George Koval - Early Life

Early Life

George Koval's father, Abram Koval, left his home town of Telekhany in Belarus to emigrate to the United States in 1910. Abram, a carpenter, settled in Sioux City, Iowa, which at the turn of the 20th century was home to a sizeable Jewish population of merchants and craftsmen. He and his wife Ethel Shenitsky Koval raised three sons: Isaya, born 1912; George (or Zhorzh), born Christmas 1913; and Gabriel, born 1919.

George Koval attended Central High School, a red-brick Victorian building better known as "the Castle on the Hill". Neighbors recalled that Koval spoke openly of his Communist beliefs. While attending Central High he was a member of the Honor Society and the debate team. He graduated in 1929 at the age of 15. Meanwhile, his parents left Sioux City as the Great Depression deepened. Abram Koval became the secretary for ICOR, the Organization for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union. Founded by American Jewish Communists in 1924, the group helped to finance and publicize the development of the "Jewish Autonomous Region" – the Communist answer to Jewish emigration to the British Mandate of Palestine then being undertaken by the Zionist movement. The Koval family emigrated in 1932, traveling with a United States family passport. They settled in Birobidzhan, near the border of Manchuria.

The Koval family worked on a collective farm and were profiled by an American Communist daily newspaper in New York City. The journalist Paul Novick wrote to his readers that the family "had exchanged the uncertainty of life as small storekeepers ... for a worry-free existence for themselves and their children." While Isaya became a champion tractor driver, George Koval improved his Russian language skills in the collective and began studies at the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology in 1934. At the university he met and married fellow student Lyudmila Ivanova. Koval graduated with honors in five years and received Soviet citizenship.