Goldsborough

Stefan Heym (1913-2001) was born Helmet Flieg to a Jewish family in Germany. He fled in the 1930s to Czechoslovakia and later to America. In 1936, he completed a degree at the University of Chicago. As a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, and a socialist, he became a naturalized American citizen and even served as an American soldier in the liberation of Europe. An active writer, he was requested to do site visits with coal miners in Western Pennsylvania during a strike and led to Goldsborough's first drafts. McCarthyism, however, drove him to East Germany where he finished the book in 1952. Heym renounced his American citizenship and lived the rest of his life in East Germany.