Product Code Database
Maxim Lieber (October 15, 1897 – April 10, 1993) was a prominent American literary agent in New York City during the 1930s and 1940s. The Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers named him as an accomplice in 1949, and Lieber fled first to Mexico and then Poland not long after Alger Hiss's conviction in 1950.
). He co-edited a book, published in 1925, and then traveled abroad using the advance paid him by the publisher (R. M. McBride). Returning to the States in 1926, he worked for Brentano's as head of publishing through 1930. At that point, Brentano's went into involuntary bankruptcy.
In 1930 Lieber set up the Maxim Lieber Literary Agency. Over the next 20 years, he would represent some 30 clients. In 1931, his office address (advertised in New Masses magazine) was "55 West 42nd St., New York" and telephone Penn. 6-6179."
Other clients included Thomas Wolfe,
[[Allen Tate]], Saul Bellow,
Carson McCullers,
[[Claude McKay]],
[[Otto Katz]] (as "Andre Simon") and Egon Kisch,
Carey McWilliams and Robert Coates, and Alma Mailman (wife first of James Agee and then Bodo Uhse) and Anna Seghers and Ludwig Renn, John Wexley,
E. P. O'Donnell,
Walker Winslow, and Tom Kromer.
Another client was Phillip Bonosky, who wrote a biography of Detroit-based communist leader Bill McKee.
The New York Public Library may have the most complete list (with years represented):
A Lieber family source adds these further clients: Joseph Milton Bernstein, Whittaker Chambers, Havelock Ellis, Albert Malkin, Lewis Mumford, Arthur Simmons, and Richard Wright; and possibly Maurice Halperin, Lillian Hellman, and Leon Trotsky.
Sally Tanenbaum headed plays for Lieber by January 1936: "Maxim Lieber, literary agent, has placed Sally Tanenbaum, formerly with the play reading department of the Theatre Guild and M-G-M, in charge of his play department".
After the Alger Hisses, Paul, of all the people in the underground, had been closest to me. In many ways our relationship was freer than mine with the Hisses. Paul was engaged in less hazardous activities than Hiss. He had a lively sense of humor which Hiss lacked. We shared a common intense love of music and books. And Paul knew my real name and had known and respected me as a [[Communist]] writer before either of us went underground.
According to Chambers in his 1952 memoir Witness, Lieber helped the underground network in New York City. Initially, Chambers secured Lieber's cooperation in setting up a branch of his agency in London, which Chambers would run under the name of "David Breen." Then, he secured Lieber's support for operations in East Asia. During the summer of 1935, the Chambers family lived with the Liebers in Smithtown, Pennsylvania. After Chambers' defection in 1938, Peters used "Paul" (Lieber) to contact him. Later, when Chambers wanted to let Peters & Co. know about his life preserver (see Pumpkin papers), he contacted Lieber to relay his message. While the London operation was getting under way (it would eventually fall through), Chambers asked Lieber to cooperate with fellow underground operator John Loomis Sherman (under the alias "Charles Francis Chase" and Chambers as "Lloyd Cantwell") in establishing the American Feature Writers' Syndicate. Together, these three filed a registration of trade in New York City and opened a bank account at the Chemical Bank. (Chambers also mentioned that Charles Angoff was involved, though conspiratorially or otherwise remained unclear. He also mentions Japanese artist Hideo Noda/野田英夫.) Sherman was to go to Tokyo and set up a network separate from that of Richard Sorge. According to Chambers' testimony:
Lieber went among various feature syndicates and various newspapers and tried to get various interests or sales ... and Sherman went to work in Lieber's office, had a desk there, and his name was written on the door and I think some stationery was got out and deposits were made, I think, in the Chemical Bank in New York in the name of the syndicate. These deposits were to finance the operation in Japan. Then Peters, who was in on most of this operation, supplied a birth certificate in the name of Charles Chase for and, on the basis of that certificate, which was a perfectly legal document procured in the way I have described in earlier testimony, John Sherman took out a passport and on that passport he traveled to Tokyo.
On June 13, 1950, Lieber appeared with lawyer Milton H. Friedman (brother-in-law of New York State Justice Philip M. Halpern ) before HUAC during executive session with House representatives Francis E. Walter, Burr P. Harrison, and Morgan M. Moulder. As with Sherman, HUAC read out excerpts from Chambers' testimony that mentioned their names or aliases. They also asked Lieber (as Sherman) whether he knew either Alger Hiss or J. Peters. (Chambers had recounted a meeting between, Lieber, himself, and Hiss on Lieber's farm: Lieber confirmed only ownership of 103-acre farm in Ferndale, Pennsylvania, in Bucks County from about 1935-1945.) They asked whether his clients included Louis Adamic, Howard Fast, V. J. Jerome, or Paul Robeson. They asked whether he knew Otto Katz (reputed to be involved in the death of Walter Krivitsky and in Soviet attempts to seize Chambers after defection) or Katz's associate Erwin Kisch. They asked whether he knew Osmond K. Fraenkel or whether he had ever contributed to a publication (probably Freies Deutschland) by Anna Seghers in Mexico. To all such questions, Lieber pleaded the Fifth on the grounds of self-incrimination. As he explained, he had also testified twice already in 1948 before the grand jury in New York City, which then indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury. During testimony, Lieber listed three by name of some 30 clients: Erskine Caldwell, Carey McWilliams, and Robert Coates.
Lieber left the U. S. for Mexico in 1951 with his wife Minna and their two children.
After one year in Cuernavaca, Mexico, they moved to Mexico City, where they resided another two years. Following his departure from the US, Lieber was stripped of his US citizenship. He resided in Mexico as a stateless person. The US authorities returned his citizenship in 1964.
In late 1954, on instructions from Moscow, Lieber moved with his family to Warsaw, Poland. They spent the next 14 years in Poland. Professor Erwin Marquit knew the Liebers in Poland and recollects:
A few weeks after our arrival in Poland, we began to encounter in the Hotel Bristol a number of U.S. Communist emigres. Although Esther and I had not known any of them personally in the United States, they quickly accepted us into what was to become a community of some dozen U.S. Communists in Poland ... Max, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had been a literary agent, whose clients included, among others, Whittaker Chambers, of Pumpkin Papers fame ... The Liebers said that they had left the United States because Max had been stripped of the possibility of earning a livelihood ... Although I had some sporadic contact with them, the Liebers rarely attended gatherings of the American group.In August 1968 they left for the United Kingdom, from where they were expelled by the British Home Office three months later.
The Liebers then returned to the States. There, Lieber lived out the rest of his life quietly in East Hartford, Connecticut. Soon after his return to the US he was interviewed by the FBI. In the late 1970s, Lieber gave a series of interviews to historian Allen Weinstein, who then was working on his book, "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case."
Maxim Lieber died age 95 in East Hartford, Connecticut on April 10, 1993.
(In 1952, Nathaniel Weyl would testify further about Hiss.)
|
|
