Arnold J. Pomerans (1920–2005)

Arnold J. Pomerans was born to a Jewish family in Königsberg, Germany (present-day Kaliningrad, Russia), and spent his childhood in Memel and Berlin. In 1936, to escape the Nazi regime, the family moved first to Yugoslavia and then to South Africa. In 1948, he emigrated to the UK, settling in London, where he became a full-time translator after first working for several years as a physics teacher. In 1956, he married Erica White, who served as his editor, and the couple moved to an old cottage in Polstead, Suffolk. During his career, Pomerans translated about 200 works of fiction and nonfiction, from most major European languages. Among the authors whose works he he translated were Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Anne Frank, Sigmund Freud, Johan Huizinga, Jean Piaget, and Jules Romain. His translation of George Grosz's autobiography A Little Yes and a Big No earned him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1983, and he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize in 1997 for The Selected Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. He also translated the work of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish diarist killed at Auschwitz during World War II.