Karen Gershon

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Karen Gershon , born in Käthe Loewenthal (born August 29, 1923 in Bielefeld , † March 24, 1993 in London ), was a German-British writer.

Biographical

Karen Gershon was born in Bielefeld in 1923 as the youngest child of the architect Paul Loewenthal and his wife Selma. She had two older sisters, Anne (born 1921) and Lise (born 1922). Käthe grew up in an upper middle-class Jewish family that was firmly rooted in Bielefeld's Jewish community. The Loewenthals became increasingly impoverished with the beginning of the National Socialist dictatorship in 1933. The father, who had been able to secure a relative prosperity for the family through his work, no longer received any orders and now had to secure their livelihood with casual work. The increasing discrimination and hostility was followed by further marginalization. So in 1936 Käthe had to leave the Sarepta School of the Von Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten and switch to the Luisenschule - still on Paulusstrasse today. In the school year 1937/38 she visited the Jewish country school home in Herrlingen near Ulm . A big turning point in her life took place in 1938. Together with her sister Lise, she was taken to Great Britain on the Kindertransport . Her parents and Anne stayed in Bielefeld and were deported to Riga in 1941 and perished under unknown circumstances. It is believed that Selma was murdered in Auschwitz and Paul died of a stroke in Riga. Their daughter Anne was able to follow Lise and Käthe, but died in Bristol in 1942 . First, Käthe, who later took Karen as her first name and the Jewish name of her father Gershon (German: A stranger in a foreign country ) as her surname , went to a training camp in Scotland, where she was prepared for emigration to Palestine . Since she had reached the maximum age for living there, Lise went there shortly after arrival, got married and moved with her husband to Rome after the end of the war , where she died in 2003. Karen also married after having worked as a housemaid after the training camps were closed, but stayed in England and divorced early. In 1948 she married an art teacher, with whom she had four children. The family lived in Israel from 1968 to 1973, but did not feel at home there. The author died on March 24th in London and was buried at the side of her sister Anne in Bristol.

Literary work

Tiled house in Bielefeld

Gershon published in the Jüdische Rundschau as a teenager , which made Stefan Zweig's attention and sent her a motivating letter. It was not until 1959 that she again attracted attention as a writer through her contribution to the volume of poetry The Relentless Year . Six volumes of poetry and some novels followed. In 1992, like all of her works, her autobiography was published in English with the title A Lesser Child in German ( Das Unterkind ). The title of this book reflects the main theme of their work, namely the feeling of subordination to family history. Committed to the memory of this, she felt guilty for surviving. She wanted to keep the memory of her parents alive through her work. The loss of homeland and being outcast increased this urge and also made the hometown an issue, especially since it never found a new "home" in England or Israel. For example, this becomes clear in her poem Wilhelms Harms' House . This building, today's tiled house , was built by her father. She found her first of three visits to Bielefeld liberating and in parts a "recovery", probably also because her father's name was put back on this house after it was removed in National Socialist Germany.

Works (selection)

Poetry

  • The Relentless Year New Poets 1959, Eyre & Spottiswoode 1960
  • My Daughters, My Sisters Gollancz 1975

Non-fiction

  • Ed .: We Came As Children London, Gollancz 1966, republished Macmillan, Papermac 1989 (Eng. We came as children, 1988)
  • Postscript: A Collective Account of the Lives of Jews in West Germany Since the Second World War Gollancz 1969
  • A Lesser Child (Autobiography, Vol.1) Peter Owen 1993 (Eng. The Child)

fiction

  • Burn Helen Harvester Press 1980
  • The Bread Of Exile Gollancz 1985
  • The Fifth Generation Gollancz 1987

literature

  • Gershon, Karen , in: Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 369

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Huppert, Shmuel: "Karen Gershon." in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women's Archive, March 1, 2009, accessed January 20, 2016 .
  2. ↑ Blaicher, Ria: She loved Bielefeld still in exile - Karen Gershons Thirty Poems on Jewish themes. In: Der Minden-Ravensberger, 73rd year 2001, p. 51ff
  3. ↑ a b c d Wambach, Susanne: Strangers in a foreign land. The poet Karen Gershon / Käthe Loewenthal (1923–1993). In: Sunderbrink, Bärbel: Women in Bielefeld History. Publishing house for regional history. Bielefeld 2010, p. 367ff. ISBN 978-3-89534-795-5
  4. ↑ a b c d Karen Gershon (Käthe Loewenthal) 1923-1993. Jewish writers in Westphalia, accessed on January 21, 2016 .
  5. ^ Lise Loewenthal-Montecorboli 1922 - 2003. Jewish writers in Westphalia, accessed on January 22, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Gershon, Karen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Loewenthal, Käthe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-British writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 29, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Bielefeld
DATE OF DEATH March 24, 1993
Place of death London