Edith Gyömrői Ludowyk

Edith Gyömrői Ludowyk (8 September 1896 – 11 February 1987) was a Hungarian Jewish psychotherapist, poet and communist. She was one of the handful of European Radicals in Sri Lanka.

Edit (Gelb) Gyömrői was born in Budapest to Mark Gelb (who changed his name to Gyömrői in 1899), a furniture manufacturer, and Ilona Pfeifer. She had a younger brother, Boris, and an older sister (by two years), Márta.

At her father’s request, she began studying interior design, but later dropped out. In 1914, she married chemical engineer Ervin Renyi - with whom she had a son, Gábor, who would later die in a fascist labour camp - but divorced him in 1918. Through her uncle, she began to learn about psychoanalysis and attended the 5th International Psychoanalytical Congress in Budapest.

From 1918 onwards she participated in gatherings of the Sunday Circle, a group of left-wing intellectuals which included psychoanalyst René Spitz. In 1919, she worked for the Commissariat for Education during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.

When the republic fell following the Romanian invasion, she fled to Vienna, where she supported herself by working at a parachute factory, and then as a sales assistant at a bookshop. She knew the Hungarian writers Béla Balázs, composer Hanns Eisler, Czech writer Egon Kisch and Hermann Broch - who translated her poetry into German. Thereafter she was for short periods in Czechoslovakia and Romania. After being expelled from Romania for her communism, she settled in Berlin in 1923, with her second husband Laszlo Tology (Gluck). She designed costumes for the films of Elisabeth Bergner at the Neumann Produktion film studio, translated, interpreted and took photographs. She also worked on the staff of the Rote Hilfe newspaper of the German Communist Party for a time. She studied psychoanalysis from 1924 onwards and later practised it.

...
Wikipedia