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Arthur Koestler (an Jews ). Koestler's Magnum Opus , the novel '' Darkness At Noon '' about the Soviet 1930s Purges , ranks with George Orwell 's '' Nineteen Eighty-Four '' as a fictional treatment of Stalinism . He also wrote '' Encyclopædia Britannica '' articles. LIFE He was born Kösztler Artúr ( Hungarian Name s have the Surname first) in Budapest , Austria-Hungary , to a German-speaking Hungarian family of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. His father, Henrik, was a prosperous start-up Industrialist and Inventor . His great business success was a "health" soap, which substituted conventional soaps based on animal fats (scarce during the WWI). Henrik's mineral soaps were thought to have health qualities thanks to their weak radioactivity, which in those times was considered curative. When Artur was 14, his family moved to Vienna . It was at this age which he had a "mystical experience", which perhaps gave rise to his later interest in the paranormal {Link without Title} Koestler studied science and Psychology at the University Of Vienna , where he became President of a Zionist student fraternity. A month before he was due to finish his studies, he burnt his matriculation book and did not take his final examinations but made " Aliyah " to Israel (then a British Mandate). From 1926 to 1929 he lived in the British Mandate Of Palestine , firstly in a '' Kibbutz '' in the Jezreel Valley ("Heftzibah"), and later in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where he almost starved. He left Palestine for Paris as a correspondent to the Ullstein group of German newspapers. A year later he became science editor for Ullstein based in Berlin; a highlight of that post was membership in a 1931 Zeppelin expedition to the North Pole . He joined the Communist Party Of Germany in 1931, but left it after the Stalinist show-trials of 1938. During this period he traveled extensively in the Soviet Union and climbed Mount Ararat in Turkey . In Turkmenistan , he met the Black American writer Langston Hughes . |
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