Lilian R. Furst

A great scholar and teacher in the American and European world of letters, Lilian R. Furst, Professor Emerita and Marcel Bataillon Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill died at home in Chapel Hill on 11 September 2009. Lilian Furst wrote more than 23 books and dozens of articles--on Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism; on the reader of European narrative; on disordered eating and women healers; on the creative and rhetorical dimensions of the art of narrative; on psychology and psychoanalysis; and on surviving the Holocaust. She was a leading specialist in the relationship between literature and medicine, as evinced in some of her more recent books: Women Healers and Physicians (1997), Between Doctors and Patients (1998), Just Talk: Narratives of Psychotherapy (1999) and Medical Progress and Social Reality: A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Medicine (2000). Her books have been translated into several languages, including Japanese, Portuguese, Korean, Greek, and German. Lilian R. Furst was born in Vienna in 1931 to parents who, at the time of the Nazi occupation, were doctors of medicine specializing in dental surgery, each having received degrees from the University of Vienna. In the book titled Home Is Somewhere Else. Autobiography in Two Voices (1994), Lilian and her father, Desider Furst, recount, from their different perspectives, the dramatic experiences that began with their flight from Vienna in 1938, followed by the stages of their relocation to Manchester, England. "I am aware," Lilian Furst writes, "each time I teach my course on the literary portrayal of adolescence in twentieth century literature, just how close I came to the fate of Anne Frank." Their life story is, of course, particular to her and her parents, but it is also, in her words, "typical of a certain category of persons who happened to be in a certain part of the world at a certain time." A German edition of Home Is Somewhere Else is being published this fall and will be featured at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Memorial contributions may be made to: Dallas Holocaust Museum / Center for Education and Tolerance 211 N. Record Street, Suite 100 Dallas, TX 75202.