Maliarlum

“Maliarlum” is apparently the 1940s Singlish word for “Malayalam”. See Rage in Singapore, David George Kin, Wisdom House, 1942, p. 214 et altra. With this post I get Google ownership of the word.

UPDATE:

Google found my post within a minute or so. They had already recognized ”Maliarlum” as a misspelling of “Malayalam”, though.

I have sent an inquiry to A Dictionary of Singlish about the status of this word, which neither they nor Coxford lists. It might be obsolete, and perhaps it was only used by expat colonials.

My guess is that this particular misspelling  is that of someone speaking some rhotic dialect of British English that puts Rs where,  as far as I am concerned, they don’t really belong .

 

Loose Ends in the David George Plotkin / David George Kin story

A BOOK WHOSE AUTHORSHIP IS UNCERTAIN:

The Road to Birmingham,  Bridgehead Books for “The Society for Racial Peace of Washington, D.C.”, 1964. (Bridgehead books was one of Samuel Roth’s many fronts, and “The Society for Racial Peace”  appears in Google only as the publisher of The Road to Birmingham.)

This novel is set during the Freedom Rider era of the 1960s civil rights movement and credited to “Beauregard James”, supposedly the pseudonym of  ”a well-known Negro author”.  However,  the book is written in Plotkin’s characteristic jocular, prurient style.

THINGS I HAVE NOT SEEN:

A poem of Plotkin’s called “A Young Messiah” was included in Henry Harrison, ed., The Sacco-Vanzetti Anthology of Verse, New York, 1927. (Source:  Robert Montgomery,  Sacco and Vanzetti, Devin-Adair, 1960, p. 62, footnote.)

The New Republic reviews Kurt Krueger, Inside Hitler, translated by David George Plotkin, Avalon Press, 1942. Probably same as I was Hitler’s Doctor, a forgery attributed to Samuel Roth. Plotkin may have helped write this book.

A Black Man in the White House, by David George Kin. Listed as forthcoming (1964) on an inside page of The Road to Birmingham (above). No other information.

The East Side Story, David George Plotkin, 1968. I have no information about this book.

David G Kin, A Time To Love, Chariot Books. (This may be the same book under the pseudonym Noel O’Hara). Chariot Books, later the New Chariot Library,  seems to have specialized in bottom-of-the-line lesbian porn during the 1960s, though after about 1975 a publisher with that name published Christian-themed children’s books, and on this list hilarity ensues when the lists are mixed, so that Sex Behavior of the American Secretary shares a page with Lord Change Me.)

RED HERRINGS:

This book was really written by one David King, but was wrongly entered in one database:

David Kin, The Brave and the Damned, Paperback Library, 1956.

Steve at http://www.languagehat.com looked up the Russian D. Kin, below,  and found that he wrote a number of books (not just two), was not an American or Russian-American, and was not named Plotkin.  Palij apparently just made a mistake. So the below is moot.

The  David Plotkin Project has come up with some loose ends, the most interesting of which is a Russian David Plotkin (or maybe even two of them.) The American David Plotkin was from a Jewish immigrant neighborhood (Brownsville), had left-wing sympathies, and in 1948 was accused of being a Communist hack because of his smear job on Burton K. Wheeler.  Thus, he conceivably could have been the Plotkin / Kin of the 1927 and 1931 books from Russia (which fit neatly into the gap between his 1926 poetry book and his 1934 cartoon book). On the other hand, these books were more likely written by  the Komsomol David Plotkin killed by the Nazis in 1942. But there is one reason to suspect that the author of Denikinshchina was the American: in the Palij reference this Russian author has the same name and pseudonym as the American author.

“David Plotkin [D. Kin]“, writing in Russian, cited in Michael Palij, The Ukrainian-Polish defensive alliance, 1919-1921, as the author of Denikinshchina (Leningrad, 1927), a book about the White Russian General Anton Denikin during the Russian Revolution.

D. Kin, V. I. Lenin on the Soviets,  Moscow,  1931 (in English)

David Plotkin, Komsomol leader killed by Germans in 1942, mentioned in The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry by Ilya Ehrenburg, Vasily Grossman, and David Patterson

A Forgotten and Not Very Good Author

Sometime later I will publish my definitive study of the works of David George Plotkin / Kin,  a forgotten minor author whose last book was published sometime between 1958 and 1968. His two most famous works were forgeries, and  two or three of the others were scurrilous smears. Not a very good writer, really, but he did succeed in mixing it up and keeping things interesting.

Key words: poetry, American Jews, Brownsville, Elias Lieberman, Thomas Seltzer, Otto Soglow, The Great Depression, cartoons, Pascal Covici, The Fall of Singapore, World War Two, Friedrich Nietzsche, forgery, Samuel Roth, Burton K. Wheeler, Philip Roth, scurrilous smear job, Communists, Maxwell Bodenheim, Greenwich Village, lesbians, Merrill’s Marauders, maxims, proverbs, pornography.

The Works of David Plotkin / Kin

David George Plotkin (introduction by Elias Lieberman) , Ghetto Gutters,  Thomas Seltzer, 1926. (Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  review of Ghetto Gutters /Braithwaite, Anthology of Magazine Verse, review of Ghetto Gutters / Poetry: A Magazine of Verse mentions Plotkin / a poem by Lieberman / Thomas Seltzer, publisher / Albert and Charles Boni, Seltzer’s nephews who revived his publishing company).

Otto Soglow (cartoonist) and David George Plotkin, Wasn’t the Depression Terrible?, Covici Friede, 1934. (Book cover  / Time Magazine review / Pascal Covici, publisher.)

David George Kin, Rage in Singapore,  Wisdom House, 1942.

Pseudo-Friedrich Nietzsche (forged by David George Kin), My Sister and I, Boar’s Head Books, 1951. (Kin’s confession /  Samuel Roth, publisher /  Some still take My Sister and I  at face value / Dennis Dutton on My Sister and I / Hollingsdale review / Disputed Nietzsche I II  III / Kathleen Winiger, “The Disputed Nietzsche: My Sister and I, by Friedrich Nietzsche”: Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought. No. 91. Spring, 1992, pp. 185-189.)

David George Kin, The Plot Against America,  John E. Kennedy Publishers, 1946. (Commissioned as a smear on Sen. Burton K. Wheeler /  Kin’s book was investigated by Congress / Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America)

Maxwell Bodenheim (“edited” and probably mostly written by David Kin), My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, Bridgehead Books,  1954. (Kin and the Bodenheim autobiography / Maxwell Bodenheim)

David Kin (preface by J. Donald Adams), Dictionary of American Maxims, Philosophical Library, 1955.

David Kin (preface by Mark Van Doren), Dictionary of American Proverbs, Philosophical Library, 1955.

David George Plotkin, Women Without Men: True Stories about Lesbian Love in Greenwich Village, Brookwood Publishing Company, 1958. (This may be the same book under the pseudonym Noel O’Hara.  Similar misogynist, homophobic books from Manhattan: Loathsome Women / Why Men Rule )