VITA

Vita

Vita

Obituary
INTA EZERGAILIS 1932.11.IX.1932—1.I.2005
Inta Miške Ezergailis, professor emerita of German Studies at Cornell University and a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature, died at her home in Ithaca on January 1, 2005 after a long battle with cancer, which was first diagnosed in 2001. Inta Ezergailis was born in Riga, Latvia on September 11, 1932. World War II disrupted family life in her home country; in 1944, along with millions of other Eastern Europeans, they were caught up in the exodus of people fleeing the advancing Red Army, searching for safety in Central Europe. The first leg of the journey led her to Berlin, where she experienced waves of Allied carpet bombing. That experience made her a pacifist for life. In a recent poem, Inta alluded to her war-time experience:
The ghost is pale,
a child of war,
it will eat you
in its large hunger,
stun you with its fear.
Don’t go near, don’t go near.
At the war’s end she found herself in a refugee camp for displaced persons near Lübeck, in the English zone of the divided Germany, where she attended a Latvian camp school. In 1946 her family moved to Ansbach, Bavaria in the American zone, where she attended the camp’s Latvian high school. In 1948 she resettled to Bad Aiblingen, and entered the German Realschule at Rosenheim. In 1950 her family emigrated to the United States and settled in Boston, where she completed her high school work. She then entered Simmons College, graduating in 1955 with a B.A. in Social Sciences. The following year she attended the Fletcher School of Diplomacy. In 1957, a year after her family resettled in Cleveland, she married Andrew Ezergailis (now a retired professor of history at Ithaca College) and moved to New York, where she worked for seven years for Johns Manville Corporation and intermittently attended night school at NYU, studying economics. In 1964 the couple moved to Ithaca. In 1965 she began graduate study in German literature at Cornell. Among the academic mentors who left a lasting influence on her were Eric Blackall, Matthijs Jolles, Burton Pike, and Paul deMan. At that time the dominant school of literary criticism placed an emphasis on the literary text (“close reading”). Although Inta followed the kaleidoscopic fortunes of ensuing theories that swept through the academy, from structuralism to postmodernism, she remained – with some modifications – faithful to literary texts throughout her academic life. After earning the doctorate in 1969, Inta was appointed to the Cornell faculty as an Assistant Professor of German literature. During the first years of her career, she concentrated on the writings of Thomas Mann. Her dissertation on the dialectics in Mann’s writings became her first book, Male and Female: An Approach to Thomas Mann’s Dialectic (1975). Later, she edited a collection of articles, Critical Essays on Thomas Mann (1988). With the rise of feminism Inta’s interests in large part shifted to women writers. Her Woman Writers – The Divided Self: Analysis of Novels by Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Doris Lessing and Others, appeared in 1982. In 1998 she followed up with Nostalgia and Beyond: Eleven Latvian Women Writers. In addition to these books, she published numerous articles, in English and Latvian, in scholarly and intellectual periodicals. During the last decade of her life, perhaps tiring of academic prose (following Goethe’s urging: “Dear friend, all theory is gray, and green the golden tree of life”), Inta turned to writing poetry. Her first volume of verse has just been published by Ulysses House, Ithaca, NY. Inta is survived by her husband of forty-seven years, Andrew Ezergailis of Ithaca, daughter Anna (residing in Toronto), and a sister, Gunta Vittands, of North Andover, Mass. Those desiring to honor Inta’s memory can contribute to a local animal shelter or to the publication of her poetry by sending a donation to Inta’s Poetry Fund (1157 Danby Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850).
A memorial service will be held on Sunday, March 13, 2005, at 2:00 p.m. in Sage Chapel on the Cornell University Campus.
One of Inta’s poems follows:
When the dog dies
He lies on the table, eyes closed,
the trembling quiet now.
Pink liquid in the needle,
a short yelp, and it’s over.
They’re ready, the vet says,
when they go so fast.
We cry, I take his collar off.
At night, I dream of him
running circles, touch
the thick rough fur
by his neck and feel the tag gone–
no one to return him now.
Sixteen years of walks–
parks, wildflower reserve,
Plantations, Rim Trail, Lick Brook,
Abbot’s Loop, and many nameless paths,
on foot or skis, he struggling through the snow.
Lately, for his sake, more on flat trails.
We force ourselves to walk now,
explain to other regulars,
pet their dogs, and go on,
the warm brown shadow still
between us, the ghost leash
loosening, as he falls behind.

For Prof. Herbert Deinert’s eulogy of Inta click on the following: