable
facial structure, and her strange habit of “wearing high-heeled
shoes on all occasions.” Pierre wonders humorously to his wife-to-be
whether when _the moment_ comes, and she’s lying naked in bed,
“will she be wearing those silly appendages?” To this, she had
responded, “Dearest Pierre . . . it is not too soon to find out.”

Through two cases of typhus, severe malnourishment, and a death march,
Claire has maintained her distinctive vitality. On her twenty-sixth
birthday, January 18, 1945, Claire’s Dutch-Jewish prisoner friend
Lini wakes up early to give her two biscuits and a pair of shoes. That
day, the Nazis take the prisoners of Auschwitz out for a death march
as the Soviets move in to liberate the camp. Claire and Lini make an
escape, and wind up hidden under hay in a barn with “four gentlemen
from Auschwitz,” setting up the six characters for a tense and
exhilarating set of events as liberated but imperiled individuals who
stick together.

For such a bleak topic, Maltz’s book brims with humor. When the
Polish socialist Jurek returns from a nearby farmhouse with food,
someone asks if the farmer has any vodka. “Oh, he offer big bottle
vodka, but I no take . . . I no like vodka, only French cognac.”
Sparking anger in the group, Jurek quickly follows up, “I make joke.
Is no vodka.” _A Tale of One January_ is dark, rosy, and
thrilling. In it there is not only death, but also an unexpected
degree of wit, and a sexual tension that permeates throughout their
time hiding out in an abandoned brick factory.

Claire, in her new birthday shoes, almost loses her frozen and
inflamed feet in the death march. She has to abandon the shoes in the
barn after hiding out. Their replacement is a special creation by the
captured Red Army soldier and former musician Andrey, who wraps her
feet diligently with hay. He instructs her to massage the bottom of
her legs to get the blood flowing again, an act that Lini performs
admiringly for Claire. Andrey falls in love with Claire, and is
thereafter constantly concerned with her health and, not unlike
Pierre, her controversial situation with shoes. “As human beings
they were much more direct, on a more primitive plane with each other,
more naked as human beings, than is the custom in civilization,”
Maltz wrote.

To Let People Forget

Claire is not a purely fictional figure, but is instead based on
Dounia Wasserstrom, a dark-haired Ukrainian Jew who survived the death
march described in the book. Despite the hair color difference, the
novel remains largely faithful to Wasserstrom’s story, including a
graphic scene of a young boy with an apple being smashed against a
wall — the scene was made famous just before the novel was published
by the 1965 Peter Weiss play _The Investigation_, which was based off
Wasserstrom’s testimony against concentration camp overseer Wilhelm
Boger.

_A Tale of One January_ bears such resemblance to the Wasserstrom’s
life that one almost wishes literary scholar Patrick Chura’s
illuminating introduction were placed at the end of the book so as to
free the reader from constantly wondering what’s fact and what’s
fiction. Wasserstrom’s successful escape from the Auschwitz death
march was not told in the form of a memoir or journal entries, but was
instead given orally to Maltz.

 

Albert Maltz was not an apolitical writer. A member of the Communist
Party, Maltz employed the medium, as did many other politically
charged writers of the time, to fight against antisemitism, racism,
and capitalism. In 1947, Maltz was called before the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) as one of the Hollywood Ten. Refusing to
name names, he was sent to prison at Mill Point, serving some of his
time with the author of _Spartacus_, the Communist novelist Howard
Fast
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who described Maltz as a “a sort of Communist saint.” Maltz feared
an escalation of HUAC due to the Korean War and pitched to Fast the
idea of planning an escape. Fast dissuaded him, but Maltz remained
fearful that their imprisonment was only just the beginning of an
anti-communist purge like Germany’s.

After being released from prison, most of the notable blacklistees
fled to Mexico, including Maltz. He remained in Mexico longer than the
others, skeptical of the political climate in the United States. In
Fast’s memoir, _Being Red_, he recalls that Maltz was pessimistic
about the new Communist Control Act and refused Fast’s insistence
that he return stateside. “I have to live. I have to find love. I
have books I must write. I can’t face the rest of my life in
prison,” Maltz responded. It was in Mexico, ducking the FBI and
pursuing writing jobs, that he interviewed Dounia Wasserstrom, both
narrowly escaping fascism and winding up in Mexico.

“_A Tale of One January_ is Maltz’s final novel, and perhaps his
most unfairly treated work of fiction,” Chura writes in his
introduction to the new edition. Maltz, fed up with using a pseudonym,
held on to his manuscript for four years after completion. In 1961, he
sent a copy of his interview transcript to the Authors Guild, likely
in fear of the story never making it into novel form. “No U.S.
commercial publisher would touch the book,” Chura said in an
interview
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the book’s new publisher. Although the Red Scare might have peaked
in the 1950s, the blacklists lived on and to varying degrees are still
alive today.

While J. Edgar Hoover might not be sending agents to threaten
publishers in 2023, they generally remain somewhat wary of publishing
Communists blacklisted during the Second Red Scare. The blacklists’
founding figures are long gone, but their effects still linger.
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. As Claire put it in _A Tale of One January_, “For
the rest of my life I’ll talk about Auschwitz and Fascism. I’ll
write articles and send them to newspapers. What did we suffer for to
let people forget it?”

_[TAYLOR DORRELL is a writer and photographer based in Columbus, Ohio.
He’s a contributing writer at the Cleveland Review of Books, a
reporter for the Columbus Free Press, and a freelance photographer.]_

_New issue coming soon. Subscribe to our print edition today.
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* McCarthyism
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* McCarthy Period
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* Blacklist
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* Hollywood Blacklist
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* Hollywood Ten
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* Albert Maltz
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* Dalton Trumbo
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* Fascism
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* World War II
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* Anti-Fascism
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* nazism
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* Anti-Nazis
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* Communist Party
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* repression
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* policing
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* books
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* Banned Books
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* Auschwitz
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* resistance
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