Twice Taken

Twice Taken tells the story of Kim Kun-hoo (1904/5-?), a Korean man whose life followed the fault lines of Japanese imperialism, Stalin's Great Purge, and the Korean War. Born in Korea on the eve of Japanese annexation, he followed his father into exile in China, studied mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines and Columbia University, then worked as a foreign expert in Soviet gold mines, until Stalin's Great Purge sent him to the gulag for nearly five years. Released to wartime China, he returned to liberated Korea, helped lead the Korean Tungsten Company, and was abducted by the North Korean People's Army at the outbreak of the Korean War, never to be seen again. His daughter, born months later, never met him.

Drawing on archives in Kazakhstan, Russia, and the United States, the author's family memoirs, and decades of scholarly research, this volume reconstructs a life that crossed four countries, four languages, and four political systems, lived under four different names. It includes the original handwritten memoir Kim Kun-hoo wrote after his release and sent to an American friend, now held at Harvard's Yenching Library. It is at once a personal biography, an indictment of the regimes that twice "took" him, and a window into modern Korean history from the colonial period through the early Cold War.

Edited by Kim Jea-won - his daughter, a Munich-trained art historian, and former Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Incheon Catholic University - and Lee Soong Hee, Professor Emeritus at Korea National Defence University, with an introduction by Hiroaki Kuromiya (Indiana University) and contributions from leading Korean and international scholars.