Esther Hautzig
Esther Rudomin was born in Wilno, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania). Her childhood was interrupted by the beginning of WWII and the conquest in 1941 of eastern Poland by Soviet troops.
Her family was uprooted and deported to Rubtsovsk, Siberia, where Esther spent the next five years in harsh exile. Her award winning novel The Endless Steppe is an autobiographical account of those years in Siberia.
After the war, she and her family moved back to Poland when she was 15. Hautzig reportedly wrote The Endless Steppe at the prompting of presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, to whom she had written after reading his articles about his visit to Rubtsovsk.
Hautzig helped to discover and eventually publish the master's thesis in mathematics written by her uncle, Ela-Chaim Cunzer, at the University of Wilno in 1937.
Rudomin met Walter Hautzig, a concert pianist, while en route to America on a student visa in 1947. They married in 1950, and had two children, Deborah, a children's author, and David. She died on November 1, 2009, aged 79.
“What I ate for breakfast on school mornings was one buttered roll--a soft roll, not a hard roll--and one cup of cocoa; any attempt to alter this menu I regarded as a plot to poison me.”