ELEANOR HOCHMAN

HOCHMAN--Eleanor (Lee),

a translator of French literature and nonfiction and also a long-time chief in the copyediting department of the New American Library (NAL) died at home in New York City of natural causes on October 6, 2018. She was 90. Ms. Hochman is survived and mourned by her son, David (married to Eugenia Siegler), and two grandchildren, Daniel and Joel Hochman. She joined the copyediting department of NAL in 1964, when the Penguin spinoff was owned by the Times- Mirror Company of Los Angeles, and she retired in 1990, by which time NAL had been re-acquired by Penguin Books USA, a unit of Pearson PLC. NAL is now an imprint of Penguin Random House. She holds sole translation credit for Claude Edmonde Magny's The Age of the American Novel (Frederick Ungar, 1972), a pioneering study of the relationship between film and fiction; George Sand's feminist classic, Indiana (NAL Signet Classics, 1993); and Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers (NAL Signet Classics, 1991). Together with her husband, the late editor Stanley Hochman (deceased 2014), she translated Emile Zola's Germinal (NAL, 1970) and Louis Pergaud's The War of the Buttons (Walker, 1968). The couple also jointly edited Kettridge's French/English English/ French Dictionary (NAL, 1968, with new editions issued through 1992) and A Dictionary of Contemporary American History, 1945 to the Present (NAL Signet, 1993; reissued by Penguin, 1997). Together with Mr. Hochman and others, she also co-authored several romance novels pseudonymously. Ms. Hochman was born in Brooklyn in 1928 to Abraham and Sarah Bell. After earning a degree in English from Brooklyn College, she spent a year in northern France, teaching English. She met Mr. Hochman, another Brooklyn College graduate who had been studying in Paris on the GI Bill, on the return ocean voyage home, and they married in 1952. She also earned an MA in English literature from Columbia University. After retirement, she adapted and expanded her master's thesis into a full- length book, Fictional Females: Mirrors and Models; The Changing Image of Women in American Novels from 1789 to 1945 (Xlibris, 2002). This title surveys and analyzes the stories of 160 novels with female protagonists written by more than 60 critically acclaimed authors, both men and women. These novels record how successive generations of women either accepted or challenged the conventions of their day and enjoyed the rewards or suffered the consequences of either choice. No memorial service is planned. Any charitable donation in her memory is an act of kindness.