Author, Journalist, Essayist, Poet, Music Critic, Lecturer
Franzi Ascher-Nash was born in Vienna, Austria on November 28, 1910. Leo Frankl, her father, was a composer of operettas. She graduated with honors from the Humanistisches Maedchengymnasium in Vienna in 1928. Asher-Nash studied singing at Vienna Academy of Music at the Volksoper, Viennafrom 1929 to 1931. She chose, however, after her second year to pursue a writing career and became a free-lance writer, in 1934, for various Austrian newspapers and journals and in 1937-38. For the United Artists Agency in Vienna she also translated film dialogues.
Just before Nazi Germany’s invasion of Austria in 1938, she left for France with her parents. They moved again to England and eventually to the United States where, in December 1939, they settled in New York City. In 1939 and 1940, she wrote one-act radio plays for German American Writer’s Association and in 1941 wrote the program series, A Viennese Sees New York, for station WLTH. Between 1941 and 1949 Ascher-Nash was music critic for Neue Volk-Zeitung, New York. She contributed to Aufbau and New Yorker Staatszeitung und Herold; and from 1945-49 wrote short essays for the Austro-American Tribune. The New York Herald newspaper sponsored her as a traveling lecturer during the Second World War. She toured throughout the New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania lecturing before women’s clubs on Austrian politics, history and culture. From the late 1940’s to the early 1950’s, she continued lecturing and writing. Her essays and short stories appeared in the German American Studies Magazine, Lyrik and Prosa Magazine and Lyrica Germanica Magazine. In 1954 she lectured at the New School for Social Research on music history and development of Opera and Song. She and Edgar R. Nash, a composer and musician, were married on November 21, 1959. She began hosting her own radio program in 1962 entitled “The Story of the Art Song”, which ran weekly until 1964. Ascher-Nash published essays, short stories and poetry in magazines and journals in the United States, India, Germany and Austria throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s. In the 1980’s, she guest lectured at many national and international conferences and continued her writing of poetry, essays and short stories for selected anthologies, American radio companies and both American and European newspapers. She moved to Millersville, Pennsylvania in 1986 where she lived until her death in 1991.
Franzi Ascher-Nash was a member of both B’nai B’rith Liberty Lodge (1956); and of Verband deutschsprachige Autoren in Amerika (1974).