Literatureיוליוס מרגולין

Julius Margolin

Julius Margolin was an Israeli writer, journalist and philosopher who spent 5 years in Soviet labor camps and wrote A Journey to the Land Ze-Ka about them.

1900 to 1971A Journey to the Land Ze-KaSurviving the Soviet GulagActivism for Soviet Jews

Born: 14 October 1900, Pinsk
Died: 21 January 1971, Tel Aviv
Occupation: writer, journalist, philosopher
Education: Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Julius Margolin was born in 1900 in Pinsk

Margolin was born in Pinsk, then part of the Russian Empire, and was educated in Russian. In 1926 he married Eva Spektor.

He studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1929. He later lived in Łódź, Poland.

In 1936 he moved to the Land of Israel with his family. In 1939 he returned to Poland on family matters and was trapped there when the war began. He fled to the Soviet side, was arrested in June 1940, and after refusing Soviet citizenship was sent without trial to a labor camp in northern Russia.

He survived and was freed in 1945 as a former Polish citizen. He returned to Poland in 1946 and then settled in Tel Aviv. In 1947 he finished his book on the camps, which Israeli publishers rejected, and an abridged version appeared in France in 1949.

In Israel he worked mainly as a freelance journalist, largely in Russian, and was active for the release of Soviet Jews. He died in Tel Aviv in 1971 and was buried in Holon.