Jean Malaquais (1908–1998)

Jean Malaquais was born Wladimir Malacki to a non-religious Polish Jewish family in Warsaw. His father was a man of letters who taught Latin and Greek, and his mother was a socialist militant of the Jewish Bund. His whole family perished in the Nazi concentration camps. In 1926, at age 18, he left Poland, and traveled through Eastern Europe and the Middle East before ending up in France. He had idealized France as a paradise of liberty, but soon received a rude awakening. The country was riddled with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, and the authorities seized his passport as a "non-desirable," making him a stateless person. He got work in a number of jobs, including as a miner at Gardanne in Provence. Here he met workers from all over the world, an experience that would become the basis of his first novel. He first married a Polish sweetheart, Alina Eisenberg, with whom he had a son, and later shared his life with a Russian painter, Galina Yurkevich. He adopted the name Jean Malaquais, inspired by the Quai Malaquais along the Seine in Paris. There he worked nights as a stock clerk at Les Halles, the city's central food market. He spent his days in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, perfecting his French and educating himself. After writing a letter to André Gide, he was hired as his private secretary. During the Spanish Civil War, Malaquais fought for the Republican forces as a member of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). He was threatened by the Russian secret police and escaped back to France. In 1939, he published his debut novel Les Javanais (The Men from Java), which won him the prestigious Prix Renaudot. Although he was still a stateless person, the French Army drafted him at the start of World War II. He was captured by the Germans, but managed to escape and flee south to Marseille. In 1943, he left France with the assistance of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee, on a ship bound for Mexico. While there, he published two books with a French firm in New York City: Coups de barre (1944), a collection of short stories, and Journal de guerre (1943), his Spanish war diary. Eventually, he reached the USA but returned to France in 1947. He went back to the USA in 1948 and taught European literature for 20 years as a roving public speaker. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1952, but moved to Switzerland in the 1980s, maintaining his links with anti-authoritarian groups in France and the USA. He married Elisabeth Deberdt, a French university professor with whom he had a daughter. His most famous work, about an international group of exiles in Vichy France, was Planète sans visa (1947), published in English as World without Visa in 1948.