Silvia Tennenbaum grew up in a liberal Jewish family in Frankfurt. Though she was initially enrolled at a private girls’ school in Frankfurt, the family went into exile in December 1936, initially settling in Switzerland, a step which the parents disguised to their daughter as a visit to relatives. When her stepfather, the conductor Hans Wilhelm Steinberg, secured a position in New York, the family emigrated onward to the USA in September 1938.

Silvia Tennenbaum studied Art History at Columbia University in New York. She worked as an art critic and wrote short stories and articles. Her first novel Rachel. The Rabbi’s Wife was published in 1978. It told the life-story of the wife of a rabbi in the conservative atmosphere of a provincial US town, an experience that the author had shared for some years. Her autobiographical novel Yesterday’s Streets (Straßen von gestern) was published in 1981 and explored the fate of an extended Jewish family in Frankfurt between the imperial era and the end of the Second World War. Two further novels remained unpublished.

In her essays and writings from the mid-1970s onwards, Silvia Tennenbaum increasingly began to engage with her heritage and the themes of exile, homeland and language as well as the social taboo surrounding these topics, one which had also defined her family. Following the publication of the German edition of her novel Yesterday’s Streets, the author was a frequent visitor to Germany as a contemporary witness, a role she critically reflected on.

Selected works:
Return to Germany (Essay, 1976)
Rachel, die Frau des Rabbiners (Roman, 2010; engl. 1978)
Straßen von gestern (Roman, 1983; engl. 1981)
Auschwitz and Life (Essay, 1992)

Further reading:
Tennenbaum, Silvia: Auschwitz and Life. In: A Sense of Loss and Nostalgia. Encounters with the German-Jewish Past and Present. Cincinatti: American Jewish Archives 1992, S. 7-47