By STEPHEN HEYMAN | NOVEMBER 21, 2011
A photograph of Eva Zeisel taken shortly after her arrest in 1936.
NY Times: On Nov. 13, the celebrated Modernist designer Eva Zeisel turned 105. As if this weren’t impressive enough, Zeisel marked the occasion by publishing a memoir about the 16 months she spent in a Soviet prison in the 1930s, during which time she tried to commit suicide by cutting her wrists with a copper wire pulled from a toilet. “For many years Eva did not want to make her prison experiences public, in part because she was afraid that the K.G.B. would come after her in the U.S.,” said her daughter, Jean Richards.
Zeisel, who was born in Hungary and moved to Russia in 1932, had been falsely accused of plotting to kill Stalin. (Zeisel’s childhood friend Arthur Koestler later channeled her experience when writing “Darkness at Noon.”) She was rounded up by members of the secret police and tossed into a Leningrad prison, where she spent months alone in a cell she describes almost cheerily as “a cupboard.” “I started to do gymnastics,” she writes in the memoir, published this month in the literary journal A Public Space. “I tried to stand on my head. This was rather easy in the cupboard because there is not too much room to fall.”
Zeisel now lives in Rockland County, N.Y. Brigid Hughes, the founding editor of A Public Space, visited her earlier this year to discuss some edits. “She’s very, very sharp,” said Hughes, who noted that even though Zeisel’s vision and hearing are fading, she was still at work on new designs, among them a little ceramic egg holder.
Eva Striker Zeisel (born Eva Amalia Striker, November 13, 1906) is a Hungarian born industrial designer known for her work with ceramics, primarily from the period after she immigrated to the United States. Her forms are often abstractions of the natural world and human relationships. Work from throughout her prodigious career is included in important museum collections across the world. Zeisel declares herself a "maker of useful things". Zeisel continues to design furniture as well as glass and ceramic objects.
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