Fray, Sonye
1903–1979
She was a journalist, born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. She was one of the first members of the Communist Youth in the city, and she took part in the civil war. At eighteen years of age, she joined the Communist Party.
In the early 1920s she began her journalistic work, initially with
the Kharkov journal Arbeter-yugnt (Workers’ youth), and
she was later one of the organizers of
the Moscow journal Yungvald (Young Forest).
In Minsk she founded the newspaper
Der yunger arbeter (The young worker).
She was also the first editor of the Minsk-based Byelorussian youth newspaper
Chervona zmena (Red team).
From 1925 until 1932, she was involved with leading party work in Minsk, Tashkent, and Moscow. After graduating from the Institute of Red Professors, she became a lecturer in political economy at a series of Moscow’s senior high schools, defended a dissertation on
“the economic crisis in Russia over the years 1900-1903,”
and received the title of candidate (Russian equivalent to PhD) in economic science.
The mass campaign to “unmask the enemies of the people” did not avoid her, and she was purged in 1937 along with her life partner, Volf Nodel; she spent eighteen years in prisons and the gulag. After being “rehabilitated” (i.e., exonerated) in 1956, she returned to Moscow. Over the course of the following decades, she worked in the Moscow Institute for Foreign Languages, where she taught political economy.
Beginning in 1961, she was a member of the editorial collective of
Sovetish Heymland (Soviet Homeland).