Karl Radek’s 72-year-old widowed mother, Mrs. Klara Sobelsohn, pressed today a desperate last-minute fight to save her son from an almost certain death sentence before a Soviet military tribunal for an alleged Trotskyist plot.
Radek’s father died when he was a boy and Mrs. Sebelsohn opened a private school. Karl became completely Polonized, adopting the name Radek from a Polish novel, “The Thief,” by Czerosky.
At the age of 16, while still in high school, he delivered his first public address–a challenge to Zionism. Tarnow was a center of the Zionist movement. This address marked him as a talented speaker.
Expelled from the Tarnow High School for his revolutionary views, Radek studied and was graduated from Cracow University. Afterward he went to Switzerland where he began to play an important role among the Russian revolutionaries.
During the World War, Radek entered Russia with Lenin and Trotsky in a sealed train.
Until his recent arrest in Moscow, Radek supported his mother. She lives with a sister in the Galician town. Another sister, married to a hatmaker, lives in Tarnow.
Radek is now 52 years old and has no children. His wife, Larisa Reisnor, a daughter of a Polish professor of agriculture, died several years ago.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
