Early life and education

Helen Epstein is the daughter of Kurt Epstein and Franci Rabinek, both survivors of Nazi concentration camps.^[1] She was born in Prague in November 27, 1947, grew up in New York City, and graduated from Hunter College High School, Hebrew University,^[2] and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.^[3]

Career

She became a journalist at the age of 20, while caught in the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Her account was published in the Jerusalem Post and she has been a journalist ever since.^[3] Her articles and reviews have appeared in many major American publications and include profiles of art historian Meyer Schapiro^[4] and musicians Vladimir Horowitz and Leonard Bernstein.^[5]

Helen Epstein is the author, co-author, translator or editor of ten books of narrative non-fiction including the non-fiction trilogy Children of the Holocaust, Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History and The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma; and Joe Papp: An American Life, the biography of a theater producer . She translated Heda Kovaly’s Under a Cruel Star, Paul Ornstein’s Looking Back: Memoir of a Psychoanalyst,^[6] and the tribute anthology Archivist on a Bicycle ^[7]. The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma was published in English and Czech in 2018.^[8] In 2020, she published her late mother's memoir as Franci's War and in 2022, her cancer memoir Getting Through It.

She was the first tenured woman journalism professor in New York University (1981) and taught about 1000 students over 12 years.^[9] She guest lectures extensively at universities, libraries and religious institutions in North America and abroad.^[10]