An Admirable Woman

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction: A captivating portrait of a courageous anti-authoritarian thinker living in exile, inspired by the life story of Hannah Arendt.

Erika Hertz is a Berlin-born Jewish intellectual who, with her art historian husband Martens, fled Nazi Germany for New York. It was Martens's impressive reputation that won them their sanctuary, but it’s Erika who’s supported them with her journalism. In the years since, she’s cemented her own reputation as a leading culture historian and the fêted author of the internationally-acclaimed tomes The Travail of Freedom and On Cruelty.

Inspired by the life story of Hannah Arendt—whose landmark Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Arthur Cohen published in its first paperback edition—An Admirable Woman won the 1983 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. “A fascinating piece of scholarship in its own right” (Publishers Weekly), it’s a tribute to Arendt and her fellow European thinkers displaced by Fascism, and a celebration of the extraordinary impact they had on American cultural life.

This new edition, featuring a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winner Joshua Cohen, offers readers an all-too-timely portrait of moral courage in the face of authoritarianism, virulent bigotry, and state-sponsored violence.