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INTERPRETARIADO EN INGLÉS
Beate Sirota Gordon: Human rights
reformer who helped draft Japan's
constitution
The Independent, Thursday, 17 January 2013.
Beate Sirota Gordon lived enough lives to beggar belief. Fluent in English, German, French, Japanese and Russian, she was a linguist who shaped 20th-century history.
As an influencer, midwife to recordings and director of the performing arts, she reset the gold standard for North American arts programming by dint of her work with the Japan and Asia Societies and her address book. Yet for much of her life, her other achievements were not merely veiled in secrecy, but classified. Those details eventually emerged, notably in her 1997 memoir The Only Woman in the Room, from which she emerged as a self-effacing, instinctual advocate of civil and women's rights: Yehudi Menuhin called it "a prime example of truth being stranger and at the same time more coherent than fiction."
A naturalised US citizen from 1947, Beate Sirota was born in 1923 in cosmopolitan Vienna in that queasy hangover period experienced by former Austro-Hungarian Empire nations. She was the only child of Augustine – elder sister of the conductor Jascha Horenstein – and Leo Sirota of middle-class Russian-Jewish stock. She wrote that her mother named her after Stefan Zweig's Frau Beate; actually, it was Arthur Schnitzler who wrote Frau Beate und ihr Sohn ("Mrs Beate and her son").
In 1929, her pianist father accepted a six-month concert tour engagement in Japan and stayed. The family put down roots in Tokyo's Nogizaka district. She did not know it, but, at the age of five, she had left Europe more or less for good, though she fondly recalled a prewar return and her father's eagerness to attend Vienna's Freudenau racecourse. She was educated through the medium of German at Tokyo's German school, but soaked up
Japanese.
She was educated through the medium of German at Tokyo's German school, but soaked up Japanese.