Born in Basel in 1949, Rita Goldberg grew up mostly in the United States with two early years in Germany, where her father was a U.S. Army psychiatrist. She taught literature at Essex and Cambridge Universities in England for nearly ten years, went on to teach at MIT, and is now a lecturer in comparative literature at Harvard University. She and her husband have two sons and two grandsons and live near Boston, Massachusetts. Goldberg is the author of Motherland: Growing Up with the Holocaust (The New Press).