Dagmar Herrmann spent her formative years in a trilingual home in Bratislava, Slovakia. She studied music, languages, and political science in Prague, Grenoble, Jerusalem, and Chicago. She came to the U.S. in 1971 and began to focus on literature with topics of Jewish interest.
In the eighties and early nineties, she taught a graduate course in etymology at Columbia College and translated classic works of Karel Čapek and short stories by contemporary Czech dissident writers for Northwestern University Press in Evanston, Albatros in Prague, and various literary magazines. She also translated Israeli, French, German, and Czech children's books for Wellington Publishing, a Chicago publishing house which she co-founded in 1988. More recently, Ms. Herrmann has been developing and conducting seminars at The Newberry Library, Chicago, among them The World and Work of Franz Kafka; Kafka and the Issue of Jewish Identity; History of the Central-European Jewry, 1918-1938; Memory and Memorials, Stories and History (Wiesel, Friedlander). Currently, she is also translating several Aharon Appelfeld novels from Hebrew into Slovak.
