John A. Yaron

Иван Александрович ЯРОН (1903–1971). Русский текст внизу страницы ⬇

Born on 23 January 1903 in Revel (Tallinn), Estonia; died on 19 October 1971 in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

Older son of the architect Alexander J. Yaron and Kazimira Yarkovskaya. His mother died in 1906, and Ivan (John) Yaron was brought up by his father and stepmother Elena. Soon after the 1917 revolution, he joined the Estonian independence movement and fought as a volunteer in the White Army at the north-western front. He trained as an architect first in Petri-Realschule in Tallinn and then at the American correspondence school in Shanghai, in 1925–1928, which he quit before graduating. 

In autumn 1924 John A. Yaron started working with his father A. J. Yaron, first at Lafuente & Yaron, and then at A. J. Yaron architecture studio. In 1932–1935, he represented his father’s firm in Nanking, where the construction of the Ministry of Communications was ongoing.

After his father’s death in 1935, Yaron moved extensively around China. Between 1936 and 1947, he spent one year in Nanking as an assistant architect and one year in Hankow, as a technical consultant and super-intendant of building and construction. He spent several years in Chungking, Tsunyi and provincial towns around Chungking, drawing fortifications for military textbooks at the Chinese General Staff College. In 1942–1943 he was in Chungking, working in film distribution. 

After the Sino-Japanese War, Yaron worked as a cartographer in Chungking’s USMA (US Military Academy?). Having returned to Nanking, he spent two years as a building custodian and engineer, simultaneously working as an architect for USNA (?). In 1950, he traveled to Canton and Tsinan to supervise film distribution for Sovetexoprtfilm. In 1952, he settled in Shanghai for five years, teaching English, Russian and German. By some accounts, he participated in the construction of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Palace (1955), on Yan’an Road (Source).

Yaron had two sisters – Elena and Marina, stepsister Olga and stepbrother Alexander A. Yaron (artist and designer; link). He married Varvara Nikolaevna Tchaikovskaya, from Harbin, on September 19, 1930, and got divorced in 1934. In 1938, while in Hankow, he married Tamara Borisovna Yaron (née Gebel) from Saint Petersburg; their son Nikolai was born in 1947 in Nanking. Yaron held an Estonian passport until 1938 and then became a Soviet citizen. In 1957, the family left China and moved via Hong Kong to Brazil.