Early Life
Grigulevich was born in Trakai, Lithuania, to a family of Crimean Karaites. His parents emigrated to Argentina when he was young. His father did well for himself and later sent Iosif to Europe to study. However, some Russian sources claim that only his father moved to Argentina and he and his mother remained in Poland, where he joined the Polish Communist party and became acquainted with Edward Gierek, not travelling to Argentina until 1934. In any case, in 1933 he studied briefly at the Sorbonne. He was recruited by the NKVD and showed a gift for languages, soon picking up English, Spanish, French and Russian.
Read more about this topic: Iosif Grigulevich
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“How are we to write
The Russian novel in America
As long as life goes so unterribly?”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)