Leon Zolotkof (1866-1938), born in Vilna, Lithuania, was a poet, writer, and lawyer, In Vilna, he received his Jewish education and afterward attended a Russian senior high school. From late 1883 until the autumn of 1885, he lived in Paris where he was an early auditor at the Sorbonne and at the same time was engaged in a variety of trades, for a time as well working in a publishing house. In those years, he began to write poetry in Russian and Hebrew. He debuted in print with “A Letter from Paris,” in which he described the sad condition of Jewish immigrants in Paris and the work of Alliance Israélite, for the Russian monthly Evreiskoe obozrenie (Jewish review) in St. Petersburg (March 1884)—in which he also published under such pen names as L. Zolotkovich and Ben-Zev. At the beginning of 1886, he returned to Russia, worked for a time on the editorial board of Hayom (Today) in St. Petersburg (writing under the pen name “Zaken gadol” or big elder), and then late that year again left Russia and headed for London, where he purchased the small publishing house from which he produced Der arbayter fraynd (The workers’ friend), became a friend of B. Feygenboym who enlisted him in the Jewish labor movement, and together with Feygenboym wrote Di sotsyalistishe hagode shel peysekh (The socialist Passover Hagada) (London: Berner Street Club, 1888). That same year he emigrated to the United States and settled in Chicago. He was at first active in the Jewish socialist movement and was well-known as a political speaker and lecturer. After graduating from university with a doctoral degree, he practiced as a lawyer and also assumed the post of prosecutor, simultaneously turning his attention to writing, and with his friend and fellow townsman Perets Vyernik, he began to publish various periodicals in Hebrew and Yiddish. He was one of the pioneers in the Yiddish (mainly, conservative) press in America. In 1911 he moved to New York, was active in the Labor Zionist party, later moved over to general Zionism, and was one of the founders of the organ Knights of Zion in Chicago in 1898.