An Admirable Woman

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.

"Erika Hertz, a famous political philosopher, the admirable woman of the title . . . quickly becomes more than merely a brain. Without ever losing the quality of mind that accounts for her fame, Mr. Cohen creates a whole person and endears her to the reader . . . Mr. Cohen has written a novel about not-Hannah Arendt. He uses the denial brilliantly to inform the novel and to overlay it with the suspense of a puzzle . . . He has used the novelist's imagination to explore fame in the intellectual world, to reveal life overwhelmed by ethics, to take the reader to the miraculous town." —Anita Brookner, The Sunday Times

"A novel of clarity and valor that explores the inmost lining of intellectual fame… Wherein the power of a singular mind grows into wisdom and wisdom into heroism." —Cynthia Ozick