Draft:Anya Berger

Anya Berger, also known as Anna Bostock, (born Anna Zisserman 1923 in Harbin - 23 February 2018 Geneva) was a Russian-British translator, literary critic, communist, feminist and intellectual.

Life

Anya Berger was born in 1923 in Harbin. Her parents were Wladimir Zisserman, a Russian landowner, and Matilda Glogau, from Vienna. They left Russia as a result of the Russian Revolution. In 1936, Anna Berger moved to Vienna to live with her mother's family. In 1938, after the annexation of Austria, she fled Vienna by train to join an English acquaintance in London. She studied at St. Paul's Girls' School. She won a scholarship to attend modern languages at Oxford. However, she dropped out of school to work for Reuters as a wartime translator. In particular, she translated news from the Eastern Front.

In 1942, she married intelligence officer Stephen Bostock, and they had two children, Nina and Dima. After the end of the war, they divorced. Anya Bostock moved to New York to work as a translator at the United Nations. When their father kidnapped them and brought them back to Britain, the custody battle was brought before the courts and in the press.

Bostock returned to London, where she became part of a left-wing intellectual circle around Eric Hobsbawm, Doris Lessing and Mordecai Richler. She found employment as a literary critic at the Manchester Guardian and as an editor at publishers Methuen and Hutchinson. She began translating books from Russian and German into English. Under the name Anna Bostock, she translated works by Trotsky, Lenin, Karl Marx, Ernst Sigismund Fischer, György Lukács, Ilja Ehrenburg, Wilhelm Reich and a book on cats by Paul Eipper,.

She had a relationship with the artist Peter de Francia for a time and together they translated Le Corbusier's Le Modulor into English. They were both quoted in the dedication of John Berger's first novel A Painter of Our Time. Anya Berger had known the writer since 1951, but it was not until then that they began a relationship and together they had two children, Katya Berger and Jacob Berger. John and Anya Berger translated texts by Hélène Weigel and poems by Bertolt Brecht together.

In 1958, she changed her name to Anya Berger by Deed poll, then traveled through Europe on a motorcycle in the company of John Berger and also went to the Soviet Union for the first time. They lived for a time in France and eventually settled in Meyrin, Switzerland. She worked there again as a translator for the UN. Her relationship with John Berger ended in 1970.

Anya Berger became involved in the emerging feminist movement and founded a women's meeting group in Meyrin. The group met in Anya Berger's apartment and men were not allowed to participate, the goal being for these women to meet each other and to be able to talk about their condition in society, their rights, their bodies, and their sexuality. John Berger dedicated the novel G to her and her "sisters in the women's movement" in 1972. Anya Berger's last translation was André Leroi-Gourhan's Gesture and speech in 1993.