ETTINGER, Elzbieta 1925–2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born September 19, 1925, in Warsaw, Poland; died of heart failure March 12, 2005, in Cambridge, MA. Educator and author. A survivor of the Holocaust, Ettinger became a writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a respected novelist and biographer. After the Nazis invaded Poland, Ettinger escaped the Warsaw ghetto and fought with the resistance under the assumed identity of a Catholic Pole named Elzbieta Chodakowska. With the war over, Poland became a communist satellite of the Soviet Union, and although Ettinger believed in socialism, she criticized the new government's authoritarianism and found herself blacklisted. After earning a doctorate in American literature from the University of Warsaw, she immigrated to the United States. She worked for a time for the Radcliffe Institute (now the Bunting Institute) during the early 1970s as a senior fellow before joining the MIT faculty in 1975. Gaining a reputation as a demanding teacher, she also became known for her criticism of what she saw as the materialism and anti-intellectual culture of her adopted nation. Named Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric and Literature, she remained at MIT until her retirement in 1996. Ettinger published several books over the years, including the novels Kindergarten (1968) and Quicksand (1989), both of which are set in Poland; the biography Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (1987); and the nonfiction Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (1995). At the time of her death, the author was working on a biography of Arendt.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Boston Globe, March 26, 2005.

Boston Herald, April 5, 2005, p. 29.

ONLINE

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Web site, http://web.mit.edu/ (March 15, 2005).