Eva Kollisch, "who escaped Nazi-occupied Austria when she was a teenager to become an American professor and memoirist who broke new ground in feminist studies and championed equal rights for lesbians," died October 10 at age 98, the New York Times reported. The author of two memoirs, Girl in Movement (2000) and The Ground Under My Feet (2007), Kollisch taught for 30 years at Sarah Lawrence College where, with Gerda Lerner, Joan Kelly and Sherry Ortner, she helped introduce a women's studies curriculum.
Kollisch's memoir The Ground Under My Feet documents, in part, her childhood and her time spent in Nazi-occupied Austria. Born in Vienna, she was raised in a prosperous, secular Jewish family. When she was 13 and the Nazis annexed Austria, she was sent to a boarding school in Vienna for Jewish girls. In 1939, her parents placed her and her brothers on a Kindertransport train. The family was reunited in New York in 1940.
Kollisch's brief marriage in 1942 to Stanley Plastrik, who helped found Dissent magazine, ended in divorce. She later married Gert Berliner, an Abstract Expressionist artist and fellow refugee. They were among the founders and operators of Cafe Rienzi, "a bohemian haunt in a former noodle factory on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village that was frequented by Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac and Richard Wright in the early 1950s," the Times noted.
After her second marriage ended, Kollisch, who had graduated with a bachelor's degree in German literature from Brooklyn College in 1951, earned a master's in German from Columbia University in 1963, the same year she was hired at Sarah Lawrence. While teaching there, she worked closely with her colleague and Greenwich Village neighbor Grace Paley, the writer and social activist.
In 2009, Kollisch married her partner, Naomi Replansky, a poet and labor activist. The Times noted that Kollisch "was unusually candid for the time about gay rights, and about her own sexual orientation. In an interview for the Smith College Voices of Feminism Oral History Project in 2004, she explained that she never felt entirely comfortable revealing her private life but believed she was, in a way, obligated to herself and to the gay and lesbian rights movement." The Ground Under My Feet is available from Hamilton Stone Editions.
