Rayna Prohme

Rayna Prohme (1894 - 1927) was a journalist who covered the communist movement in China in the late 1920s.

Biography

She was born Rayna Simons, the daughter of a successful Jewish businessman. She graduated from the University of Illinois in 1917,[1][2] where she befriended Dorothy Day.[3] Day's book, The Long Loneliness, describes their activities reading socialist novellas and joining the Socialist Party of America.[4]

From 1918 to 1922 she was married to Samson Raphaelson, a marriage that ended in divorce.[1] She later met and married William "Bill" Prohme who worked for William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner. They moved to China, where Prohme's sister, Grace Simons was working in China.[5]

In 1926 she started working with Eugene Chen who was publishing the People's Tribune.[6][1] Prohme and the American journalist Milly Bennett edited the People's Tribune in Hankou from 1926 until July 1927.[7] While in China, Prohme was among the people admiring Mikhail Markowitsch Borodin, whom Lenin had sent to China in September 1923.[1] Jointly Prohme and Bennett wrote a speech in which Soong Ching-ling, Sun Yat-sen's wife, resigned from her government position, and then Prohme helped her leave Hankou[7] and make her way to Russia.[3][8] Prohme also met the American screen writer Vincent Sheean in 1926 and he would eventually dedicate his memoir, Personal History, to Prohme whom he called "a marvelously pure flame".[9] Within Personal History, Sheean talks about Prohme's work in China.[10][11] He also talks about his relationship to her in an article published in the Atlantic Monthly.[12]

Anna Louise Strong tried to help Prohme when she became ill;[3] however, Prohme died on November 21, 1927,[13][14] and was cremated in Russia.[15] A book of Prohme's letters about her reporting during the Chinese Revolution was published after her death.[16]

Selected publications
  • Hirson, Baruch; Prohme, Rayna; Knodel, Arthur J. (2007-08-20). Reporting the Chinese Revolution: The Letters of Rayna Prohme. Pluto Press. ISBN 978-0-7453-2642-9.

References
  1. Jacobs, Dan N. (Dan Norman) (1981). Borodin : Stalin's man in China. Internet Archive. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-07910-6.
  2. Taylor, S. J. (1990-03-29). Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 978-0-19-505700-3.
  3. Nies, Judith (2002-10-15). Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-22965-5.
  4. Day, Dorothy (1981). The long loneliness : the autobiography of Dorothy Day. San Francisco: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-061751-9. OCLC 7554814.
  5. French, Paul (2009-05-01). Through the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao. Hong Kong University Press. ISBN 978-962-209-982-1.
  6. Chen, Yuan-tsung (2008). Return to the Middle Kingdom: One Family, Three Revolutionaries, and the Birth of Modern China. Sterling Publishing Company, Inc. ISBN 978-1-4027-5697-9.
  7. King, Marjorie M. (1994). "Review of On Her Own: Journalistic Adventures from San Francisco to the Chinese Revolution, 1917—1927". China Review International. 1 (1): 59–62. ISSN 1069-5834. JSTOR 23728654.
  8. Chang, Jung (1986). Mme Sun Yat-Sen (Soong Ching-ling). Internet Archive. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England ; New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-008455-9.
  9. Pomfret, John (2016-11-29). The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 978-1-4299-4412-0.
  10. Sheean, Vincent (1933). In search of history : the modern gothic. George Allen and Unwin, London.
  11. Hamilton, John Maxwell (2008). "Interpret the World". Columbia Journalism Review. 47 (2) – via EBSCO.
  12. Sheean, Vincent (1935). Finale in Moscow. Vol. 155. The Atlantic Monthly. Atlantic Media, Inc.
  13. "RAYNA PROHME DEAD; DEVOTED TO CHINESE; American Girl Who Gave Her Life to Revolution Breathes Her Last in Moscow". New York Times. November 22, 1927. Retrieved 2022-04-15.
  14. Schwartz, Stephen (1998). From west to east : California and the making of the American mind. Internet Archive. New York : Free Press. ISBN 978-0-684-83134-3.
  15. "Red rites for Mrs. Prohme". The Kansas City Times. 1927-11-25. p. 6. Retrieved 2022-04-15.
  16. Hirson, Baruch; Prohme, Rayna; Knodel, Arthur J. (2007-08-20). Reporting the Chinese Revolution: The Letters of Rayna Prohme. Pluto Press. ISBN 978-0-7453-2642-9.
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Further reading
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