The first time Friman was arrested on December 15, 1935 by the Office of the NKVD in the Odessa region as an active member of the Zionist organization.

Odessites were accused of holding clandestine meetings, illegal communication with Zionist circles abroad, and the dissemination of anti-Soviet literature. Friman was also accused of sending his manuscripts to Palestine and taking part in harboring a representative of the Moscow Zionist center Khanzin, who fled from the investigation to Odessa.

On December 15, 1935, Avraham was sentenced under Article 54-10 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (“anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation”) to three years of exile. As the writer later recalled, the fact that he was arrested two years before the start of the "Great Terror", to some extent, saved him.

Shortly before Friman's first arrest in December 1935, Abraham Kariv, who worked in the Palestinian Jewish press, prepared for publication the second part of Friman's novel “1919”, which he published at the Tel Aviv publishing house Stibel with his own preface. The publication was very well received by Jewish literary circles, and the writer was awarded the Bialik Literary Prize for 1935, the most prestigious literary award in Eretz Israel.

The writer served his exile in the city of Kamyshlov, Sverdlovsk region. When the case was already moving towards release, he was arrested a second time. The Kamyshlovsky district department of the NKVD learned that the administratively exiled writer continued to maintain contact with the “Zionist circles of Palestine” – Friman's friends and colleagues who managed to leave the Soviet Union.

Friends did not forget the writer and supported him in every possible way, including financially: sometimes they sent money orders and parcels. But most importantly – they supported morally – with letters from Eretz Israel, in which they included clippings from Hebrew-language newspapers. This turned out to be quite enough for a new term.

The investigation lasted a long time. Friman, who was arrested again in March 1938, received three more years in the camps, but the investigation dragged on for so long that it was only over two years later, on June 11, 1940. During the Great Patriotic War, the writer lived in the same Kamyshlov, where, after serving his sentence, he worked as the head of the base of the Soyuzutil procurement office.
In 1945, the former political prisoner was allowed to return to Ukraine. Friman decided to get closer to his survived sister, who lived in the resort town of Osipenko (now Berdyansk).

In Osipenko, the Jewish intellectual first had to work at a fish base, then as a storekeeper. Problems with employment pursued the writer until the end of his days: on the one hand, it was psychologically difficult for the Bialik Prize winner to do anything other than literature, on the other hand, with two convictions it was difficult to get even the simplest job.

Over time, in Osipenko, the writer acquired like-minded people from among the local Jewish intelligentsia. Not all friends shared Avraham’s views on Zionism, but they all agreed that the Soviet Union was not the country which it initially claimed to be.

However, Friman had another category of communication, perhaps even more numerous – professional provocateurs: secret informants and MGB agents. An extremely intimidated man, with undermined health and psyche, Friman was terribly afraid of falling into the hands of a bloody regime again. And the system, tuned in to the constant control of former political prisoners, followed on his heels. It was impossible to hide. Moreover, they used unmistakably selected tools: Jews, writers and former prisoners were sent to the Jewish writer, former prisoner Friman.

Already at the end of July 1949 Avraham Friman was actively spied on by the MGB agent “Zarnitsky” (Zalkind). On the instructions of the MGB, the former "specialist" on convicted Trotskyists began to scour the city in search of the Jewish underground. Having got acquainted with a religious Jew, watchmaker Gedalia Rosenfeld, “Zarnitsky” noticed that an elderly Jew sometimes stopped by to talk to the old watchmaker. It turned out to be Avraham Friman, to whom the agent very soon infiltrated his confidence, pretending to help an unemployed fellow tribesman, as repressed as he is. He actually got Avraham Friman into the Office of Normalized Works No. 113, where he himself was listed in the supply department; the victim was imbued with gratitude and almost boundless confidence in the provocateur.

According to the denunciation by “Zarnitsky” and another agent, “Borisov”, on Avraham Friman and his friend, photographer Moisey Podva, on February 21, 1951, local department of the MGB opened an agent case. Agents reported that Friman and Podva were conducting nationalist propaganda among the residents of the city. The accusations were standard: Friman and Podva slander that Jews are being infringed upon in the USSR and are furiously agitating for leaving for Israel, and in every way they praise life in the capitalist West.

The unsuspecting Friman was happy to tell his “colleague” from the MGB about his literary work in the 1920s and 1930s, and shared a retelling of the speech of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion heard at the Rosh Hashanah holiday.

Zalkind characterized the Jewish writer Friman as a malicious anti-Soviet who criticized absolutely all aspects of Soviet life: he called the elections to the Supreme Soviet nothing more than a comedy, and characterized the authorities' policy towards Jews as anti-Semitic.

To assist on this case of Avraham Friman, agent “Yanovsky” (Yasin) arrived in Osipenko on July 23, 1952. Having met Yasin and seeing in him a well-read man, Friman inadvertently told him that he had never stopped working in the field of Hebrew-language literature. With him, he began to criticize Soviet policy towards Jewish culture.

After the TASS report on January 13, 1953 about the arrest in Moscow of “killer doctors”, Friman did not find a place for himself. He was especially frightened by the accusation of doctors in collaboration with the organization “Joint”, with which he himself once worked in the early 1920s. Meeting in the city with acquaintances, the writer carefully looked around, and sometimes – tried to get away from the “outside observation” that he kept seeing in every passer-by.

When Stalin died, Avraham exclaimed: “I am happy that I have lived up to the moment when I can come and spit on his grave!” The writer had no idea that just on March 5, 1953, the Deputy Minister of State Security of the Ukrainian SSR Brovkin sent a letter to Osipenko with an order to arrest Friman and confiscate all the literature he had. It was proposed to arrange the arrest through the Ministry of Internal Affairs: the police were supposed to search the house of Friman and his sister for a far-fetched reason, and there – “accidentally” – stumble upon anti-Soviet literature. All this was done in order to avoid decryption of the KGB agents. To divert his eyes, the main agent working on the case, Alexander Zalkind, was ordered to organize an imitation of a search.

However, on May 21, 1953, a retreat came from Moscow: the 4th Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs demanded to postpone the arrest and organize a more thorough development of the Osipenko Zionist and his entourage.

In September 1953, a Jewish writer and literary critic from Chernivtsi, who was also an agent of the Ministry of Internal Affairs “Kant”, was sent to help. “Kant”, aka the Jewish writer Grigory Bloshtein, a former correspondent of the Jewish newspaper “Einikite”, has proven himself well in working against the Zionist underground in Western Ukraine.

Sitting in a compartment with an unsuspecting Zalkind, returning from Zaporozhye to Osipenko, Bloshtein, also not warned that he was dealing with a colleague, had to introduce himself as a Jewish writer who travels to Azov in search of materials for his poem. The security officers were going to kill two birds with one stone: to check “Zarnitsky” and “Kant” for professional suitability, and also to ensure the secrecy of the operation.

As planned, Zalkind introduced his friend Friman to a writer who had come to the coast of the Azov Sea from Chernivtsi. Bloshtein had several tasks, but the main one was to get the drafts of Friman's works, supposedly to be sent through reliable people to Israel. Also, by sending Friman's poem to Israel, the KGB thought to find the Zionist channels in Chernivtsi and subsequently use them to their advantage.

In October 1953, in his letter to Grigory Bloshtein, Friman excitedly promised to send him a copy of his poem as soon as possible. The writer hoped to send his manuscripts through Kant without indicating his own address. But he didn't have time.

In early December 1953, in a Zaporozhye hospital, Avraham Friman Friman died. His sister decided at all costs to publish her brother's archive. The special services learned that Alexandra Friman planned to send the manuscripts to Israel from Moscow, while on vacation with relatives. To intercept the manuscript, Zalkind was again sent to her, who promised to arrange the transfer of materials through Grigory Bloshtein.

On August 24, 1954, 25 pages, written from right to left in intricate Hebrew letters, ended up in the hands of the special services. Most likely, the Chekists received from the agent a copy of the poem “Hymn to Mother”, which was copied by the writer's sister by hand. Friman's sister had to be informed by the agent that the papers had reached Israel safely.

After the confiscation of the copy obtained by Bloshtein, they came to Alexandra Friman with a search and took away the chest belonging to the writer, in which he kept his notes and books. The fate of the fourth part of the novel “1919” and other drafts of the writer is still unknown. The first three parts of the novel were published under one cover in 1968 in Israel with an afterword by I. Slutsky; the novel is considered a classic story about the life and struggle of the inhabitants of the Ukrainian shtetl during the Civil War.

Avraham Friman could not fully reveal his talent due to the difficult vicissitudes of fate, but he had the great honor of becoming the last defender of Jewish national literature in a country where even just learning his native language – Hebrew – could be sentenced. Like the last defender of Masada, Avraham Friman fought to the end for the right to be called a Jew and a man.