How to Pronounce Jean Malaquais
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Apr 11, 1908 Warsaw, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland Died on 22 Dec 1998 (aged 90)
French writer
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Jean Malaquais, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Family, Facts, Age, Net Worth, Biography and More in FamedBorn.com
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.
