Hindus was born into one of four Jewish families in Bolshoye Bykovo, a village then part of the Russian Empire, in modern-day
Belarus. His father Jacob Hindus was a
kulak; his mother was Sarah Gendeliovitch, and they had eleven children. When his father died, the family was impoverished. In 1905, Hindus, his mother, and his siblings came to America and settled in
New York City. He worked as an errand boy while attending night classes, and eventually enrolled at
Stuyvesant High School. He answered an employment agency advertisement for a farm laborer in
Upstate New York and, in the Spring of 1908, moved to
North Brookfield in
Madison County, New York, where he worked at various farms over the next three years. He attended high school in North Brookfield for three years and, thereafter, pursued a course in agriculture at
Colgate University, where he earned a degree in literature, with honors, in 1915. After engaging in part-time lecturing on Russia on the Chautauqua circuit in the American Midwest, he furthered his education with a year of graduate study at
Harvard University. During the Second World War, he spent three years in the Soviet Union as a
war correspondent for the
New York Herald Tribune. He also wrote four novels, and travelled to Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine in 1947. In 1957 he married Frances McClernan. On July 8, 1969, Hindus died in New York City at the age of 78, after spending the previous weekend in his beloved North Brookfield. ==Russia and writings==