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 and/or life:
“It was common practice for me to take my children with me whenever I went shopping, out for a walk in a white neighborhood, or just felt like going about in a white world. The reason was simple enough: if a black man is alone or with other black men, he is a threat to whites. But if he is with children, then he is harmless, adorable.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“Look at your [English] ladies of quality—are they not forever parting with their husbands—forfeiting their reputations—and is their life aught but dissipation? In common genteel life, indeed, you may now and then meet with very fine girls—who have politeness, sense and conversation—but these are few—and then look at your trademen’s daughters—what are they?—poor creatures indeed! all pertness, imitation and folly.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)