SHEILA KLASS

Klass--Sheila Solomon, died on March 26 at 86. She was professor emerita of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she taught for 47 years, and a prolific writer who published 19 books. Born 1927 in Williamsburg, she attended Brooklyn College, where she worked on the college newspaper, the Vanguard. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1953 she married Morton Klass, who became professor of anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. Together they lived in Trinidad and India, as well as Bennington, VT; Leonia, NJ; and Manhattan. Her books include Come Back on Monday (1960), the memoir Everyone in this House Makes Babies (1964), Bahadur Means Hero (1969), A Perpetual Surprise (1981), In a Cold Open Field (1997); her young adult fiction includes historical novels about Louisa May Alcott, Annie Oakley, and Deborah Sampson (her very last book, Soldier's Secret, 2009). She published a joint memoir, Every Mother is a Daughter, written with her daughter, Perri, in 2006. In her eighties she began a blog (blogginggrandma.com) and attracted thousands of page views as she wrote about being a legally blind New Yorker who rode the subways by counting the stops. She continued to teach writing at BMCC through last December, and corrected student papers with a magnifying glass. She loved living and working and teaching in New York City. She will be remembered as an inspirational teacher, writer, and New Yorker by her family members, her many students, and the friends she made and kept at every stage of her long and productive life. Her brother, Arnold Solomon, died in 1950 in the Korean War; her sister, Marilyn Koster, died in 2004. Her husband, Morton Klass, died in 2001. Her determination to make writers of everyone around her is reflected in her children, all three of whom are published writers. She is survived by her children, Perri, David, and Judy, and by her grandchildren, Orlando, Josephine, Anatol, Gabriel, and Madeleine. Donations in her memory may be sent to the BMCC Foundation (199 Chambers St. FH 1330A, NY, NY 10007) with a notation directed to the English Department's Writing and Literature Program for annual awards.