Esther Hautzig

Esther Hautzig (née Rudomin) (Hebrew: אסתר האוציג‎, born October 18, 1930, died November 1, 2009) was an American writer, best known for her award-winning book The Endless Steppe (1968).

She was born in Vilna, Poland (Vilnius, Lithuania today). Her childhood was interrupted by the beginning of World War II and the conquest in 1941 of eastern Poland by Soviet troops. Her family was uprooted and deported to Rubtsovsk, Siberia, where Esther spent the next five years in harsh exile. Her award winning novel The Endless Steppe is an autobiographical account of those years in Siberia.

After the end of the war, Esther and her family moved back to Poland when she was 15. She met Walter Hautzig, a concert pianist, while enroute to America on a students' visa in 1947. They married in 1950, and had two children, David and Deborah, one of whom (Deborah) grew up to be a children's author.

She wrote `The Endless Steppe' at the prompting of Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, to whom she had written after reading his articles about his visit to Rubtsovsk.

She died on 1 November 2009 from a combination of congestive heart failure and complications from Alzheimers Disease.

References

See also: Hautzig