Louis Fischer
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Louis Fischer was a well known Jewish American journalist of the 1950s. He was a contributor to the ex-Communist treatise The God that Failed. He met Mahatma Gandhi and wrote a biography of him, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, on which the Oscar-winning film Gandhi was based. Working as journalist in Stalin's Soviet Union, he and his family eventually had to flee the country.
Louis Fischer's wife, Markoosha Fischer, was Russian. She was also the author of books that included My Lives in Russia, The Nazarovs, The Right to Love and Reunion in Moscow. Their son Vic Fischer was an Alaska state legislator and is still active in Alaska and Russian politics. Their other son, George, was a professor of government at Cornell University.
Louis Fischer, the son of a fish peddler, was born in Philadelphia on 29th February, 1896. After studying at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy (1914 to 1916) he became a school teacher.
In 1917 Fischer joined the Jewish Legion, a military unit in Palestine. On his return to the United States Fischer worked for a news agency in New York. In 1921 Fischer went to Germany and began contributing to the New York Evening Post as a European correspondent. The following year he moved to Moscow and in 1923 began working for The Nation.
While in the Soviet Union Fischer published several books including Oil Imperialism: The International Struggle for Petroleum (1926) and The Soviets in World Affairs (1930). He also covered the Spanish Civil War and for a time was a member of the International Brigade fighting General Francisco Franco.
In 1938 Fischer returned to the United States and settled in New York. He continued to work for The Nation and wrote his autobiography, Men and Politics (1941).
Fischer left The Nation in 1945 after a dispute with the editor, Freda Kirchway, over the journal's sympathetic reporting of Joseph Stalin. His disillusionment with Communism, although he was never a member of the Communist Party, was reflected in his contribution to The God That Failed (1949). Fischer now wrote for anti-Communist liberal magazines such as The Progressive.
Other books by Fischer include The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950) Stalin (1952) and Lenin (1964). Louis Fischer also taught about the Soviet Union at Princeton University until his death on January 15, 1970.
