Susan Taubes (born Judit Zsuzanna Feldmann,[1] 12 January 1928–6 November 1969) was a Hungarian-American writer and intellectual. She committed suicide after the publication of her novel Divorcing.
Biography
editTaubes was born in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. Her grandfather, Mózes Feldmann (1860–1927), was the head of the Neolog branch of the divided Hungarian rabbinate in Pest,[2] and her father, Sándor Feldmann (c. 1889–1972), was a psychoanalyst of Sándor Ferenczi's school,[3] though the two had a falling out in 1923.[4]
In 1939, Susan Feldmann emigrated to the United States with her father (but without her mother, Marion Batory). She studied at Bryn Mawr College[1] and then earned her doctorate at Harvard. Her PhD dissertation, The Absent God: A Study of Simone Weil,[5] was supervised by Paul Tillich.[6] Taubes subsequently published on philosophy and religion.[6]
She was the first wife of the philosopher and Judaist scholar Jacob Taubes. The couple both taught religion at Columbia University between 1960 and 1969. They had two children, Ethan (b. 1953) and Tania (b. 1956).
In the mid-1960s, she became involved in literature and the stage: she was a member of The Open Theatre and in a group of writers around Susan Sontag.[citation needed] She compiled African Myths and Tales, published in New York in 1963 under her maiden name, and wrote her first novel, Divorcing, in 1969.
Taubes committed suicide shortly after the novel’s publication by drowning herself off Long Island in East Hampton. Taubes was 41 years old.[7] Her body was identified by Susan Sontag.[8]
Reception
editThe misogyny of the literary field during her lifetime caused Taubes suffering.[9] The literary critic Hugh Kenner, reviewing her book Divorcing in the New York Times on November 2, 1969, dismissed her as one of the "lady novelists" and “a quick-change artist with the clothes of other writers.”[10] Taubes drowned four days after Kenner's review was published, and a reappraisal of her work began.[11] In 2003, the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, Germany, established an archive for Taubes's work, describing her life as a “story in which Jewish exile meets female intellectualism.” An intellectual biography of Taubes by Christina Pareigis was published in 2020,[12] and the New York Review of Books reissued Divorcing the same year to appreciative reviews.[13] In 2023, the New York Review of Books published Taubes’s novella Lament for Julia for the first time in addition to nine short stories. 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 transferred to Berlin in 2001, where Sigrid Weigel established the Susan Taubes Archiv e.V. at the Berlin-based Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung/ZfL (Center for Literature and Culture Research).[14][15] Weigel, together with Christina Pareigis, worked on an edition of Taubes’ letters.
In 2024, Atlantic Magazine included Divorcing in its list of "The Great American Novels," describing it as a "rediscovered masterpiece, a raw, witty, and utterly original novel."[16]
References
edit- ^ a b Emre, Merve (2023-06-05). "Back From the Dead: The Afterlives of Susan Taubes". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2023-07-23.
- ^ "Haraszti György: Két világ határán (History of the Rumbach synagogue), p.23, in: Múlt és Jövő, bilingual journal of the Hungarian-Jewish culture". Archived from the original on 2016-10-10. Retrieved 2016-03-15.
- ^ Entry in the Hungarian analysts' register Archived 2016-03-16 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Thalassa, journal of the Sándor Ferenczi Society, Budapest, (18) 2007, 2–3: S. 204
- ^ Lene Zade: Ja, ich bin tot. In: Jüdische Zeitung 11/2009.
- ^ a b Sigrid Weigel, Between the Philosophy of Religion and Cultural History: Susan Taubes on the Birth of Tragedy and the Negative Theology of Modernity. In: Telos. Nr. 150, Spring 2010. pp. 115-135: http://journal.telospress.com/content/2010/150/115.full.pdf+html
- ^ P. 142, Rollyson, Carl and Paddock, Lisa. 2000. Susan Sontag: the Making of an Icon. Courier Companies, Inc.: NYC.
- ^ "Susan Sontag: As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980," edited by [Sontag's son] David Rieff (2012), p.108.
- ^ Levy, Deborah (2021-02-27). "Divorcing: a classic novel about misogyny that was almost lost to it". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
- ^ Kenner, Hugh (1969-11-02). "Divorcing; By Susan Taubes. 249 pp. New York: Random House. $5.95". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
- ^ Emre, Merve (2023-06-05). "The Afterlives of Susan Taubes". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
- ^ Pareigis, Christina (2020-11-30). Susan Taubes: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (in German). Wallstein Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8353-4511-9.
- ^ Williams, John (2020-12-01). "A Skeptical Heroine, Unconvinced by Religion, Romance or Psychoanalysis". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
- ^ List of works by Susan Taubes in German published by ZfL
- ^ "Susan Taubes Edition - ZFL Berlin".
- ^ "The Great American Novels". Atlantic Magazine. March 14, 2024. Retrieved 15 March 2024.
Further reading
editThe first major study of Susan Taubes's thought by Elliot R. Wolfson, The Philosophic Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope, was published by Stanford University Press in 2023.