Anya Berger

Anya Berger (née Anna Zisserman; published as Anna Bostock; 1923 – 23 February 2018) was a Russian-British translator, intellectual, and feminist, whose work has been described as having "shaped the horizons of the English-speaking left on issues of race, gender and class". She was best known for her translations of thinkers such as Leon Trotsky, Wilhelm Reich, Vladimir Lenin, and Karl Marx.

Early life and education Anna Zisserman, later known as Anya, was born in 1923 in Harbin, China, to Matilda and Vladimir Zisserman, a Russian landowner. Zisserman had older siblings, and spent her early years among an émigré community displaced by the Russian revolution before travelling to Vienna in 1936 to live with her mother's Jewish family members. Following the Nazi annexation of Austria, Zisserman escaped to Britain without her family and attended the St Paul's Girls' School in London.

She studied modern language at the University of Oxford.

After moving to Geneva, Berger resumed translation work for the United Nations and became active in the women's liberation movement.

Personal life Zisserman married British intelligence officer Stephen Bostock in 1942, with whom she later had two children. The marriage ended shortly after World War II. Following the divorce, Bostock took his children from the United States back to England, resulting in a public custody battle. The couple had two children before separating in 1976.

Selected bibliography

The Modulor by Le Corbusier (with Peter de Francia; London: Faber and Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard University Press, 1954) Modulor 2 by Le Corbusier (with Peter de Francia; London: Faber, 1958, and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958) Julio Jurenito by Ilya Ehrenburg (with Yvonne Kapp; London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958) People and Life: Memoirs of 1891-1917 by Ilya Ehrenburg (with Yvonne Kapp; London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1961) Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire (with John Berger; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) Marx in His Own Words (London: Penguin Press, 1970) The Necessity of Art by Ernst Fischer (London: Penguin, 1971) Lenin in His Own Words (London: Penguin Press, 1972) Sex-pol: Essays 1929-34 by Wilhelm Reich, ed. Lee Baxandall (with Tom Dubose and Lee Baxandall (New York: Random House, 1972) The Great Art of Living Together: Poems on the Theater by Bertolt Brecht (with John Berger; London: Grenville, 1972) Understanding Brecht by Walter Benjamin (London: NLB, 1973) The Theory of the Novel by György Lukács (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974) Soul and Form by György Lukács (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974) Gesture and Speech by André Leroi-Gourhan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993)