Rhea Clyman

Clyman was born in 1904 in Poland. She moved with her Jewish parents, Solomon and Anna Kleiman, to Toronto two years later.[3][4] She was run over by a streetcar while a child and lost part of her leg.[5] Because her father had died, she left school early, working in a factory to help support her family.

As a young woman Clyman worked in New York, and then moved to London.[5] She worked as a researcher for New York Times reporter Walter Duranty,[6] and then took a job as a foreign correspondent for the London Daily Express.[4]

In 1928, at the age of 24, Clyman travelled to the USSR to report on Soviet reforms. However, she was exposed to the realities of the regime. She wrote for many newspapers which included the Toronto Telegram and the London Daily Express.[7][8] She travelled to the far north labour camps and travelled south to Georgia by car with two women from Atlanta. On the way to Georgia, they encountered the starving Ukrainian peasants in Kharkiv. When the women arrived in Tbilisi, Georgia, she was arrested on the charge of reporting false news about the USSR and soon deported.[9]

In 1933-1938 she worked in Nazi Germany, reporting for the London Daily Telegraph.[5] In 1938 she had to leave the country urgently because of growing reprisals against the Jews. The plane in which she was riding crashed while landing in Amsterdam; Clyman was injured, but survived and recovered.[3]

In 1938-1941, she worked in Montreal as a correspondent for London Daily Express,[5] and then moved to New York, where she led a quiet life until her death in 1981.[7][5] She never married or had children.

Rhea Clyman was portrayed by actress Beata Pozniak in a feature film "Mr. Jones" (2019) starring Peter Sarsgaard, James Norton, Vanessa Kirby.