Jean Malaquais, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Jean Malaquais

French writer

Date of Birth: 11-Apr-1908

Place of Birth: Warsaw, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland

Date of Death: 22-Dec-1998

Profession: writer, translator

Nationality: France

Zodiac Sign: Aries


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About Jean Malaquais

  • Jean Malaquais (1908 – December 22, 1998) was a French novelist.
  • He was born as Wladimir Jan Pavel Malacki in Warsaw in 1908 of a non-religious Polish family of Jewish descent. In 1926, he left Poland, traveling in Eastern Europe and the Middle East; he wrote: "I had the feeling that the end of the world was approaching in Poland, so I wanted to discover the life of other lands before it disappeared entirely.
  • Morally and intellectually I was a tramp, a companion of the dispossessed." He settled in France, where he worked as a laborer, and adopted the name of Jean Malaquais (which he took from the Quai Malaquais).
  • He was associated with, though not formally a member of, several French leftist organizations, including the Trotskyist Communist League, and during the Spanish Civil War he joined the Republican forces as a member of the militia columns of the left Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).
  • He obtained the Prix Renaudot in 1939 for his novel Les Javanais, based on his experience as an immigrant mine worker in Provence; it was admired by André Gide, who made Malaquais his private secretary. At the beginning of World War II, he was conscripted into the French army, though not a French citizen.
  • He was captured by the Wehrmacht, but managed to escape, and fled to southern France.
  • In 1943, he succeeded in leaving France with the assistance of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee bound for Mexico, and, eventually the United States, where he became a naturalised citizen; his parents died in Nazi Germany concentration camps.
  • He returned to France in 1947, but left again for the United States in 1948.
  • (Beginning in 1942 and continuing after the war, he was a member of the Left Communist group Gauche communiste de France; in the United States, he was loosely affiliated with a number of non-Communist left groups.) His most famous work, about an international group of exiles in Vichy France, was Planète sans visa (1947), which has been translated into many languages.

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