Susan Taubes

Susan Taubes (January 1928 – 6 November 1969) was a Hungarian-American writer and scholar. She is best known for her novel Divorcing, published shortly before her suicide in 1969. Taubes was born Judit Zsuzanna Feldmann in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. Her mother was Marion Batory, and her father, Sándor Feldmann, was a psychoanalyst and member of Sándor Ferenczi's school; Feldmann and Ferenczi had a falling out in 1923. Taubes' grandfather, Mózes Feldmann, was the head of the Neolog branch of the divided Hungarian rabbinate in Pest. Taubes' mother left Sándor for a new husband while she was still a child. The mother and daughter's relationship steadily deteriorated, never to recover. In a 1950 letter, Taubes expressed a desire to cut her mother off completely, describing her as "pitiful" and "neurotic," a theme that would appear in much of her later work. In 1939, Taubes and her father emigrated to Rochester, New York, where she adopted the name Susan. She attended Bryn Mawr College as an undergraduate.