Early life Esther Polianowsky was born in
Zhytomyr to an observant
Jewish timber merchant. In 1917, she was accepted to the
Kiev University to study
mathematics. As
civil war and
anti-Semitic pogroms spread across the
Russian Empire, however, her father forbade her from leaving alone for Kiev. Polianowsky fought in the Ukrainian
national resistance during the
Russian Civil War, thereupon escaping to
Mandatory Palestine in January 1920 to join a group of
pioneer agricultural workers. She succeeded in securing
travel documents for her widowed mother and four siblings, and paid a team of
Polish foresters to lead them to the
Polish border in secret. From there, Esther guided them to Palestine.
Education Despite the volatile situation for Jews in
Germany, Esther and her sister Feyga (Fania) elected to relocate to
Berlin in the summer of 1922 to resume their education. Polianowsky's application to the
University of Berlin was sponsored by
Albert Einstein, whose recommendation gained her admission to the Faculty of Physics, in spite of her not having completed an
entrance examination. While his pupil, Polianowsky developed a personal relationship with Einstein. He encouraged her writing after reading her article in the
Frankfurter Zeitung recalling the murderous pogroms in Zhytomyr by
Petliura's
Cossacks during
Orthodox Christmas of 1918. As the
Nazi Party rose to prominence in Germany, Polianowsky was encouraged by Einstein to leave the country after graduation. He provided her with a recommendation to pursue doctoral work at the
Cavendish Laboratory under Sir
Ernest Rutherford. Her scholarship, funded by Jewish philanthropist
Redcliffe Salaman, was conditioned on her later going to
Israel to teach. Although this plan did not come to fruition, she grew close to the Salaman family and married Redcliffe's eldest son Myer, a
pathologist. Polianowsky left the Cavendish in the summer of 1928, her PhD incomplete, to devote her life to her family.
Early career At the suggestion of
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Esther began writing fiction for an English audience. She published her first novel,
Two Silver Roubles, in 1932, only six years after arriving in England knowing only
Yiddish, Russian, German, and Hebrew. From 1940, Myer and Esther Salaman shared a large home in Cambridge with their close friends
Frances and
Francis Cornford, along with their respective children. The Salamans had four children: Nina Wedderburn, Thalia Brenda Polak, Ruth Chattie Salaman and David Francis Salaman. When Myer joined the
Royal Army Medical Corps in 1943, Esther and their children stayed on with the Cornfords. That same year, she and Frances together published an anthology of poems from the Russian, which included biographies of
Kruykov,
Pushkin,
Blok, and
Akhmatova. The two families often retreated to
Ringstead, Norfolk, where the Cornfords maintained a cottage attached to the
Darwin family's six-storey Hunstanton Mill, constructed in 1850. From 1936 the Mill served as a debating retreat for the
Theoretical Biology Club, a group of
organicists and
theoretical biologists that included
John D. Bernal,
Max Black,
J. B. S. Haldane,
Dorothy and
Joseph Needham,
Karl Popper,
C. H. Waddington,
Bertold Wiesner,
Joseph H. Woodger, and
Dorothy Wrinch. In 1956, Frances Cornford sold the property to the Salamans. Salaman's reminiscences of Einstein were broadcast on the
BBC Third Programme in 1955, and her second novel,
The Fertile Plain, was published in 1956.
Later life In 1948, Myer Salaman was hired as Director of the Cancer Research Department at the
London Hospital Medical College and the family moved to London. Esther Salaman's later works include
A Collection of Moments (1970), a study of
involuntary memory, and
The Great Confession (1973), which explores the use of memory by
Aksakov,
De Quincey,
Tolstoy and
Proust. She published memoirs of Albert Einstein and
Paul Dirac in
Encounter in 1979 and 1986 respectively. She died on 9 November 1995 at the age of 95. ==Bibliography==