Margolin was born in Pinsk, West Belarus, then in the Russian Empire. He moved to Palestine in 1936. Three years later he was visiting his relatives in Pinsk and was trapped there by the Soviet invasion of Poland. Together with numerous other "socially-dangerous elements", he was rounded up by the NKVD and sent to a labor camp on the northern bank of the Lake Onega. He survived, and was freed in 1945 as a former Polish citizen according to the agreement with Poland. In 1946, he was permitted to return to Poland, from where he moved to Palestine. He immediately started writing A Travel to the Land Ze-Ka, which was finished in 1947, when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn just been sent to the gulag.