Walter Abish (1931–2022)

Walter Abish was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. His parents were Friedl and Adolph Abish, a perfumer. After Nazi Germany's Anschluss (annexation) of Austria, they fled the country, traveling first to Nice, France, before taking a ship to Shanghai, China. They lived there in a Jewish ghetto from 1940 to 1948. In 1948, they moved to Israel, where Abish served in the army and then worked in the American Library. In 1957, the family emigrated to the USA. He was in his 40s when he published his debut novel, Alphabetical Africa, in 1974. It was the first of his experimental fiction works, and was quickly followed by his first collection of short stories, Minds Meet (1975). His second novel, How German Is It?/Wie Deutsch ist es? (1980), is his most celebrated work and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1981. Abish received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987. In his career, Abish published three novels, three collections of short stories, a volume of poems, and a memoir, Double Vision (2004). He also worked and taught at Empire State College, Wheaton College, the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Columbia University, Brown University, Yale University, and Cooper Union. He sat on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions, and served on the board of International PEN from 1982 to 1988. He was on the Board of Governors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. Abish was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He married Cecile Gelb, a photographer and sculptor, in Tel Aviv in 1953.