Ettinger, Elżbieta.

Professor, novelist, and biographer, Elżbieta Ettinger was born in Lodz, Poland, on September 19, 1924, to Emmanuel Ettinger and Regina Stahl. She survived the Holocaust in Poland, escaping the Warsaw ghetto and working and living in Poland under the war-time pseudonym Elżbieta Chodakowska. After the war, she was director of the Import Department of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Trade, and she worked as a journalist and interpreter, traveling to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia with the International Commission of Supervision and Control. She earned a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Warsaw University in 1966 and emigrated to the United States the following year with her daughter Maia. From 1967 to 1974 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute. In 1973 she became a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was appointed a full Professor of Rhetoric and Literature from 1986 until her retirement in 1997. She was instrumental in building MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. In addition to her teaching, she was the author of Kindergarten (1968), a semi-autobiographical work about the German war against the Jews; the biography, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (1987); Quicksand (1989), a follow-up novel to Kindergarten; and she published an interpretation of the love letters between Hannah Arendt and her Nazi-affiliated mentor, Martin Heidegger, entitled Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (1994). Ettinger was working on a full-length biography of Arendt when she died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in March 2005.

From the description of Papers of Elżbieta Ettinger, 1922-2001 (inclusive), 1967-2000 (bulk). (Harvard University). WorldCat record id: 426059693

Ettinger was the author of Comrade and Lover (1979), a biography of Rosa Luxemburg.

From the description of Letter, 1981. (Harvard University). WorldCat record id: 232007756