Charles Malamuth

Charles Malamuth, (November 9, 1899 – July 14, 1965) was s Polish-Jewish-American journalist, writer, and translator, known as an "expert in Slavic languages," "Russian expert," and "anti-communist."

Background

November 9, 1899 in Lodz, Poland (then Russian Empire). His father was Leo Goodman and mother Cipa Broder.

Career

In the 1920s, Malamuth was a professor in the Slavonic Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Malamuth served as assistant to Eugene Lyons during the latter's stay there as Moscow bureau chief for United Press. On November 22, 1930, he accompanied Lyons to their historic interview with Joseph Stalin.

In 1947, he was director of European Public Relations in Paris for the American Joint Distribution Committee.

Around 1950, he left Paris to join Radio Free Europe in Frankfurt, Voice of America, and Radio Liberty.

In 1953, the Communist Party of France attacked him in its newspaper fr:Ce Soir by calling him "un fidéle de Trotsky" ("a Trotsky loyalist") and citing the support from Lyons and him for Victor Kravchenko during the latter's trial in France for his book I Chose Freedom (1949), which exposed the GULAG system in the USSR. Ce Soir "accused" Malamuth of translating the first 500 pages of Kravchenko's famous book. Further, the newspaper accused Malamuth of close association with the "Trotskyite Max Eastman" and of Isaac Don Levine. Further, his visitors in Paris included ex-CP members Jay Lovestone and Benjamin Gitlow. Further, he was known to have visited the US Embassy in Paris weekly (i.e., implying that he was an American spy). Lastly, he had worked for the American Joint Distribution Committee ("Jewish welfare agency"), which the CP USSR had accused of "engineering" the "Doctors Plot."

Personal and death

On December 20, 1925, in Sacramento, California, Malamuth married Joan London, daughter of American novelist and socialist Jack London. It was her second marriage. They divorced in 1930, moved to Moscow remarried, separated in 1934, and divorced finally in 1935.

He corresponded with Max Eastman, Eugene Lyons, Adolphe Menjou, and Lev Trotsky as well as Ilya Erenburg, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Aleksei Tolstoi, and Evgeny Zamyatin. Other friends and acquaintances included Isaac Don Levine.

He died in Los Angeles on July 14, 1965.

Legacy: Trotsky's Stalin (2016)

Stalinist communist parties called Malamuth a Trotskyist. Trotskyists considered him an Anti-Communist–and still do to this day.

Case in point – In 2016, Wellred Books published a new translation of Trotsky's biography Stalin by Alan Woods. For this new translation, Woods consulted not only Harvard University library archives (which holds Trotsky's papers for the book) but also French and Russian translations. It contains 100,000 words more than the 1940 translation. Also, the new translated presents "Malamuth's political distortions removed."

Robert Sewell of In Defense of Marxism has criticized Malamuth strongly. He has written, "Whatever Malamuth's talents, this was a political task for which he was completely unsuited." Trotsky was unhappy with Malamuth because he had shown his unfinished translations to others (specifically Max Schachtman and James Burnham). For this indiscretion, Trotsky was soon blaming him further: "He does not know Russian; he does not know English; and he is tremendously pretentious."

In video, he explained about Malamuth:

Clearly, he wasn't in the political state in order the carry out his particular task. He wasn't qualified enough to carry out this particular task. Therefore, he introduced into this later edited version a lot of material that he had decided to supplement to Trotsky's work. These supplements, these additions clearly went against the general thrust of Trotsky's political thought... Natalia Trotsky... wanted to take out the material that had been put in by Malamuth, that should be replaced by Trotsky's own writing... Malamuth had given the excuse that a lot of it was repetition... The main thing also he said that the transcripts had been damaged in the assasination attack in 1940, and some of the material was in disrepair... There wasn't any damage whatsoever... and files deliberately left out of the book... A vast number of words had been left out... an extra 100,000 words. Malamuth's text of about 10,000 were taken out.

Ultimiately, Sewell concedes a simpler explanation: "Following Trotsky's death, the American publishers (Harper and Brothers), who owned the rights to the book, placed Malamuth in charge, not only of the translation, but of 'editing' the final book. For them, this was simply a commercial calculation to salvage the book following the author's death." In other words, "Trotsky's views did not enter into their calculations." Given Malamuth's career, it seems clear that Sewell's assessment – that translation of Trotksy's Stalin was "a political task for which he was completely unsuited" – signal to fellow Trotskyists to Malamuth's career as anti-communist.

Works

• Squaring the Circle by Valentine Katayev (1928, 1935)
• The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea by Evgeny Petrov (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1931)
• The Little Golden Calf by Evgeny Petrov (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1932)
• Forward, O Time! by Valentine Katayev (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1933)
• Forward, O Time! by Valentine Katayev (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934)
• Fear by Alexander Afinogenov (1934)
• Inga by Anatole Glebov (1934)
• Little Golden America by Evgeny Petrov (1936)
• Lonely White Sail, or Peace is Where the Tempests Blow by Valentine Katayev (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936)
• Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence by Leon Trotsky (1941)

• ^ Reference Guide to Russian Literature. Routledge. 2013. pp. 393, 420, 620. Retrieved 2 December 2016. 
• "Charles Malamuth". Playbill. Retrieved 2 December 2016. 
• "Malamuth, Charles". IBDB.com. Retrieved 2 December 2016. 
• "Time, Forward!". Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1933. Retrieved 2 December 2016. 
• ^ Catalog of Copyright Entries. Library of Congress. p. 41. Retrieved 2 December 2016. 
• "Ilya Il'f and Evgenii Petrov, The Twelve Chairs". Swarthmore University. 2008. Retrieved 3 December 2016. 
• "Trotsky, Leon, 1879-1940. Leon Trotsky's Stalin: material concerning English translation,1940: Guide". Harvard University. 2006. Retrieved 2 December 2016. 
• "Stalin : an appraisal of the man and his influence". New York: Harper & Brothers. 1941. Retrieved 2 December 2016.