Novelist, professor of literature, author of a biographer, member of the resistance movement during World War II.
She was born on September 19, 1925, in Łódź, the daughter of Emmanuel Ettinger and Regina Stahl. In 1939, she was placed with her family in the Warsaw Ghetto, from which she managed to escape with her mother in 1942, shortly before the Grossaktion. From the moment she crossed over to the "Aryan" side, she used false documents under the name of Elżbieta Chodakowska and was active in the resistance movement. In 1943, she married a partisan known by the pseudonym Gierek. She described her wartime experiences in the novel "Kindergarten" (1968), and the realities of life in communist Poland in "Quickstand" (1989).
In 1946, she graduated from the Faculty of English at the Jagiellonian University, and then completed her master's degree in English studies at the University of Warsaw in 1949. She began working at the Ministry of Foreign Trade, from where she traveled on business to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. In 1962, she gave birth to her daughter, Maja, and in 1966, she defended her doctorate in English and American literature at the University of Warsaw.
Faced with a career stall due to her rejection of a permanent position in the Security Service and growing anti-Semitic sentiment in Poland, she emigrated with her mother and daughter to the United States in 1967. There, she took up a position as a Senior Fellow at Radcliffe College, Harvard University. From 1975 to 1996, she was a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she initiated the establishment of the Institute of Literature and Humane Studies, introducing the work of writers such as I.B. Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Elizabeth Bishop. In 1987, her biography of Rosa Luxemburg was published, followed in 1994 by a controversial book about the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Elizabeth Ettinger died on March 12, 2005, of a heart attack in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
