Joseph North

Career Following graduation, and with an interest in writing and journalism, Jacob Soifer landed a series of cub reporter jobs on Pennsylvania newspapers such as The Chester Times. Throughout much of the 1930s, he was involved with the New Masses magazine. He contributed articles and served on its editorial staff in 1934 and 1935. After a hiatus for the Spanish Civil War, he returned in 1939 as New Masses editor, a position he held until 1948. During his tenure at the magazine, and in his travels and reporting as a foreign correspondent, North came in contact with many notable writers and artists. His 1958 memoir, No Men Are Strangers, describes encounters he had with people such as Theodore Dreiser, Lincoln Steffens, Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Dorothy Parker, Louis Aragon, and Charlie Chaplin. But North's steadfast allegiance to CPUSA doctrine sometimes caused friction with his acquaintances. Howard Fast wrote about North:

In a similar vein, North recounted an incident in the Spanish Civil War when he and Hemingway were holed up together in a room in Madrid during an artillery barrage from a Nazi battery:

Next, Hemingway started shadowboxing around the room. After several minutes, he toweled off his sweat: "I keep trim that way," he laughed, "to fight the commissars. I suppose you stay fit memorizing a chapter of Das Kapital." Despite these barbs, Hemingway wrote a complimentary Foreword to North's 1939 pamphlet, Men in the ranks, the story of 12 Americans in Spain.

In his decades as a Daily Worker columnist, North developed a writing style that mixed humor with serious commentary. For example, during the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, he wrote a piece entitled "That Sprinter, Hitler". It opens with wry remarks about Hitler's hurried exits from the track stadium whenever an African-American athlete such as Jesse Owens won a medal:

For several years starting in the late 1940s, North lectured at the Jefferson School of Social Science,

Personal life and death North married Helen Oken in 1931. During the last four of his sixteen months covering the Spanish Civil War, she was in Spain also, working in the medical service. After the war, they settled in Manhattan and raised three children: Daniel, Susan, and Nora. Like her husband, Helen was active in the CPUSA. On numerous occasions, she had to assume the breadwinner role since Joseph's job as a journalist did not provide enough income to support the family, and he was often abroad on assignments.

Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology. (Contributor and co-editor.) New York: International Publishers, 1935.