Rayna Prohme

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Rayna Prohme (* 1894 in Chicago ; † November 21, 1927 ) was an American journalist .

Rayna Simons, the daughter of a successful Jewish businessman, graduated from the University of Illinois , where she befriended Dorothy Day . The two are said to have read socialist novels and joined the Socialist Party of America . Inspired by the Russian Revolution, she is said to have joined the US Communist Party . However, according to her later friend Milly, she was never a member of a communist party. From 1918 to 1922 she was married to Samson Raphaelson , with whom she moved to Berkeley, where she met the divorced William "Bill" Prohme, who had the son Rupert. Bill worked for William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner .

Rayna and Bill became a couple and she took his last name. Together with their German shepherd Dan, they went to China, where Rayna initially wanted to stay for five years to collect material for her dissertation . When Bill was working in Beijing for the Leader, he suffered a TBC -Rückfall what Rayna forced to look for a job. The couple supported the Kuomintang (National People's Party of China) and wrote for their English-language newspaper in Wuhan. You were in touch with Eugene Chen . Her assistant and friend wrote under the pseudonym Milly Bennett. They joined Michail Markowitsch Borodin , whom Lenin had sent to China in September 1923.

In 1925 her sister Grace E. Simons and her husband Wilbur Burton came to Beijing and then to Shanghai, where Burton worked for the new China Courier.

In 1926 Rayna wrote for the Canton Gazette . In 1926 she met Vincent Sheean , whom she accompanied to Moscow with Song Qingling , where she wanted to study at the Lenin Institute . During a visit to Dorothy Thompson she passed out and fell ill as a result. The doctor feared she was going to lose her mind. With Anna Louise Strong , who wanted to take care of her, she couldn't bear to be in one room. She succumbed to encephalitis shortly afterwards .

Her sister, who had stayed in China, married Frank Glass , who was from England and who had co-founded the South African Communist Party, later became a Trotskyist and emigrated to Shanghai in 1931.

Her widower Bill, who was trapped in Manila at the time of her death, picked up her ashes in Moscow and buried them in Chicago. After a long illness, he died at the age of 48 on November 21 or 22, 1935 in Honolulu.

literature

  • Baruch Hirson, Arthur J. Knodel: Reporting the Chinese Revolution: The Letters of Rayna Prohme. Pluto Press, London / Ann Arbor 2007, ISBN 978-0745326429 . ( Review on jstor.org).
  • Matthias Messmer: China: Scenes of West-East Encounters. P. 319 f ( online )
  • Milly Bennett: On Her Own: Journalistic Adventures from San Francisco to the Chinese Revolution 1917–1927. P. 49 ( online )
  • Paul French: Through the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao. Pp. 130-133, 167 ( online )
  • Randall Gould: China in the sun. P. 70
  • Yuan-tsung Chen: Return to the Middle Kingdom: One Family, Three Revolutionaries, and the birth of modern China. ( Online )
  • George Chaplin: Presstime in Paradise: The Life and Times of The Honolulu Advertiser, 1856-1995. P. 160 ( online )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Milly Bennett, b. Mildred Jacqueline Bremler, May 22, 1897 in San Francisco - November 6, 1960
  2. ^ The China Monthly Review. Volume 39, p. 291
  3. ↑ http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt9f59s0nd/entire_text/
personal data
SURNAME Prohme, Rayna
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago
DATE OF DEATH November 21, 1927