Julius Margolin


Julius Margolin was a Belarus-born Israeli writer and political activist. He was the author of Journey to the Land of the Ze-Ka.

Biography

Margolin was born in Pinsk, West Belarus, then in the Russian Empire. He studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Margolin received his doctorate in philosophy in 1929. He then moved to Łódź, Poland and later to Palestine in 1936. Three years later he was visiting his relatives in Pinsk and was trapped there by the Soviet invasion of Poland. Together with numerous other "socially-dangerous elements", he was rounded up by the NKVD and sent to a labor camp on the northern bank of the Lake Onega. He survived, and was freed in 1945 as a former Polish citizen according to the agreement with Poland. In 1946, he was permitted to return to Poland. He immigrated to Palestine, settling in Tel Aviv.

Literary career

He completed Journey to the Land of the Ze-Ka in 1947, when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had just been sent to the gulag.It was impossible to publish such a book about the Soviet Union in the West at that time, immediately after World War II. The manuscript was also rejected in Israel. An abridged version was published in France in 1949. The book was printed in the United States in 1952 by , and was reprinted in 1975. In 1951, Margolin testified at the trial of David Rousset after he was accused of revealing information about the gulag to the French public.

Published works