Silvia Tennenbaum papers

Silvia Pfeiffer Tennenbaum was born in Frankfurt, Germany, the daughter of Lotti Clara Stern and Erich Pfeiffer-Belli. Her parents divorced in 1930 and in 1934, her mother married William Steinberg, a conductor who would lead several symphonies, including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (1952-1976). The Steinberg family fled Nazi Germany in 1936 and young Silvia spent the next two years living in Basel, Switzerland with her Aunt, Getrude Ritz-Stern. In 1938, reunited with her mother, stepfather and stepbrother, she emigrated to America where the family settled in New Rochelle, New York. Silvia Pfeiffer graduated from New Rochelle High School in 1946; she then attended Barnard College, earning a BA with honors in Art History in 1950. She started graduate school at Columbia University but left in 1951 upon her marriage to Lloyd Tennenbaum, a rabbi. The Tennenbaums lived the next seven years in Lynchburg, Virginia--it was during these years that Silvia Tennenbaum gave birth to three sons and started her writing career. Twenty years later, she would parlay that experience into her first book, Rachel the Rabbi's Wife (1978). After a brief stint in Plainfield, New Jersey, Lloyd Tennenbaum was appointed rabbi to two congregations on Long Island's North Shore and the family settled in Huntington, New York where Silvia Tennenbaum began writing in earnest. In 1981, after thirty years of marriage, the Tennenbaums separated and were divorced in 1986. By then, Silvia Tennenbaum had returned to graduate school at Columbia University and completed her MA in art history in 1983. An avid traveller and prolific diarist, she is also the author of Yesterday's Streets (1981), a fictionalized account of life amongst upper-middle class Jews in Frankfurt, Germany from the start of the twentieth century to the Nazi take-over. In 2012, the city that Silvia Tennenbaum had fled from as a young child to escape the Holocaust decades earlier named Yesterday's Streets as their "Book of the Year."