Esther D Hemsing

Esther D. Hemsing, born April 7, 1921 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY, died at her home in Manhattan on March 12, 2019, just weeks shy of her 98th birthday. She was a lifelong lover of literature, theatre, the visual arts, anthropology, foreign languages, and politics, and her various positions included copy editor for The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, House Beautiful, and Parents’ Magazine from 1943 to 1951. At the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education in Washington, DC, she served first as Publications Editor and then as Director of Publications from 1968 to 1971. She also taught English and speech in New York City high schools from 1943 to 1944 and in Washington DC from 1955 to 1957.

Born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Esther was the daughter of homemaker Bella Davidson, and Max Davidson, an inveterate gambler who worked all his life as a laborer in the laundry business. (At one point he was able to open up his own business, the Snow White Laundry in Yorkville, which he ran with his son Sydney.) When Esther was five years old, Bella inherited a small sum from a distant relative and decided to spend it on tap dance lessons for her daughter, in the hopes of turning her little girl into an entertainer. Esther performed nights and weekends as a singer/dancer/comedienne in Yiddish Theatre in New York and summers in the Catskills. Meanwhile, longing to escape, she developed a thirst for English, Latin, and world literature, reading Molière, Keats, Shelley, and, her particular favorite Robert Burns in her early teens. Esther attended Hunter High School and earned a B.A. in English in 1943 from Hunter College, while helping to support her family as a performer.

In 1944, she was awarded a Graduate Fellowship in Anthropology by the University of Pennsylvania, but interrupted her studies to marry Albert E. Hemsing, whom she had met in 1942. Both families opposed the marriage, as it was wartime and Al came from a German Catholic background. Armed with degrees from City College and New York University, he worked first for the East and West Association, founded by Pearl S. Buck, then the Office of War Information overseas film division, and taught documentary film at City College, while Esther held various editorial positions. When he was offered a post to head up the Marshall Plan Film Unit in Paris in 1950, the couple embarked on a 35-year adventure overseas. In Paris, living on a miniscule salary, they nevertheless were able to take advantage of the rich theatrical offerings at the Comédie Française and the popular Olympia. Esther studied French, did a stint at the Cordon Bleu cooking school and, in 1952, became a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the Sorbonne, Université de Paris. Their daughter Josephine Claudia Hemsing was born in 1953 in Paris.

From there Esther’s husband joined the United States Information Agency, serving as Public Affairs Officer in Berlin, Germany, during the tense years leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall and the crisis that ensued (1958 to 1964). In June 1963, they were present when President John F. Kennedy delivered the “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech to an audience of thousands. Subsequent diplomatic posts included Bonn, Washington DC, Munich, New Delhi (under U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan), and Freiburg, Germany. Restricted in those days as a foreign service wife from working officially in a foreign country, Esther maintained her intellectual pursuits, perfecting her German, and founding a bi-lingual book club in Bonn, to which such authors as John Steinbeck and Günter Grass were invited. (The book club is still going strong in 2019, run by Carola Paulsen.) Esther also freelanced as a writer/editor for the Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart. She was the English language specialist for the 1961 feature film Question Seven, directed by Stuart Rosenberg and produced by Lothar Wolff, which won the National Board of Review. In 1980 Esther and Albert edited and wrote the English version of the documentary The Yellow Star, the Persecution of the Jews in Europe 1933-45, produced by Arthur Cohn, which was nominated for an Oscar Award in 1981.

In 1986, Esther and Albert retired to their house overlooking Upper Mill Pond in Brewster, MA. They enjoyed their new friends on Cape Cod and Esther took up gardening and basket weaving. Together they researched and compiled a list of several hundred scattered but still extant Marshall Plan films. They also persuaded Congress to pass a bill authorizing access for the American public to see these documentaries for the first time. In 1997 they made plans to return to New York, but on March 18th of that year, Al suffered a fatal heart attack. Heartbroken, Esther made the decision to move back to the City alone. Even at the advanced age of 90, Esther was still working as a volunteer at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Esther’s beloved brother, Sydney Davidson, pre-deceased her in 1993. She is survived by her daughter Josephine, son-in-law Dan Cameron, niece Marilyn Davidson, nephew Allen Davidson, and numerous friends on three continents.