Susan Taubes

Susan Taubes (née Feldmann; 1928 in Budapest – 6 November 1969 in East Hampton) was a Hungarian-American writer and intellectual.

Taubes came from a Jewish family in Hungary. Her grandfather Mózes Feldmann (1860–1927) was the head of the Conservative or "Status Quo" branch of the divided Hungarian rabbinate in Pest,[1][2] and her father Sándor Feldmann (1889/90–1972) was a psychoanalyst[3] of Sándor Ferenczi's school, though the two colleagues had a falling out in 1923.[4]

Biography

In 1939, Susan Feldmann emigrated to the United States with her father (but without her mother, Marion Batory). She studied at Harvard, wrote her PhD thesis on The Absent God. A Study of Simone Weil,[5] supervised by Paul Tillich.

She was the first wife of the philosopher and Judaist scholar Jacob Taubes. The couple both taught religion at Columbia University 1960–1969. They had two children: Ethan (b. 1953) and Tania (b. 1956).

In the mid-1960s, she became also involved in literature and the stage: she was a member of The Open Theatre and in a group of writers around Susan Sontag.

She compiled "African Myths and Tales", published in New York in 1963 under her maiden name; and published her first novel Divorcing in 1969, but committed suicide shortly afterwards by drowning herself off Long Island.[6] Her body was identified by Susan Sontag.[7]

She left numerous literary texts, most of them unpublished, as well as years of correspondence with Jacob Taubes and other prominent figures of philosophy and religion. Most of this estate was discovered years after her death and edited by the Berlin-based Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung/ZfL (Center for Literature and Culture Research).[8]

References
  1. hu:Feldmann Mózes
  2. Haraszti György: Két világ határán (History of the Rumbach synagogue), p.23, in: Múlt és Jövő, bilingual journal of the Hungarian-Jewish culture
  3. Entry in the Hungarian analysts' register Archived 2016-03-16 at the Wayback Machine
  4. Thalassa, journal of the Sándor Ferenczi Society, Budapest, (18) 2007, 2–3: S. 204
  5. Lene Zade: Ja, ich bin tot. In: Jüdische Zeitung 11/2009.
  6. P. 142, Rollyson, Carl and Paddock, Lisa. 2000. Susan Sontag: the Making of an Icon. Courier Companies, Inc.: NYC.
  7. "Susan Sontag: As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980," edited by [Sontag's son] David Rieff (2012), p.108.
  8. List of works by Susan Taubes in German published by ZfL
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