Medem, Vladimir Davidovich

Born in the family of a Jewish military doctor. At birth, he was baptized into Orthodoxy , later his family became Lutheran . In 1898 he entered the Kiev University . In 1899, he was expelled from the university for participating in a student strike, was arrested and deported to Minsk under police supervision. There, in the spring of 1900, he joined the Bund and began writing articles in publications of the Bund.

In 1901 he was arrested in Minsk, was released on bail and fled abroad. He studied at the University of Bern and was engaged in propaganda in the circles of students - immigrants from Russia. In 1903 he was co-opted into the Foreign Committee of the Bund ( Geneva ); In the same year, he represented the Bund at the II Congress of the RSDLP , which he left with other delegates from the Bund because of the rejection of the requirement of a federal party building principle.

In 1905-1908, returning to Russia, Medem was one of the leading employees and editors of the Bund publications Nashe Slovo, Our Tribune, Latest News, Di Folkstsaytung, Di Hofenung, Der Morgenshtern and others. The main literary pseudonyms of Medem are Mark, M. Vinitsky, G. Raf, Ben Dovid.

At the 7th congress of Bund (1906, Leipzig ), Medem was elected to the Central Committee, and in 1907 he participated in the 5th congress of the RSDLP and was a member of the presidium.

In the early 1910s. Medem has published a lot in Russian (“ European Herald ”, “Day”), Russian-Jewish (“Jewish World”, “Jewish Review”) and German (“Neue Tsit”) print media.

In 1912, while living in Vienna , Medem edited the Warsaw weekly Bund's Lebsfragen (which was closed after the second issue), for which he was arrested in Kovno in 1913 and in May 1915 was sentenced to four years hard labor . However, due to illness, Medem was not sent to penal servitude and was released from the prison hospital in Warsaw in August 1915 by German troops who had occupied Warsaw .

In 1915-1920 Medem was one of the leaders of the Bund in Poland and headed the Jewish secular school education there. He was the initiator of the petition, which gathered more than sixty thousand signatures to the German occupation authorities on the recognition of Yiddish as the official language of the Jews and on schools teaching in Yiddish.

In 1919-1920 in the Bund (in particular, in its Polish Committee) pro-communist tendencies prevailed, but Medem was very negative about Bolshevism and turned out to be in isolation.

In early 1921, Medem emigrated to the United States , where he collaborated in the New York newspaper "Forverts" and other publications in Yiddish. He died of jade in 43 years.

He wrote the memoirs “Zikhroynes un articulated” (“Memoirs and articles”, 1917; in the Russian translation, “In the Tsar's prisons ...”, L., 1924) and “Fun mein lebn” (“From my life”, 1-2 tt., 1923).

In 2015, a Russian translation of his memoirs was published ^[1] .

Many Jewish cultural, educational and charitable organizations and institutions in Poland in the 1920s-30s. bore the name Medem.

• Medem Vladimir - article from the Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia
• Biography on the site sem40.ru (not available link) Checked March 17, 2017.
• Medem V. From my life (excerpt)
• Tell granddaughters of the legendary Medem