Manya Reiss was born in China to a family of Russian-Jewish origin and then immigrated to the United States in 1912.[2] In the United States, she was a garment worker as well as a communist activist.[3] In 1931, she attended the International Lenin School.[2] After this, she worked for the Eastern Secretariat of the Comintern and was later sent on missions to Germany and France.[2] She returned to the United States in the late 1930s to work for the propaganda department of the Communist Party USA and to teach at a party school.[2] By 1940, she had returned to Moscow.[2]
