Edith Anderson

Edith Anderson-Schröder (30 November 1915 – 13 April 1999) was a New York-born journalist, writer and translator whose political sympathies favoured Marxism. In 1947 she moved to Berlin, then in the Soviet occupation zone, and between 1949 and 1990 part of the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Berlin was her home base for the rest of her life. Life Edith Handelsman (which was her name at birth) was born in New York City. Her father, Max Handelsman (1885–1964), was a teacher of Jewish provenance who was keen to integrate and troubled that the predominant language inside his own parents' house was Hungarian. Edith's grandparents had immigrated from Austria-Hungary. She grew up in the Bronx (Hoe Avenue), attending the James Monroe Highschool at which her father taught. She went on to study, between 1933 and 1937, at New College, a recently established teacher training college attached to Columbia University, intending to obtain a teaching qualification. Her first short stories and poems appeared in 1933, under her authorship as Edith Handelsman, in the school magazine. In May 1937, increasingly preoccupied with the problem of poverty and involved in left-wing politics more generally, she quit New College without sitting her final exams. During 1938 she developed a consuming interest in marionettes and seriously considered embarking on a career as a puppeteer. In 1939 she married Victor Teich, an official of the US Communist Party and a friend from their school days. This marriage broke down after a short time. Her initial break into journalism, which lasted only for a few months, came unexpectedly in 1942 when her friend Milton Wolff joined the US army and recruited her to succeed him as culture editor with the New York-based "Daily Worker", a communist newspaper. She was never invited to join the editorial team and was paid only 15 dollars a week at a time when the "union minimum" was 27 dollars, but she was able, during her time at the paper, to network with a number of politically like-minded intellectuals. Without relevant experience or sufficient preparation for the work, she was dismissed after some months, instead taking work with the Pennsylvania Railroad company, which was experiencing a serious shortage of male workers: many had joined the army because of the country's entry, at the end of 1941, into the war.