Eva Kollisch papers

Eva Berliner Kollisch (1925-) is an author and activist. She was born in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of Margaret Moller and Otto Kollisch and escaped with her two younger brothers, Steven and Peter, to England in 1939 via Kindertransport, the organized rescue effort that facilitated the escape to England of some ten-thousand Jewish children from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany. Her parents also escaped and the family was reunited in April, 1940, in New York.

Eva Kollisch graduated from Curtis High School in Staten Island, NY in 1942. That year she joined the Workers Party, a Trotskyist organization that sent its members into factories to radicalize the workers. She abandoned her plans for college and, from 1942 to 1945, worked and organized in sweatshops in New York City and in auto plants in Detroit. During this time she met and married a comrade, Stanley Plastric; she divorced Plastric in 1946, at which time she also left the Workers Party.

In 1948, Kollisch met Gert Berliner, a German Jewish refugee and artist, whom she married and with whom she had one child, Uri Berliner (b. 1956); they divorced in 1959.

Kollisch earned her undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College in 1951, and her M.A. from Columbia University in 1963. She studied in the Ph.D. program at New York University but decided not to complete a dissertation.

Kollisch taught Comparative Literature and German, first at Broooklyn College and, at Sarah Lawrence College for thirty years, during which time she and Gerda Lerner and Joan Kelly created the Women's Studies Program there.

Since the 1960s, Kollisch has been involved in numerous political causes, including the peace movement, anti-war activism, nuclear disarmament, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights. She has written essays and stories for anthologies and magazines, and her book, Girl in Movement, was published in 2000.

She lives in New York City with life-partner, poet Naomi Replansky.