Born Eva Maria Kollisch on August 17, 1925, in Vienna, she was the daughter of the poet, journalist and translator Margarete Kollisch and the architect Otto Kollisch. She grew up in a secular Jewish family, and in 1939, after Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany, her parents put her and her two brothers on a Kindertransport. The children were reunited with their parents in New York in 1940, and the family settled on Staten Island.
As a young woman she joined the Trotskyist Workers Party, worked on an assembly line in Detroit and organized for the movement, then left it, disillusioned by its bureaucracy and its male-dominated leadership. She earned a bachelor’s degree in German literature from Brooklyn College in 1951. With her husband, Gert Berliner, an abstract expressionist painter and fellow refugee, she helped found Cafe Rienzi, a Greenwich Village coffee house frequented by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin and Richard Wright. The couple moved to New Mexico, where their son was born, and separated in 1959 after returning to New York.
Kollisch earned a master’s degree in German from Columbia University in 1963, the year she began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College. Over three decades there she taught German, comparative literature and women’s studies, and with Gerda Lerner, Joan Kelly and Sherry Ortner she helped design a women’s studies curriculum that became the basis of a pioneering graduate program in feminist studies. She was arrested twice in protests against the Vietnam War.
She was openly lesbian at a time when that was rare in academia. In a 2004 interview for the Smith College Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, she said that speaking publicly about her sexual orientation was a matter of survival and self-respect. In 2009 she married the poet and labor activist Naomi Replansky, with whom she had lived on the Upper West Side for nearly 40 years. The two received the Clara Lemlich Award for social activism from LaborArts in 2016. Replansky died in January 2023.
Kollisch received Austria’s Theodor Kramer Prize for writing in resistance and exile in 2012. In later life she helped start the Older Women’s Network, which met for more than 20 years at the Westbeth Artists Housing complex in Greenwich Village.
Girl In Movement (2000) recounts her youth, her escape from Nazi-occupied Austria on the Kindertransport, and her years as a young radical in the Trotskyist Workers Party, with tender reflections on the women friends and companions of that era.
The Ground Under My Feet, published by Hamilton Stone Editions, collects autobiographical essays and memoirs on her childhood in a secular Jewish family fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria, her early radical political life, her evolution as a feminist academic, and her adult identity and long-term partnerships as a lesbian.
Complete Bibliography
Memoirs: Girl in Movement (2000), The Ground Under My Feet
Kollisch died of a chest infection on October 10, 2023, at her home in Manhattan. She was 98. She is survived by her son, Uri Berliner, and a grandson.
Eva Kollisch, the Vienna-born professor, activist and memoirist who wrote Girl In Movement and The Ground Under My Feet, died on October 10, 2023.
Born Eva Maria Kollisch on August 17, 1925, in Vienna, she was the daughter of the poet, journalist and translator Margarete Kollisch and the architect Otto Kollisch. She grew up in a secular Jewish family, and in 1939, after Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany, her parents put her and her two brothers on a Kindertransport. The children were reunited with their parents in New York in 1940, and the family settled on Staten Island.
As a young woman she joined the Trotskyist Workers Party, worked on an assembly line in Detroit and organized for the movement, then left it, disillusioned by its bureaucracy and its male-dominated leadership. She earned a bachelor’s degree in German literature from Brooklyn College in 1951. With her husband, Gert Berliner, an abstract expressionist painter and fellow refugee, she helped found Cafe Rienzi, a Greenwich Village coffee house frequented by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin and Richard Wright. The couple moved to New Mexico, where their son was born, and separated in 1959 after returning to New York.
Kollisch earned a master’s degree in German from Columbia University in 1963, the year she began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College. Over three decades there she taught German, comparative literature and women’s studies, and with Gerda Lerner, Joan Kelly and Sherry Ortner she helped design a women’s studies curriculum that became the basis of a pioneering graduate program in feminist studies. She was arrested twice in protests against the Vietnam War.
She was openly lesbian at a time when that was rare in academia. In a 2004 interview for the Smith College Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, she said that speaking publicly about her sexual orientation was a matter of survival and self-respect. In 2009 she married the poet and labor activist Naomi Replansky, with whom she had lived on the Upper West Side for nearly 40 years. The two received the Clara Lemlich Award for social activism from LaborArts in 2016. Replansky died in January 2023.
Kollisch received Austria’s Theodor Kramer Prize for writing in resistance and exile in 2012. In later life she helped start the Older Women’s Network, which met for more than 20 years at the Westbeth Artists Housing complex in Greenwich Village.
Girl In Movement (2000) recounts her youth, her escape from Nazi-occupied Austria on the Kindertransport, and her years as a young radical in the Trotskyist Workers Party, with tender reflections on the women friends and companions of that era.
The Ground Under My Feet, published by Hamilton Stone Editions, collects autobiographical essays and memoirs on her childhood in a secular Jewish family fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria, her early radical political life, her evolution as a feminist academic, and her adult identity and long-term partnerships as a lesbian.
Complete Bibliography
Memoirs: Girl in Movement (2000), The Ground Under My Feet
Kollisch died of a chest infection on October 10, 2023, at her home in Manhattan. She was 98. She is survived by her son, Uri Berliner, and a grandson.