Albert Maltz – författare

Only edition in printPoland, January 1945. Two women and four men escape from a Nazi death march. Each is from a different background and a different country, but all have endured the horrors of imprisonment in Auschwitz. They find refuge in an abandoned factory, and suddenly they realize that they are no longer mere numbers. Even in their wild euphoria at being free, however, they can have no certainty about their future.This is a tale of exploding joy within a hothouse of fear, a tale of human beings erupting into life after breaking free of the embrace of death – an unusual and moving tale that cements Albert Maltz’s reputation as a compassionate observer of character and one of the finest storytellers of his generation.

Only edition in printAs time ticks along with indifference, the inmates of the Washington District Jail drag on their daily routine behind bars. Innocent at their birth, these frail creatures who have lost their way now spend their lives shut out of society, deprived of all freedom, with little prospect of being readmitted into the human fold.Each prisoner has a story: some of them are charged with crimes of assault, murder and manslaughter, others of forgery, robbery and larceny – others still are not guilty of anything other than having been born to certain parents at a certain time in a certain country. A Long Day in a Short Life – Maltz’s first novel to be published in the UK – is a powerful indictment of the penal system and a strong reminder about the underlying humanity of each individual.

Only edition in printDespite being decorated with a German Service Cross, Willi Wegler is inwardly sickened by both Hitler’s genocidal war and the complicity of his fellow citizens in Third Reich brutalities. Wracked by guilt, he suddenly betrays his country in a profound gesture of protest and self-sacrifice: during the course of an air raid, he fashions an enormous arrow out of hay in an open field, then ignites it as a flaming signal to direct British bombers to the site of the factory where he works – an act that cannot fail to precipitate a series of dramatic events.The Cross and the Arrow – first published in 1944, during the latter stages of the war it describes – portrays a man’s struggle to retain his dignity in defiance of state-sponsored cruelty and explores the role and responsibility of the individual in the face of tragic global events. In its examination of an enemy’s complex heroism, it provides a life-affirming message of humanity’s ultimate capacity for good.

Only edition in printFormer oil worker, untutored philosopher, dreamer, man of laughter possessed with an indomitable spirit, seventy-three-year-old Simon McKeever runs away from a shabby state-run home for the elderly in Sacramento and hitch-hikes a ride to Los Angeles, in search of a cure for his arthritis. In the course of his personal odyssey on the road, McKeever – a modern working-class Everyman – will find something much more precious than a medical miracle: a realization that will enable him to bequeath to humankind his hard-won personal truth and thereby “move the world one inch forward”. In this technically flawless novel, now reprinted for the first time after its original American publication in 1949, Maltz elevates literature of the common man to high art, providing a life-affirming, enduring message of ordinary courage and heroism.

Only edition in printThe scene opens in Moscow in August 1968. Forty-two-year-old Daniil Petrovich Barkov is a prizewinning writer whose life is at a crossroads. His wife is slowly dying in a hospital bed, and his faith in his country is shaken by the anti-democratic invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops. On a Sunday afternoon in Red Square, Barkov witnesses a peaceful demonstration for human rights. Eight men and women, including a mother and her baby, sit silently on the pavement near Lenin’s tomb and unfurl their banners. Within moments, police whistles are heard, and KGB agents arrest them with shocking brutality. Barkov is moved by the bravery of the protesters, but resists the impulse to join them. The guilt-ridden author vows to write an eyewitness report, a burning polemic against rule by aggression, which will show his growth as an artist.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.

Only edition in printThe titular story in this collection, ‘Man on a Road’ – which famously led to the 1936 congressional hearings that exposed the worst industrial disaster in American history – is a snapshot of appalling capitalist exploitation from the perspective of a walking-dead miner slowly suffocating from silicosis. ‘The Happiest Man on Earth’, winner of the 1938 O. Henry Award, is about a man who, desperate to feed his family and regain his dignity, embarks on a long journey on foot in his quest for a job, while ‘The Way Things Are’ renders the terrors of the Jim Crow South with unflinching realism, foreshadowing the aesthetics and politics of the civil-rights movement.Albert Maltz, one of the “Hollywood Ten” of the McCarthy era, spent ten months in prison and twenty years on the blacklist as a banned artist forced to write under a pseudonym. With this collection of stories, spanning forty years of his career and including previously uncollected works, his long-silenced voice returns, re-establishing him as a master of hard-hitting but compassionate short fiction.