24 Facts About Isaac Deutscher

Isaac Deutscher was a Polish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom before the outbreak of World War II.

Isaac Deutscher is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs.

Isaac Deutscher studied with a Hasidic rebbe and was acclaimed as a prodigy in the study of the Torah and the Talmud.

Isaac Deutscher lived through three pogroms in 1918 that followed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Isaac Deutscher "tested God" by eating non-kosher food at the grave of a tzadik on Yom Kippur.

Isaac Deutscher first attracted notice as a poet, when he began publishing poems in Polish literary periodicals at the age of sixteen.

Isaac Deutscher translated poetry from Hebrew, Latin, German, and Yiddish into Polish.

Isaac Deutscher studied literature, history, and philosophy as an extramural student at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

Isaac Deutscher wrote for the Jewish Nasz Przeglad and for the Marxist Miesiecznik Literacki.

Isaac Deutscher never returned to Poland and never saw any of his family again.

Isaac Deutscher became a British subject in 1949, taking his oath of allegiance on 12 May 1949.

Isaac Deutscher taught himself English and began writing for English magazines.

Isaac Deutscher was a regular correspondent for the leading weekly The Economist.

Isaac Deutscher wrote for The Observer as a roving European correspondent under the pen-name "Peregrine".

Isaac Deutscher published his first major work, Stalin, A Political Biography in 1949.

The Stalin biography made Isaac Deutscher a leading authority on Soviet affairs and the Russian Revolution.

Isaac Deutscher followed it up with his most ambitious work, a three-volume biography of Trotsky: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast.

Isaac Deutscher planned to conclude his series with a study of Lenin, but The Life of Lenin remained incomplete at the time of Isaac Deutscher's death, partly due to a politically motivated denial of a university position to him.

In 1965, Isaac Deutscher took part in the first "Teach-In" on Vietnam at the University of California, Berkeley, where thousands of students listened to his indictment of the Cold War.

Isaac Deutscher coined the expression "non-Jewish Jew", to apply to himself and other humanistic Jews.

Isaac Deutscher admired Elisha ben Abuyah, a Jewish heretic of the 2nd century AD.

Isaac Deutscher managed to save his life; but as he was falling he hit a person standing down below and broke that person's legs and arms.

Isaac Deutscher wrote the following passages in "The Israeli Arab War, June 1967" :.

Isaac Deutscher married Tamara Frimer in Hampstead, London, in June 1947.