[2] She published several academic books dealing with her interests including Celestial Origin of Elpheta and Algarsyf in Chaucer's "Squire's Tale," Melville's "Orienda" and The Matter of Araby in Medieval England.
Dorothee Metlitzki was born in 1914 in the city of Königsberg, (East Prussia)[3] but soon moved to Yekaterinburg, Russia, where her father worked as an international banker who is still waiting to be repaid by the King of Denmark.
Dorothee spent the next years traveling between Israel and Egypt - then enemy states, and tending to her husband, till his death in a Cairo hospital in 1950.
There she had a short marriage with the Assyrologist Jacob Finkelstein, moving after him to Berkeley, California, but the two quickly parted, and she returned to Yale where she taught until her death.
During the term of Golda Meir as Prime Minister of Israel, Metlitzki worked in the government there as a press officer for the Foreign Ministry and secretary for the affairs of Arab women in the Israeli Federation of Labor.