Nuclear physicist Fay Ajzenberg was born in the Neubabel district of Berlin in 1926. Her beloved father, Moisei (Misha) Abramovich Aisenberg (c. 1890–1962), although born into a poor and pious Jewish family in Warsaw, had climbed out of poverty by being, in the words of his admiring daughter, “tough, smart and adaptable”—qualities which he displayed throughout the many vicissitudes of his life.

Misha had three brothers and two sisters, of whom one, Luba, was killed in the Holocaust. One brother died early in Poland, while one brother and two sisters moved to Palestine. One of the latter, Vera, married Leonid Doljanski, a physician at Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem, who was killed on April 13, 1948, in an Arab ambush of the ambulance in which he and other Hadassah personnel were traveling.

With a scholarship from the Tsar, Misha studied mining engineering at the St. Petersburg Mining Academy and also became fluent in several European languages. His wife, Olga Naiditch, was born in Pinsk but when both her parents died she moved to St. Petersburg, where her brother Isaac had built a large business that produced alcohol.

Isaac was one of the early Zionists and had organized the self-taxation scheme to which Jews contributed to buy land in Palestine. His home was more traditional than that of Fay’s parents, who were—like herself—agnostics although they were also cultural Jews. In St. Petersburg Olga completed her secondary education and began studies at the Academy of Music. Though a talented pianist and fine mezzo-soprano, she was not interested in a musical career. Misha and Olga married very young. Their older daughter, Yvette (Iva), was born when they were both twenty-one.

The couple moved to Berlin and, in 1930, to Paris, where Isaac Naiditch put Misha in charge of his sugar factory in Lieusaint, a small town some twenty miles from the capital. Fay attended the Lycée Victor-Duruy, which she found intellectually boring and where she was treated as an outsider by her fellow pupils. She was, however, greatly influenced by Olga’s older sister, Sara, a Freudian psychologist who helped her understand her relationship with her parents, and by Lida Nahimovich, a distant relation some eight years older than herself, a Communist who not only deepened Fay’s political awareness but also taught her to like the poetry of Verlaine and Garcia Lorca. Fay early on became a voracious reader and, with the encouragement of her father, to whom she was very close, took great interest in scientific topics. She grew up assuming that, like him, she would one day have an engineering career. While still young, she resolved “to live a life that [she] would not regret as [she] lay dying.”

With the German invasion of France on May 10, 1940, the family set out on a long, difficult, and danger-fraught journey which took them from Brittany to Toulouse and finally across the border to Lisbon, Portugal. Throughout, Misha’s ingenuity and coolheadedness combined with Fay’s language skills and lively personality to secure assistance at moments of seemingly insoluble crisis. In December 1940 the Ajzenbergs reached New York, though without Yvette, whose husband, Ziutek Louria, was serving in the French Air Force.

They at first traveled to the Dominican Republic for which Misha, as a skilled professional, had obtained a visa. U.S. immigration officials, believing that they in fact intended to stay in the country, imprisoned them on Ellis Island, from which they were rescued by Isaac, whose Zionist activities had acquainted him with a number of American Jews who helped him enter the United States. In order to obtain entry visas the family had first to leave the country and apply to a U.S. consulate. After three glorious months in New York, a city with which Fay instantly fell in love, the family moved to Havana and after a few weeks received the desired visas. In April 1941 they sailed back to New York, where Yvette and her husband eventually joined them. Urged by her mother to return to studies, Yvette eventually became a professor of Romance languages at Queens College, N.Y.

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Ajzenberg-Selove continued her battle against sexism. In 1972, when the University of Pennsylvania physics department announced it would hire three new tenured physicists, she applied for one of these positions, knowing her credentials to be strong. She was shocked and disappointed when her colleagues voted against her, citing “inadequate research publications” and age (she was 46 years old) as reasons for her rejection. Several months later, Ajzenberg-Selove was elected chair of the division of nuclear physics of the American Physical Society.

Determined not to bow to blatant discrimination, she lodged complaints against the University of Pennsylvania with both the Federal Equal Opportunity Commission and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. To make her case, she used citation counts, comparing the number of times her work had been cited in scientific papers with the citation profile of each member of her department, including the newly tenured faculty. The only one who had a higher citation rate than herself was J. Robert Schrieffer, a Nobel laureate. In consequence, in October 1973, the university was required to offer her a tenured professorship in physics, retroactive to July 1 of that year. She became the second female professor in the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Science1s, but she calculated that the struggle had cost her 1500 very painful hours.

In 1982, Ajzenberg-Selove, who had for some time been involved in science politics, was diagnosed as having a cancer that was dispersed throughout the ducts of her left breast and had invaded one of the lymph nodes. Immediate chemotherapy was prescribed, but she insisted on first going to London for a planned New Year vacation with her husband. The chemotherapy brought about both bladder cancer and a loss of memory, which led her to stop teaching in 1988. She continued to engage in research, working on triton-induced nuclear reaction at Daresbury in England and then on light-ion–induced reaction at the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility in Bloomington.

However, after 1989 the physical effort proved too great for her to continue. In December 1990 she terminated her work on the Energy Levels review articles. The shock of the second bout of breast cancer, the chemotherapy, a traumatic head-on crash with a speeding motorcyclist, the bladder cancer, and her concern about Wally, who had developed health problems of his own, all contributed to her having a high level of anxiety and anger. She became addicted to anti-anxiety medication.

A dedicated teacher with an intense love of the profession, Ajzenberg-Selove continued to work at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1991 she won the Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching. After years of discrimination against women she noted that the twenty seniors of her class were the best physics majors she had ever encountered. On preparing a list of their rank, ordered by their grade-point average, she found that of the eight students with a G.P.A. of 3.6 (out of 4.0), four were women. In her autobiography, A Matter of Choice: Memoirs of a Female Physicist (1994), she devoted a significant part of her concluding reflections to the topic of women in science, revealing an awareness of continued inequities and discrimination as well as of the personal issues and dilemmas which women face in trying to combine family and profession.

The autobiography, written with candor, wit, and wisdom, provides a fascinating portrait of a remarkable scientist, a woman who was once described as “feisty” and, upon learning from her husband what the word meant, fully agreed with the description. When she ends her book with the sentence “I have had a wonderful life,” one cannot but agree with her.

Ajzenberg-Selove passed away on August 8, 2012, at the age of 86.