Henryk Grossman was born to Jewish parents in 1881 in what is now Krakow, Poland. (1) The Austrian-Hungarian Empire ruled Krakow at the time. As a high school student, he became politically active and joined the Social Democratic Party of Galicia. The Social Democratic Party of Galicia was dominated by followers of Józef Piłsudski (1867-1935), the future nationalist dictator of Poland. Galicia is a geographic region spanning what is now southeastern Poland and western Ukraine. It is not the community in Spain of the same name.
In 1905, Grossman was part of a split of Jewish workers from the Social Democratic Party of Galicia, which formed the Jewish Socialist Party of Galicia.
After the Russian Revolution, he joined the newly formed Polish Communist Party, which sought to unite both the Polish and Jewish workers of Poland in a united revolutionary party of the working class.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 