Top: Activist and pioneering women’s studies professor Eva Kollisch (b. 1925) and her lif
Top: Activist and pioneering women’s studies professor Eva Kollisch (b. 1925) and her life partner of nearly thirty years, poet Naomi Replansky (b. 1918), at the Sixth Annual Clara Lemlich Awards (2016).Middle: Eva Kollisch in 1940 (left, reprinted from A Woman Like That, Larkin, 1999) and Naomi Replansky in 1941 (right).Bottom: Kollisch and Replansky in their home (Bengiveno, 2015) and at the Poetry Society of America Awards (2013).“I met Naomi at a reading of Grace Paley … I noticed this very, to my mind, beautiful and interesting-looking woman who was sitting there reading a book … We talked and very quickly she realized my accent and she could see that I was a German Jew, I mean, Austrian Jewish refugee, and she told me that she had done a lot of work translating poetry from the German and from the French. I told her I was teaching German and she said, ‘Oh, perhaps you know somebody who could help me. I need to brush up on my German. Do you have an assistant or a student who would work with me?’ She asked this very sincerely. And I said, 'Maybe I can work with you’ … We did give each other certain literary — we had a little literary exchange of reading poetry together, talking German and French literature, and I had a country house at that time, a shared country house, and I invited her up. I could see this is a woman who was really deeply wonderful and beautiful and I was nervous that she might be with somebody but it turned out she was not …" — Eva Kollisch, interviewed by Kate Weigand for the Smith College Voices of Feminism Oral History Project (2004).“I grew up during the Depression. I was in the Young Communist League in the mid to late 1930s … To think that if Eva and I had met each other back then we would have considered each other mortal enemies! Yet we had the same motivation, to make the world a better and more just place.” — Naomi Replansky, interviewed by Edith Chevat (Bridges, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2002). -- source link
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