Elzbieta Ettinger

Elżbieta Ettinger (September 19, 1924 – March 12, 2005) was a Polish-Jewish writer.

The daughter of Emmanuel Ettinger and Regina Stahl, she was born in Łódź. In 1939, after Hitler invaded Poland, her mother's family - prominent textile manufacturers and philanthropists - moved to Warsaw, believing they would be less visible in the larger city. When the Warsaw Ghetto was created, much of the family moved to a tiny apartment there, while Ettinger's mother Regina remained on the outside, running a black market business and passing as Gentile. In 1942, Ettinger and other family members escaped the ghetto with her mother's help and, using forged identity papers, adopted the name Elżbieta Chodakowska. She worked with the Polish resistance during World War II. In 1946, she received a degree in English and German philology from Jagellonian University and, in 1949, a MA in English philology from Warsaw University. In 1966, she earned a PhD in English and American literature from Warsaw University.

In 1943, she married Gierek, a partisan sympathizer. The couple separated after the war and she had a relationship with university professor Manfred Lachs; they had a daughter.

She worked at various jobs in post-war Poland, including journalism, translation, editing and research. Her career in Poland took a downturn after she refused a permanent post in the country's National Security office, and rising anti-Semitism in Poland eventually sent her into exile. From 1967 to 1974, she was a senior fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. From 1975 to 1996, she was a professor of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; she helped establish the program in writing and humanistic studies there. Ettinger and her daughter later became American citizens. She also taught at the Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts from 1971 to 1973 and at the Harvard Extension School from 1972 to 1973.

Ettinger described her experiences during World War II in her first novel Kindergarten published in 1968. Her second novel Quicksand, published in 1989, described her life in post-war Poland. In 1987, she published a biography Rosa Luxemburg, A Life. In 1995, she published the controversial work, Hannah Arendt-Martin Heidegger about the relationship between the Jewish philosopher and her Nazi mentor.

Ettinger died at home with hospice care in Cambridge at the age of 80, declining to eat and drink after her quality of life plummeted due to spinal stenosis.

Bibliography

• Ettinger, Elżbieta (1997) [1995]. Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-07254-9.
  • Ryan, Alan (11 January 1996). "Dangerous Liaison". The New York Review of Books (Review).
  • Brent, Frances (30 May 2013). "Arendt's Affair". Tablet (Review).