Boris Fraenkel

Boris Fraenkel (1921, Free City of Danzig - 23 April 2006, Pont du Garigliano, Paris) was a Communist politician active in French and international politics.

Fraenkel was born to Jewish parents in 1921 in Danzig (then an independent territory, thus allowing him a stateless status) now in northern Poland. He began by fighting for extreme-left Zionism under Hashomer Hatzair, where Marxist ideology mixed with Jewish nationalism. Arriving in France in 1938, to study agriculture at Nancy, he moved to study chemistry and in 1940 joined his mother at Grenoble, where he just missed being raided by the Gestapo. He then fled to Switzerland and was interned in the Gierenbad camp in Zürich, where he met the novelist and philosopher Manès Sperber, the future Racine specialist, Lucien Goldmann, and Aby Wieviorka, a major translator from Yiddish in Paris. Despite the very difficult conditions, he managed to take a course in political economy in the camp and there for the first time in a clandestine cell of a Trotskyite party, joining with Jost von Steiger (nephew of conseiller fédéral Eduard von Steiger, then chef du département de Justice et Police). Expelled from Switzerland in 1949 for participating to a conference on Marxism and Judaism, he was assigned to the French police at Grenoble. He then took several jobs, such as secretary to the painter Sonia Delaunay and as an organiser for CEMEA, where he met his wife Denise Salomon.

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