Medem Vladimir Davidovich (party pseudonyms: Grinberg, Goldblat) (1879, Libava — 1923, New York) — political and public figure, publicist.

He was the son of a military physician (later a State Councillor) and was baptized by his parents. While studying at the Minsk Gymnasium, he began learning Hebrew. In 1898 he enrolled at Kyiv University, but in 1899, for participation in student unrest, he was expelled and exiled to Minsk. From 1900 he was one of the leaders of the Minsk organization of the Bund and at the same time worked for the Jewish periodical press (the newspapers Der Veker and Der Minsker Arbeter). In 1901 he was arrested in Minsk, exiled to Eastern Siberia, escaped, and soon emigrated.

He studied at the University of Bern and engaged in propaganda work among circles of students from Russia. From 1903 he was a member of the Bund’s Foreign Delegation and represented the party at the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP. In 1904 he published a series of articles on the national question in the Bulletin of the Bund, which formed the basis of the brochure Socialism and the National Question (1906). This work was reprinted many times and included in the Soviet edition Marxism and the National Question (Kharkov, 1923).

From 1905 to 1908 he lived in Russia, conducted party work in Vilna, and was one of the leading contributors and editors of Bund publications such as Nashe Slovo, Nasha Tribuna, Poslednie Izvestiya, Di Folks-tsaytung, Di Hofenung, Der Morgenstern, and others. His literary pseudonyms included Mark, M. Vinitsky, G. Raf, and Ben David.

In 1906, at the 7th Congress of the Bund in Leipzig, Vladimir Medem was elected to the Central Committee; in 1907 he was a member of the presidium of the 5th Congress of the RSDLP. In the early 1910s he published in Russian (Vestnik Evropy, Den’), Russian-Jewish (Yevreyskiy Mir, Yevreyskoye Obozreniye), and German (Neue Zeit) periodicals.

In 1912 he lived in Vienna and edited the Warsaw Bund weekly Lebnsfragen (closed after issue no. 2). For this activity he was arrested in Kovno in 1913; he spent 25 months under investigation and in May 1915 was sentenced to four years of hard labor. In a grave condition he was transferred to a prison hospital in Warsaw and was released in August 1915 when German troops entered the city.

From 1915 to 1920 he was one of the leaders of the Bund in Poland, headed Jewish secular school education, and was expelled by the German authorities. He initiated a petition to the German occupation authorities demanding recognition of Yiddish as the official language of the Jews and the establishment of schools with instruction in Yiddish.

In 1920 (or early 1921) he emigrated to the United States, where he worked for the newspaper Forverts and other Yiddish-language periodicals. His journalistic writings were partially included in the collections Zikhroynes un artikley (Memoirs and Articles, 1917) and Fun mayn notits-bukh (From My Notebook, 1920).

His wife was Gina Medem, a publicist and member of the Bund.

Works:

From My Life, 1923;

Through the Tsarist Prisons…, Leningrad, 1924.

Medem Gina (1886, Brezin, Piotrków Governorate — ?) — publicist, member of the Bund. Wife of V. Medem.

In 1908 Gina Medem moved to Switzerland. In 1926 she visited the USSR, becoming acquainted with the life of Jewish agricultural colonies in southern Ukraine and Crimea; from 1929 to 1935 she visited Birobidzhan several times. She delivered lectures about the Jewish Autonomous Region in various countries. In 1937–1938 she worked as a correspondent for a New York newspaper in Spain and gave Yiddish-language radio reports from Madrid. In 1950 she published a memoir entitled A Lebnveg (A Life Path).

Work:

A Life Path. New York, 1950.