Jean Malaquais

Who was Jean Malaquais?

Jean Malaquais 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. 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. 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 Germans, 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 concentration camps. He returned to France in 1947, but left again for the United States in 1948. His most famous work, about an international group of exiles in Vichy France, was Planète sans visa, which has been translated into many languages.