Hélène Parmelin (1915–1998)

Hélène Parmelin, née Jungelson, was born to a family of Russian Jewish émigrés in Nancy, France. Her parents were Véra Halfin, a left-wing lawyer, and Arcady Jungelson, a revolutionary and agronomist, who had fled separately from Tsarist Russia after the failure of the 1905 revolution. Her older sister Olga Wormser became a noted historian. Hélène earned her baccalauréat and married Serge Parmelin, with whom she lived in French Indochina for more than two years. The couple divorced on her return to France. After Nazi Germany invaded France in World War II, she supported the Resistance and joined the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français or PCF) in 1944. She worked for the party's daily newspaper L'Humanité, and became a foreign correspondent after the liberation of France. In 1950, she married painter Édouard Pignon, with whom she had a son. Through her husband, she met many other artists, including Pablo Picasso, who became a close friend of the couple. From the Soviet invasion of of Hungary in 1956 and the suppression of the popular uprising there, Hélène Parmelin began to distance herself from Communism. With Pignon, Victor Leduc, Paul Tillard, Anatole Kopp, and Marc Saint-Saëns, she published under pseudonyms and with the financial assistance of Picasso, a few issues in 1956 and 1957 of the monthly magazine The Spark (in reference to Lenin's journal Iskra). She and Pignon left the PCF for good in 1980. In addition to her journalism, Parmelin wrote volumes of political essays, some 10 novels, and numerous books about art and artists. Her 1951 novel La montée du mur was awarded the Prix Fénéon.