Edith Cohn Milton

Edith Cohn Milton of Peterborough, NH, died on Monday, April 14, 2025, at the age of 93.

Edith was born in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1931. In 1939, on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, seven- year-old Edith Cohn and her older sister Ruth fled Germany by way of the Kindertransport, the program that gave some 10,000 Jewish children refuge in Great Britain. The two were given shelter by an English foster family, the Harveys, with whom they lived for the next seven years. When Edith was fifteen, the two sisters once again left behind everything they knew and journeyed to New York, where they were reunited with their mother.

Edith attended Mount Holyoke College and The City College of New York and received her PhD in English Literature from Yale University. Edith was a gifted writer, and her reviews, critical essays, and short stories have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Yale Review, and the Boston Globe, among other publications, and her fiction was published in The Best American Short Stories for 1982 and 1988. She is the author of the novel Corridors, and the memoir The Tiger in the Attic: Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing Up English. She was awarded a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony in 1981.

Edith moved with her family to New Hampshire in 1969 where, over the years, they lived with a rotating cast of cats, a dog, and a guinea pig. Edith was an amazing self-taught cook, a formidable Scrabble player, and an incredibly creative storyteller and gift wrapper.

Her warmth, humor, and keen perception are missed dreadfully by her husband, Peter, her kids, Jeremy (June) and Naomi (Bill), her grandchildren, Daniel, Bethany, Emma, and Sarah, and her many, many friends.

Edith requested that there be no service. In late June, her family will be meeting at her gravesite in Peterborough’s Pine Hill Cemetery for a celebration and remembrance of her life.