Karen Gershon
Karen Gershon, born Kaethe Loewenthal in 1923 in Bielefeld, Germany, was a notable writer whose experiences as a refugee deeply informed her literary work. In 1938, she fled Nazi Germany with her sister to England, leaving behind her family; their parents were later murdered in a concentration camp. Gershon married art teacher Val Tripp in 1948, and together they had four children before immigrating to Israel in 1968. Throughout her life, she grappled with themes of isolation, exile, and the trauma of loss, which are prevalent in her writings. One of her most significant works, *We Came as Children: A Collective Autobiography* (1966), captures the memories of over 250 Jewish children who escaped Nazi Germany, reflecting their anxiety and sense of displacement. Her poetry often explored personal and collective grief, exemplified in the poem "Stella Remembered," inspired by her daughter’s departure for art school. Gershon's contributions to literature were recognized with several awards, underscoring her influence as a voice for those affected by the Holocaust. She passed away in 1993 in London after a heart bypass operation.
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Karen Gershon
Fiction Writer
- Born: August 29, 1923
- Birthplace: Bielefeld, Westphalia, Germany
- Died: March 1, 1993
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
Karen Gershon was born Kaethe Loewenthal in 1923 in Bielefeld, Germany, the youngest of three daughters born to architect Paul Loewenthal and Selma Schoenfeld Loewenthal. In 1938, she and her sister Lise were transported by boat to England with thousands of other German children to escape the horrors of the Nazi government, an event that would deeply influence most of her work as a writer. Her sister left for Palestine in 1939 while Gershon remained in England. Both of the author’s parents were murdered in a concentration camp in Riga, Latvia.
Gershon married art teacher Val Tripp in 1948 and the couple had four children: Christopher, Anthony, Stella, and Naomi. The family immigrated to Israel in 1968. Gershon, her husband, and daughter Stella relocated to England in 1973, while the other children remained in Israel. Gershon died in 1993 in London after undergoing a heart bypass operation.
Gershon’s book We Came as Children: A Collective Autobiography (1966) contains the personal reminiscences of almost 250 men and women who fled Nazi Germany when they were children and settled in England, as Gershon herself had done. The book details the anxiety they experienced as children uprooted and exiled from their parents, their homeland, and everything familiar to be taken to an unfamiliar land as refugees. In 1971, Gershon’s daughter, Stella, left Israel to attend art school in England, an event which paralleled Gershon’s own childhood departure from her parents. The separation from her favorite daughter inspired the poem “Stella Remembered,” written in 1972 and published in Gershon’s well-received and highly regarded collection My Daughters, My Sisters, and Other Poems (1975).
Numbered among Gershon’s awards were the 1967 British Arts Council Award for poetry, the 1967 Jewish Chronicle Award, and the 1968 Haim Greenberg Literary Award. Most of Gershon’s poetry, novels, and nonfiction work dealt thematically with the excruciating pain brought about by isolation, exile, the subsequent everlasting sense of bereavement, and the infinite violent outrage at the Nazi slaughter of the Jewish people.