Dorrit Cohn
Dorrit Cohn, internationally recognized as a major literary theorist and one of the first women to be appointed to tenure at Harvard (she joined the Harvard Faculty in 1971), was born Dorrit Claire Zucker in Vienna, Austria, the younger daughter in a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family. Her father, Herbert Zucker, owned a hat factory in a small town in Czechoslovakia, where the family often spent summer vacations. Her mother, née Hirsch, belonged to a family that pioneered the manufacture of bentwood furniture in the same town. Dorrit grew up with the cultural and educational privileges of her class: she studied music, was fluent in French, and loved theater and opera. This comfortable life came to an abrupt end in March 1938, when Hitler’s troops marched into Austria and annexed it to Nazi Germany. The Zucker family had the good fortune to leave the country just before the Anschluß. The following...