Portrait

Eva Kotchever

Born: 15 June 1891Mława, Poland
Died: 19 December 1943Auschwitz, Poland · aged 52

Writer and salon ownerPoland135th birthday

Eva Kotchever

A Jewish writer and café owner whose book preserved an early portrait of lesbian life in New York.

Eva Kotchever was born in Mława in 1891. Born Chawa Złoczower into a Jewish family, she emigrated to the United States in 1912 and became involved in radical political circles, selling left-wing publications and knowing figures such as Emma Goldman.

Using the name Eve Adams, she opened a tearoom in Greenwich Village in 1925. Known as Eve’s Hangout, it welcomed writers, artists and women looking for companionship. That year she privately published “Lesbian Love”, a collection of sketches of women she had known.

Police attention brought the venture to an end. In 1926 Adams was arrested and convicted of obscenity and disorderly conduct. After imprisonment, she was deported to Poland in 1927. She later settled in Paris, where her partner was the singer Hella Olstein.

As Nazi persecution spread, the two moved to southern France. Kotchever was arrested in Nice in 1943 and deported through Drancy to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in December 1943. Research into her life and the survival of “Lesbian Love” have restored a voice that deportation and the Holocaust nearly erased.

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