Early Life
Lerner was born Gerda Hedwig Kronstein in Vienna, Austria, on April 30, 1920, the first child of Ilona (née Neumann) and Robert Kronstein, an affluent Jewish couple. Her father was a pharmacist, her mother an artist. Following the Anschluss, Kronstein joined the anti-Nazi resistance, and spent six weeks, including her eighteenth birthday, in an Austrian jail. Her family was able to escape from Austria; Kronstein, with the help of a young socialist lover, Bobby Jensen, immigrated to the United States in 1939.
Read more about this topic: Gerda Lerner
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)
“I have lifted the veil. I have created life, wrested the secret of life from life. Now do you understand? From the lives of those who have gone before, I have created life.”
—Edward T. Lowe, and Frank Strayer. Dr. von Niemann (Lionel Atwill)