His parents, Eugène Pierre and Christine (née Ambach) had immigrated to the United States from the Rhine borderland area between France and Germany several years earlier.
In 1897 the family later returned to Forbach in Elsass-Lothringen (today in French Lorraine), where Jolas grew up, and which had become part of Germany in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War.
[1] In 1909, he moved on his own to New York City, where he learned English while attending DeWitt Clinton Evening High School and earning a modest living as a deliverer.
His work in that capacity allowed him to meet many of the famous and emerging writers of Paris, both French and expatriates alike.
He was later named editor in chief of the Deutsche Allgemeine Nachrichten-Agentur (DANA, later renamed DENA), an organization established to teach American-style journalism as a means for replacing the Nazis' propaganda apparatus.