Edith Gyömrői Ludowyk

Who was Edith Gyömrői Ludowyk?

Edith Gyömrői Ludowyk was a Hungarian Jewish psychotherapist, poet and communist. She was one of the handful of European Radicals in Sri Lanka.

Edit Gyömrői was born in Budapest to Mark Gelb, a furniture manufacturer, and Ilona Pfeifer.

At her father’s request, she began studying interior design, but later dropped out. In 1914, she married chemical engineer Ervin Renyi - by whom she had a son, 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.