An unpublished novel by one of the Hollywood Ten, who were blacklisted for their involvement with the Communist Party USA. The Eyewitness Report is a novel which explores the role and responsibility of the individual in the face of tragic historical events.
The scene opens in Moscow in August 1968. Forty-two-year-old Daniil Petrovich Barkov is a prizewinning writer whose life is at a crossroads. His wife is slowly dying in a hospital bed, and his faith in his country is shaken by the anti-democratic invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops. On a Sunday afternoon in Red Square, Barkov witnesses a peaceful demonstration for human rights. Eight men and women, including a mother and her baby, sit silently on the pavement near Lenin’s tomb and unfurl their banners. Within moments, police whistles are heard, and KGB agents arrest them with shocking brutality. Barkov is moved by the bravery of the protesters, but resists the impulse to join them. The guilt-ridden author vows to write an eyewitness report, a burning polemic against rule by aggression, which will show his growth as an artist.
At once an indictment of oppression and an exploration of the role and responsibility of the individual in the face of tragic historical events – themes that preoccupied Maltz throughout his life and artistic career – The Eyewitness Report, left unpublished by its author at his death and presented here for the first time, will cement Maltz’s reputation as one of the finest storytellers and most perceptive thinkers of the last century.
Albert Maltz (1908–85) was a prizewinning American playwright, fiction writer and screenwriter. His novel The Cross and the Arrow, about the German resistance to the Nazi regime, was distributed to 150,000 American soldiers during the Second World War. He worked on a number of films, including Casablanca, until he was blacklisted during McCarthyism. He is best remembered today for his novels A Tale of One January and The Journey of Simon McKeever.
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