Maxim Lieber

Maxim Lieber (October 15, 1897 – April 10, 1993) was an 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.

Background

Maxim Lieber was born on October 15, 1897, in Warsaw, then Congress Poland, to a family of Jewish origin. Both parents came from Opoczno, Poland. His family left Hamburg, Germany for New York City aboard the S. S. Pennsylvania in 1907 and lived in the Bronx. Lieber's father served as a typesetter for the Yiddish social-democratic newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward, suggesting that one parent (if not both) was secularist. Young Maxim attended public schools, including Townsend Harris Hall (then part of New York City College) and Morris High School (Bronx, New York). ). 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.

Clients According to one writer (and client), Lieber's client list included Louis Adamic, Erskine Caldwell, Katherine Anne Porter, John Cheever, Josephine Herbst, Albert Maltz, John O'Hara, Albert Halper, James Farrell, Nathanael West, Maxim Gorky, Theodore Dreiser, and Langston Hughes.

Other clients included Thomas Wolfe, Allen Tate, Carson McCullers, Claude McKay, Otto Katz (as "Andre Simon") and Egon Kisch, Carey McWilliams and Robert Coates, 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):

Louis Adamic (1930–1931, 1946) Benjamin Appel (1933, 1935) Nathan Asch (1934–1936, 1940–1942, 1946–1947, 1949–1950) Arturo Barea (1947, 1950) Saul Bellow (1943) Alvah Bessie (1933) Carlos Bulosan (1944) Erskine Caldwell (1932–1943, 1947–1948) John Cheever (1935–1941) Robert Coates (1935–1938, 1941, 1945) David de Jong (undated) Daniel Fuchs (undated) Emily Hahn (1930–1931) Nancy Hale (1934) Albert Halper (1935, 1937, 1942–1943, 1946–1950) Langston Hughes (1933–1945, 1949–1950) Alfred Kreymborg (1947) Grace Lumpkin (1935) Carson McCullers (1938, 1941, 1948–1949) Bernard Malamud (1942, 1945) William March (W. E. Campbell) (1934, 1937–1939) Naomi Mitchison (1935) Frances Park (1932–1934) Leo C. Rosten (1935–1938) Tess Slesinger (1933–1937, 1941) Henry Anton Steig (1937–1941) Nathanael West (1933) Thomas Wolfe (1934) Leane Zugsmith (1933–1944, 1947–1949, 1951)

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.

Staff Elizabeth Nowell, who went on to become Thomas Wolfe's agent later, got her start as an agent with Lieber as early as 1933. Other authors with whom she dealt include: Alvah Bessie, Daniel Fuchs, David de Jong, and Nancy Hale. By February 1935, she had left to form her own agency.

Espionage J. Peters introduced Lieber to Whittaker Chambers in late 1934. The two became friends, and Chambers often used Lieber's apartment when visiting New York. Chambers wrote of Lieber (using his alias "Paul"): 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. This left House Un-American Committee (HUAC) with few people who had not yet pleaded the Fifth to corroborate Chambers' story. On February 27 and March 1, 1950, Sherman appeared before HUAC without counsel and pleaded the Fifth to nearly every question asked him.

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. 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."

Personal life and death

In 1924, Lieber married to Irma Cohen, with whom he had one son and whom he divorced by 1933. He married Sally Tanenbaum in May 1936, whom he divorced before 1939. (The marriage though not the dates were corroborated by Whittaker Chambers and his wife during questioning by the FBI in 1951. ) Minna Edith Zelinka was a co-respondent in the second divorce; Lieber married her before 1939. They had two children.

Maxim Lieber died age 95 in East Hartford, Connecticut on April 10, 1993.

Impact on McCarthy era Lieber's flight abroad in 1951, following Peters, Field, and others, left the U. S. Government with few witnesses to corroborate Chambers' testimony about Hiss. A second trial had found Hiss guilty of two counts of perjury a few months earlier, in January 1950. Witnesses included Hede Massing and a former housemaid.

(In 1952, Nathaniel Weyl would testify further about Hiss.)

Publications Lieber told HUAC, "Prior to that I had edited a book, an anthology of short stories, which I am happy to say is in the Library of Congress. " The Shape of Sarmatian Ideology in Poland by Stanisław Cynarski and Maxim Lieber (Polska Akademia Nauk.: Komitet Nauk Historycznych, 1968)