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Francesca: A novel about the Holocaust by a blacklisted socialist writer. It's just been published in the US over 60 years after it was written.
Patrick Chura: Until July of 2023, Maltz's A Tale of One January had never been published in the United States. So this is, so it's a long history for the novel to get here.
And it's, you know, quite a testament to the, the things that you lose as a nation when you start blacklisting people.
I think Maltz's, throughout his career and many stories about that, adds up to a really good example of what we lose when we start blacklisting.
That's Patrick Chura.
He wrote the introduction to A Tale of One January and is responsible for its publication by Bloomsbury Press.
Then we replay an extended segment of our 2018 interview with Norman Finkelstein about his book Gaza, an inquest into its martyrdom.
That's all coming up on today's Writer's Voice, in-depth conversation with writers of all genres on the air since 2004. Thanks for joining us this hour. On this station and at writersvoice.net.
The novel, A Tale of One January, tells the story of six prisoners who have just escaped from a forced march out of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Based on a true story told by one of the escapees to the writer Albert Maltz, the novel paints a compelling portrait of what it's like to experience sudden freedom after years of horrific confinement and the constant threat of death.
Albert Maltz was a committed socialist who wrote for the stage and screen until he was blacklisted in 1947 as one of the Hollywood Ten.
A Tale of One January was published in the UK in 1967, but due to the blacklist, was never published in the US until now.
Patrick Chura is writing a biography of Albert Maltz and wrote the introduction to A Tale of One January.
He's professor of English at the University of Akron and the author of Thoreau, the Land Surveyor and Michael Gold, the People's Writer.
Patrick Chura, welcome to Writer's Voice.
Thanks, glad to be here.
So this novel, A Tale of One January, based on a true story, it's about a group of six concentration camp survivors who have just escaped a forced march toward the end of the war, I guess 1944, when the Russian front is moving up close to Auschwitz.
And it was written in 1962.
So tell us about the author, Albert Maltz.
Sure.
Actually, January 45 is the setting for this novel.
He's quite a story.
I'm working on a biography of Albert Maltz.
I've got a long way to go, but he gets more interesting by the day.
So in 1944, his very acclaimed novel was The Cross and the Arrow.
It's about anti-Nazi resistance in Germany itself by German citizens.
That was acclaimed to the extent that they printed quickly 150,000 copies for distribution to U.S. servicemen abroad.
Also just a year later in 1945, Maltz worked with Frank Sinatra on a little 10-minute film called The House I Live In. Sinatra starred in the film.
Albert Maltz wrote it.
It was really written for the single purpose of counteracting a lot of anti-Semitic violence that was going on in New York and Boston in the mid-1940s.
And it won in 1945 a special Oscar for its contribution to racial and religious tolerance.
So Maltz got an early call out by the Motion Picture Academy.
He had moved to Hollywood in 1941.
And from 41 on, he was using screenwriting and the money he could earn as a screenwriter to finance his career as a novelist.
He said over and over again during his lifetime that his real work that he wanted to be remembered for most was his work as a novelist.
So his strategy was to use his film credits, which produced some substantial and interesting films along the way.
He was very respected and sought after at the peak of his career as a screenwriter.
He was brought up in 1947 in the early Cold War.
After World War II ended, the right wing just really started to turn its eyes toward leftism in the United States and call it out.
So in 1947, he along with, well, he was a member of the Hollywood Ten who were called before a House committee chaired by J.
Parnell Thomas and asked the kind of million dollar question, right?
Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
And the Hollywood Ten banded together and they decided to fight this committee, not on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment, tending to not incriminate oneself, so to speak.
They fought it on the grounds of the First Amendment.
Albert Maltz said, the American people are going to have to choose between the Bill of Rights and the Thomas Committee.
They cannot have both.
One or the other must be abolished in the immediate future.
That did not go over well with the Thomas Committee.
The six of the Hollywood Ten members were Jewish and there was quite a bit of anti-Semitism on the Thomas Committee as well, and Albert Maltz knew that.
So they were sentenced, given various sentences, but Albert Maltz got a year in prison for contempt of Congress.
In 1950-51, he was in the Mill Point Prison in West Virginia.
Kind of interesting, his career went through a transition stage when he was convicted of contempt of Congress and sentenced to prison because he had completed a novel in 1949 called The Journey of Simon McIver, but it was unclear at first whether the blacklist that all of the Hollywood Ten were subjected to, and many others, obviously, in Hollywood, it was unclear whether that applied to the publishing industry at first.
So Maltz got a novel published in 1949.
It was excellent and well-received by Little Brown and Company, initially well-received until 20th Century Fox bought the film rights to it immediately because it really had a lot of potential as a film, and it was announced that it would star Walter Houston and that Fox had bought it, but just weeks later, the backlash against it was so strong from the right wing that Fox canceled the project.
So this was the beginning of Maltz feeling the real brunt of the blacklist.
He moved to Mexico in the early 1950s in order to distance himself largely from FBI harassment, and he published another novel in 1957.
This novel was an interesting early civil rights novel called A Long Day and a Short Life, but it also had a kind of tortured history.
I think it's a great novel and it's being republished now with my help from Alma Books in the UK, but he sent it to 18 U.S. publishers.
It was rejected by everyone until he had to resort to a leftist publisher, international publishers to bring it out in the United States, and because of that press's communist ties, they knew it wouldn't be reviewed or noticed.
Maltz said that he published it just so his friends could read it.
So a lot of his work was suppressed throughout the 50s.
Then, of course, a big event in 1960 was when Frank Sturmatov tried to break the blacklist by hiring Maltz and announced that he had hired Maltz to write the film The Execution of Private Slovik.
But again, when that came out, even Sinatra, a powerful megastar, could not fight off the right-wing critics who really descended quickly on the whole project, and it became quite a fiasco.
Sinatra had to hire Maltz, and then just a couple of weeks later fire him publicly.
He caved to the conservative pressure.
After that, Maltz felt more blacklisted than ever.
It turned out that this was an event that really lengthened his time on the blacklist because it had put his name out in public in a very controversial way and kind of renewed the attacks on him.
So just after that is when he meets Dunja Wasserström, the Auschwitz survivor in Mexico, and they become friends, and she trusts him enough to tell him her story about her escape from Auschwitz and the details of her background and her time in Auschwitz.
And Maltz immediately gets to work on this novel.
He finishes it in 62.
He takes it to Ingo Preminger, who is the brother of Otto Preminger, a film producer also in Hollywood at that time.
Preminger says, I believe this, and I'm very sure that this would be an excellent film and an excellent novel.
So they both work on getting it produced both as a film and a novel.
Maltz sends it to his agent.
But of course, I think largely as a result of its being just after the Sinatra fiasco, it is an idea that is completely vetoed by both the publishing and filmmaking industry.
So he keeps the novel.
He makes these extensive interview notes that come out of his long interviews with Dunja Wasserstrom that were conducted in Spanish because Wasserstrom did not speak English at the time.
And he files those away with the Authors Guild.
And he keeps the novel for a number of years because he feels like, you know, until the late 60s, there might not be anywhere else for it to go.
So finally in 66, he gets a British publisher, Calder and Boyers, to champion the book for the English-speaking world.
But until July of this year, until July of 2023, Maltz's A Tale of One Gender had never been published in the United States.
So this is its first U.S. publication.
So it's a long history for the novel to get here.
And it's, you know, quite a testament to kind of the things that you lose as a nation when you start blacklisting people.
I think Maltz, throughout his career and many stories about that, adds up to a really good example of what we lose when we start blacklisting.
Wow, that is such a powerful story, actually.
And you're absolutely right.
I mean, reading this book, one realizes that one is in the presence of a real talent.
I had never heard of Albert Maltz.
And in fact, as I was reading it, I was thinking, this should be a screenplay.
And I hope it does become a movie.
As a matter of fact, it would be an incredible movie.
But now let's get to the story.
In fact, you say in the introduction that it pretty closely follows the events that Dunja Wasserstrom recounted.
But there is some change in the characters.
Specifically, none of the characters are Jewish.
One is.
Linnia.
Linnie.
Linnie.
So there are two women and four men.
Tell us about these characters.
And also, why did he deemphasize the Jewishness?
Yeah, that's a really good question and a complex one.
And I think it has many answers and many possibilities, but it's certainly thought provoking.
Correct.
Dunja Wasserstrom was a Ukrainian Jew born in Zhytomyr.
She spent her childhood in the Ukraine and her adolescence in Poland.
Eventually, she moved to France and sort of adopted France as her nationality.
She married there.
When the war broke out, she was an anti-Nazi resister along with her husband.
So that is how she ends up in Auschwitz.
So when she tells her story to to Maltz, though, she's very clear about her background and she's very trusting of Maltz and friendly with him in order to share this, because she did not share the story with just anyone.
Actually, she hadn't made it public until later.
And I think we'll get into that.
But then, well, I'll go back to Dunja Wasserstrom.
But there's Linny, who is a Dutch Jew born in Berlin, but moved to Amsterdam.
In the novel, there's Jurek, who is a Polish Jew or a Polish resister.
He's not Jewish.
None of the men are Jewish.
Otto is from Austria, a socialist in Auschwitz for his socialist communist ties.
Jurek is in Auschwitz as an anti-Nazi resister.
Norbert is German, but he had been an anti-Nazi resister, too.
And that's how he ends up in Auschwitz.
And Andrei is a Russian soldier who was sent to Auschwitz because he was captured and escaped.
He said that it was sort of a point of honor that he needed to at least attempt to escape and not accept his incarceration.
And for that, he was sent to Auschwitz.
So quite a mixture of characters in the novel.
They are all of different nationalities and only one of them is Jewish, and that's Linny.
So why did Malz change Dunja Wasserström, kind of deracinating her to some extent?
She's portrayed as Claire, blonde haired, blue eyed.
Dunja Wasserström was dark haired Ukrainian Jew from Zhytomyr, as I said.
There could be several reasons.
One is he's a novelist and he's looking to make a universal statement.
And he's got a collection of characters here who are plausible as all six from different places and different nationalities.
And I think he decided to go with that and emphasize that.
It's a complex decision, though.
Dunja Wasserström did not disapprove of that.
She remained friends with Malz after the novel was published, and they have exchanges of letters that show that she didn't resist that change personally.
But for a novelist to make that change raises the question of why the Jewishness of the central character is de-emphasized and sort of eliminated from the text.
Malz had a habit of kind of internationalizing his idea of what the anti-fascist struggle should be.
I think he had made a decision early in his career that the battle against fascism was not just a Jewish story.
So there's that part of his character.
His mission was to show with a lot of clarity how repressive regimes operated.
And I think that was job number one for him.
And anti-Jewish suffering and featuring anti-Jewish suffering was kind of a secondary priority.
The danger, though, is, of course, I mean, to make it universal, I've talked about this with my students.
I'm teaching a course in Jewish American literature this semester, and I have some excellent students and we've had some good discussions about this issue.
But there's a danger in sort of erasing some Jewishness in characters and erasing Jewishness in characters in order to make your story universal.
You know, it could cut both ways because it could suggest that to make it universal, one of the things that has to be sacrificed is Jewishness, which is a complex and potentially harmful kind of message as well.
This is Writer's Voice, and I'm Francesca Riannon.
We're talking with Patrick Chura, who wrote the introduction to the long-suppressed Holocaust novel by Albert Malz, A Tale of One January.
This is interesting because I think it also resonates with, I think, some of the controversies today with, you know, a privileging of identity politics over class politics.
One could argue, in fact, that that has been detrimental to the left.
It's given an opening to the right because it has in some way made some people in the white working class feel like nobody's paying attention to them.
I mean, you know, when you talk about income inequality, there are plenty of poor white people, but it's always cast in terms of identity politics, of minority populations, and not that it is actually part of the relationship under capitalism.
Exactly.
And, you know, Malz, you know, his socialist leanings and his leftist philosophy certainly emphasized class first as this divider created by capitalism.
And I think also in his life, he had early in his life experienced anti-Semitism and felt it, and he said it made him sensitive from his early childhood, sensitive to the whole issue of injustice.
And I think there could have been some really deep psychological impulses in him to, again, downplay the Jewish suffering in favor of universal suffering.
I think, you know, when he wrote The Cross and the Arrow in 44, there's no Jewish character in the anti-German resistance.
There are certainly very clear references to what's going on and what's happening to Jews, but he focuses on how Germans were victims.
Germans themselves and the German people were victims too of Hitlerism and fascism and Nazism.
So that was a choice to focus on that aspect of it.
It worked out well in The Cross and the Arrow.
But, you know, in this story, we end up with six people from six different places and six different nationalities, which is in itself a kind of anti-racist message.
And you know, the fact that they so quickly coalesce around each other and become a kind of a human brotherhood, a human grouping of people who care about each other and take care of each other, even though it isn't completely idealized.
You know, there are tensions in the group, but he wants to make them a collective, a collective, and so the sort of metaphorical feature that they're all from different places works in the novel.
And Maltz is aware that, you know, 85% of the prisoners in Auschwitz were Jewish and 90% of those killed were Jewish in Auschwitz.
He's aware of that, but this is a diverse group.
Yes.
So let's talk a little bit just about the story, the situation.
We have the two women who are from Auschwitz.
They're on a forced march and they manage to escape.
And another contingent then, containing the men, come to the place where they're in hiding and those men also hide, and this is how they discover each other.
And they find a hideout where there is a sympathetic farmer who mostly stays out of the picture, who helps them.
So just give us the broad outlines of where they are.
Yeah, they're in the countryside, not far, probably about 14, 15 kilometers from Auschwitz.
They didn't really know where they were going.
They find an abandoned factory and Jurek, who speaks Polish, goes into a town nearby seeking help.
He receives it from Karol, but there are certain dangers that are all around them as they kind of take up this kind of hiding in the abandoned factory.
It's an abandoned brick factory.
It's very cold all the time.
The conditions are very, very difficult still, but they're getting regular food in the form of some soup and some meals from Karol and some clothing to replace the prison guard that they're wearing, the Auschwitz clothing.
The women have had their head shaved three days before the 4th March.
Klair's feet are frozen.
They need to be massaged back to life by both Leni and Andrei, the Russian soldier.
There's danger too, they can't make fires.
That's part of the agreement they made with Karol because they still need to be in hiding and there could be dangers all around them.
The Germans could find them.
They're hoping, they hear in the distance the Russian Katyusha rockets that are approaching.
They share information about how the war is going because some of them haven't heard anything being in Auschwitz, but there's a great amount of suspense as to how long they're going to be able to hold out here and what they should do next.
But they also feel this incredible feeling of liberation and great happiness just to be able to do something like take a bucket of cold water and wash and have a small meal and sleep without being roused out of bunks by abusive language every morning.
And quickly though, one of the things that quickly emerges among all of them is erotic desire.
The men and the women, Claire, she describes herself as being quote, dead as a woman.
Lini is in better physical condition slightly than Claire and she's attracted to Norbert.
Norbert's attracted to Lini.
Andrei is attracted strongly to Claire.
Jurek finds a lover in the Polish town, the farmer's daughter.
Otto's left out and a great amount and a kind of surprising amount of sexual tension results from that dynamic that Otto feels left out and also has a weapon, a knife, and at one point even considers using it.
So it's interesting too, looking at the interview notes that Maltz made with Dunja Wasserstrom.
When I first read this novel, I was thinking, where is he going with this erotic aspect of this?
Because you would not expect that among recently escaped concentration camp inmates, but it's there in the interview notes.
It's what Dunja Wasserstrom said.
It's not a novelistic invention.
It's a part of the story.
And Maltz apparently was pretty fascinated with that.
Well, these are all young people, even though they look much older than their age because of what they've been through.
Yeah.
And the men are remarking that they haven't seen a woman in a long time at all.
You know, so part of their almost uncontrolled feelings of, you know, becoming human again, immediately light on erotic things.
And so it becomes a kind of love story too, between Linny and Norbert and Claire and André.
And I find the Claire and André interactions very moving.
Yes.
I mean, it's not just sexuality, it's really love and care.
And you know, what is, I think the women also remark on it, on how lucky they are that the men are, you know, for the most part, pretty decent human beings.
And they realize what the alternative could have meant.
There's a very poignant scene in this novel, A Tale of One January by Albert Maltz.
And that is a scene where they finally look in a mirror, a tiny, a little mirror.
Talk about that, what their reaction is and how they deal with, you know, with how much they have physically changed.
Well, that is moving.
And it's kind of led up to as a moment when they realize that, for example, I think with Otto, it's like, I'm 24, but I look 10 years older.
And they're just despairing at the ravages of their physical beings that have been, you know, that they've been subjected to.
And they realize the youth that they've lost.
And I think the most prominent, well, Linny is, you know, kind of disturbed by what she sees, but Claire just breaks down in tears.
And there is a photo, I showed this photo to my students.
You know, in the novel, Claire is described as being about 90 pounds when her real weight is something like 130.
In the interview notes, she was more like 70 pounds.
And I think, I don't know why Maltz made that small change.
But I think it was, well, I can speculate on it, we can speculate on it no end, but he did make that change.
But there is a photograph of Dunja Waserstrom, a real photograph of her, three weeks after, between two and three weeks after she was, after the events of this novel took place.
It is a haunting and ghastly image of her that I think drives home that message of just how physically decimated and devastated she was as a human body.
So that photo, along with this moment when she breaks down in tears at the possibility of a mirror, I agree, it's powerful.
But not only she, but the other characters recognize too what the prison camp has done to them, even though some of them too, this is also breaking sometimes with, you know, kind of expectations.
Norbert and Otto had had privileges in Auschwitz.
They're German speakers who'd become, you know, kapos, kind of leaders of, kind of intermediaries between the Nazi bosses and the camp inmates.
And so they had been able to, quote, organize on the black market certain privileges, certain foods.
For example, it's Otto that has some sugar cubes, and Otto who had, yeah, he had been starved somewhat, but he'd gotten more food than the other inmates.
So they're at various stages of, you know, bad health and physical decimation.
But it's Claire who is the worst, especially because she's had typhus twice.
And she is a stand-in for Dunja Washerstrom.
Yes.
So you said you're working on a biography of Albert Malz.
How did you get involved in this story?
To be honest, I wrote a biography of another leftist writer named Michael Gold that was well-received, and I like biographies.
I wrote a biography of Henry Thoreau in 2011, specifically about one aspect of Thoreau's life, his land surveying work.
So Malz and Gold had a major showdown in the 1940s about some aspects of leftist policy, and it was not Gold's best moment, but Albert Malz came out of it also scarred.
They had a disagreement about, you know, how much leftist art should be dictated by politics and how much leftist art should be a more open kind of genre, where not everything written had to conform outwardly to socialist or communist ideas.
So I was intrigued by him and his response to that initially, and then the more I learned about him, the more interesting he became, especially because, you know, Gold suffered from the blacklist, but there's a kind of suffering from the blacklist that Albert Malz endured that was in a whole different category, I think.
He was a very public artist as a member of the Hollywood Ten who knew, again, like these extremely famous people in Hollywood.
He went through, you know, a lot of pain.
And then even there's something about Albert Malz that always intrigued me.
He was blacklisted in the United States for 20 years, and then in 1969, he writes a novel that has yet to be published called The Eyewitness Report, and we're going to publish it with Alma Books, and Alessandro Gaiensi there is kind of my partner in getting these Malz novels either published for the first time or republished, and that's in progress.
But this Eyewitness Report is a short novel, and you know what it's about.
It's about Soviet oppression of its own people in the Soviet Union, the kind of mentally institutionalizing resistance writers and mentally institutionalizing its own protesters, and Malz noticed that.
He noticed what was happening to Solzhenitsyn and how Solzhenitsyn was kicked out of the Russian Writers Union, and he sympathized with Solzhenitsyn and gave Solzhenitsyn all of his Russian royalties, which was a lot of rubles in those days, and he wrote a novel that championed the cause of anti-Soviet resistance and showed what the Soviet Union was doing to its own citizens, even though he had been a longtime socialist and for a while a member of the U.S. Communist Party.
So guess what happened?
Albert Malz was blacklisted in the Soviet Union for his support of Solzhenitsyn.
So an interesting guy who can claim to have been blacklisted by the U.S. and the USSR for his integrity.
Wow, what a story.
One thing about the Tale of One January, we haven't gotten to the story of the boy in the apple, and I don't mean to spoil the story, but I would want to say something about that.
Malz was always careful when he talked about the novel after it was out and before it was out about that story, which has become a kind of question about the novel's value as a Holocaust narrative.
And it's obvious that with Dunja Wasserstrom's personal testimony that is largely adhered to but also tweaked in the ways that we've noted, the story of the boy in the apple is a curious example of a Holocaust testimony that's become very important.
Rebecca Whitman's research on this and on the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in 1964 in which Dunja Wasserstrom participated, notes that this was a really important and key moment in the 1964 Auschwitz trials of Nazi war criminals held in Frankfurt, Germany.
And Dunja Wasserstrom was there.
Now before 64, she had told the story of the boy in the apple to Albert Malz in their personal interviews in Mexico.
But of course, Albert Malz's novel had not been published yet.
And in the lead up to the Frankfurt trials, Wasserstrom had been fairly reticent and not very forthcoming about some of the specifics of her experiences.
And do you want to tell us the broad outlines of that story?
Well, it's a brutal, monstrous and terrifying act by Wilhelm Boger.
Dunja Wasserstrom was a translator in Boger's office and she had been sent out of the building briefly because they were having a conference and a transport of children from various parts of Poland had arrived.
These were children that had been sheltered by Christians in Poland and had been captured.
And there was one boy of between four and six years old, differing accounts of it, but who had a large apple and was rolling the apple on the ground and playing with it.
And Boger saw the boy, approached him, said something and grabbed him by the ankles and dashed his brain out against the wall.
And the ending of the story, as Dunja Wasserstrom apparently told it in Frankfurt, was that later that day she saw Boger eating the boy's apple.
And it is described as something by Dunja Wasserstrom that it just broke something inside of her.
She never wanted to have children again.
She couldn't look at children without, you know, extreme anxiety and trauma for the rest of her life.
It stuck with her.
In Malz's, and this is told at the Auschwitz trials, Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in 64, and it is, it creates kind of a sensation that is viewed as a kind of an important part of the historical imagination of Auschwitz.
But Malz's novel comes out in 66, 67 and his version of the story of the boy and the apple is slightly different.
The slight difference in it, I've discussed it with my students in my classes and I've thought about it quite a bit myself.
Arguably, Malz's version adds a layer of monstrosity to it.
It makes Boger's brutality, I think, even more intense and psychologically complex.
But Albert Malz told that story in his notes, his way, and he told it in his novel, his way.
In 1979, he was giving an interview to Joel Gardner, an oral history interview, you know, that was kind of summing up his career.
And he did a lot of research before these series of interviews with Joel Gardner, and he told it the same way three times.
And it's very, it's not very different, but it's slightly different, but in a key way from the one accepted at the Auschwitz trials.
But the one at the Auschwitz trials was not recorded.
It had to be pieced together from secondary sources.
And it was also used in Peter Weiss's 1965 play called The Investigation.
So you know where I'm leading with this.
I don't know which version is the absolute final and complete one.
But Albert Malz stuck to his version, although he acknowledged, because his publisher brought it to his attention.
He said this, the story of the boy in the apple sounds like something that has already been told.
And he said, well, I wrote it first, though.
I just couldn't publish it first.
So he felt the need to make a note of that with his publisher.
And every time he talked about the book, he mentioned that.
So to me, that's another feature of the novel that deserves a little attention and discussion.
And thank you for doing that.
It really is.
I mean, it's a short novel, very powerful, really vivid, I think, partly because so much of it is in dialogue that you feel like you're right in the room.
And I want to thank you so much, Patrick Chura, for bringing this novel to American readers, finally, after many decades.
And I look forward to talking with you about your biography of Albert Malz and also about your publication of what was the name, the title of the novel that's coming out?
This is A Long Day in a Short Life.
It'll be out next month.
Fantastic.
Well, make sure that you come back on the show then.
Be in touch with us.
Certainly.
Thanks very much.
I've enjoyed it.